Rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and during the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed perpetual disaster on New Orleans’ Black and Indigenous communities. Neoliberalism masked by the auspices of repair, progress, and inclusion reinforced the plight of the urban poor while exacerbating the racial and class inequalities that existed before the storm. Cassandra Shepard’s analysis draws on ideas of settler-colonialism to chart how depriving Black and Indigenous people of critical resources intensified the harm, violence, and death inherent in systems of colonization. As Shepard shows, the rhetoric of improvement allows coloniality to masquerade as rebuilding while white elites consolidate power, profit, and privilege. Displaced and disenfranchised people of color, meanwhile, experience the impact of racial-disaster capitalism, with the chaos surrounding Katrina and COVID-19 obscuring the for-profit economic, political, and social exploitation of non-white New Orleanians. Ambitious and provocative, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster refutes the myth of New Orleans’ presumptive revival by shining new light on the ongoing colonization project at its heart.

Cassandra Shepard is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana.

“I could not put it down. A call for decolonization grounded on a specific site and on an original exploration of New Orleans’ post-Katrina rebuilding. Shepard conjoins the emerging field of settler colonial studies with disaster theory and her conclusions are compelling.”
—Lorenzo Veracini, author of Colonialism: A Global History