European Journal of American Culture - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2016

This article focuses on the ways two HBO productions, David Simon’s television series Treme and Spike Lee’s documentary film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Three Acts, rely upon sound to construct senses of loss, home and place. Drawing upon personal experience, textual analysis and interviews, the article examines the conditional possibility for television and film to function as ‘reckoning texts’ in relation to Hurricane Katrina.

Kanye West’s biting off-script comments about George W. Bush during the televised NBC benefit, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, are probably the most remembered contribution by a hip hop artist to post-Katrina critiques of racism. Beyond Kanye’s pointed remarks, other well-established rappers (including Mos Def, Jay-Z, Public Enemy, Lil Wayne and Juvenile) quickly employed hip hop music to speak out in sociopolitical protests against the overt neglect of New Orleans’s poor black residents. In recent popular television and film representations, hip hop continues to play a significant role in how we remember the effects of Katrina. In the 2008 documentary film, Trouble the Water, Kimberly Rivers Roberts’s hip hop lyrics affirm a sense of survivorship, shared and created through music. Similarly, in its second season (2011), David Simon’s HBO television series Treme explores the role of hip hop in post-Katrina recovery processes through a storyline centred on local bounce music. Some scholars argue that post-Katrina hip hop responses can be viewed as ‘disaster tourism’, or as upholding stereotypes about New Orleans as a space of either violent criminal activity or utopian racial exceptionalism. However, this article suggests that through rap music, Trouble the Water, and Treme, listeners and viewers are exposed to the complexity, diversity and lasting impact of a city (New Orleans) and a musical genre (rap), both of which are often accused of ‘selling out’, ‘watering down’ or profiting from what were once deemed authentic black music communities.

David Simon regularly says that the origins of The Wire can be traced to Greek tragedy. My contention here is that Simon’s engagement with Greek literature persists in his New Orleans drama, Treme. For instance, through the story of LaDonna Batiste-Williams, a woman desperately trying to locate and bury the body of her brother, Simon reimagines and adapts Sophocles’ Antigone for a twenty-first-century urban context. Both Sophocles and Simon use the image of the unburied corpse to demonstrate the injustices of ancient tyrannies and modern capitalist bureaucracies, respectively. However, Treme also depicts (and perhaps even models) alternative modes of being, ways of life organized around art and beauty. This article contends that these alternative ways of life are offered as potential antidotes to the political absurdities of post-Katrina New Orleans.

This article examines the depiction of exceptionalism in David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s television series, Treme, and argues that the series uses its New Orleans microcosm to articulate wider points about American society. It begins with the unlikely convergence of the rhetoric of defiance, which characterizes many of Treme’s varied protagonists who refuse to ‘bow’ in the face of crisis and disaster, with the rhetoric of the programme’s primary off-screen villains: the G. W. Bush administration. I argue, however, that while Treme undoubtedly champions the unique culture of New Orleans, its depiction of exceptionalism is neutral. Treme maps out the ways that the exceptionalism its characters are intensely invested in, which is simultaneously rooted in the city’s unique cultural history and projected onto New Orleans from the outside, can both benefit and hazard its citizens. Moreover, this multifaceted vision of exceptionalism ultimately starkly contrasts with the belligerent exceptionalism of the ‘Bush Doctrine’. Additionally, it is my contention that the programme’s representation of exceptionalism develops over the course of four seasons and after building in important strands of discussion around multiculturalism or ‘creolization’, and neo-liberalism (mostly in the guise of disaster capitalism), actually has more to say about Obama-era America, the period in which it was originally broadcast, than the Bush era in which most of the series is set.