Rebuilding Community after Katrina chronicles the innovative and ambitious partnership between Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning department and ACORN Housing, an affiliate of what was the nation’s largest low-income community organization. These unlikely allies came together to begin to rebuild devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  

The editors and contributors to this volume allow participants’ voices to show how this partnership integrated careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. With essays by activists, organizers, community members, and academics on the ground, Rebuilding Community after Katrina presents insights on the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. 

What emerges from this complex drama are lessons about community planning, organizational relationships, and team building across multi-cultural lines. The accounts presented in Rebuilding Community after Katrina raise important and sensitive questions about the appropriate roles of outsiders in community-based planning processes.

Klopotek describes the varied effects of the recognition process on the social and political structures, community cohesion, cultural revitalization projects, identity, and economic health of each tribe. He emphasizes that recognition policy is not the only racial project affecting Louisiana tribes. For the Tunica-Biloxis, the Jena Band of Choctaws, and the Clifton-Choctaws, discourses around blackness and whiteness have shaped the boundaries of Indian identity in ways that have only begun to be explored. Klopotek urges scholars and officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to acknowledge the multiple discourses and viewpoints influencing tribal identities. At the same time, he puts tribal recognition in broader perspective. Indigenous struggles began long before the BIA existed, and they will continue long after it renders any particular recognition decision.

Reimagining the Educated Citizen contends that the constructs of public education and citizenship in the struggle to constitute a U.S. national identity are inseparable from the simultaneous emergence of transatlantic constructs of an educated citizen along transnational and transracial lines. The nineteenth century is commonly understood as the age of nationalism and nation formation in which the Anglo-Protestant Common School movement takes center stage in the production of the American democratic citizen. Ironically, the argument for public, Common Schools privileged whiteness instead of equality. This book suggests that an alternative vision of the relationship between education and citizenship emerged from a larger transatlantic history. Given shape by the movement of people, ideas, commodities, and practices across the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Valley, this radical egalitarian vision emerged at the crossroads of the Atlantic-colonial and antebellum Louisiana.