Picturing Katrina: The Queer Child and Black Death-Birthing Narratives

Drawing on refugee studies, “Picturing Katrina: The Queer Child and Black Death-Birthing Narratives” explores the transient performance of antiblack and refugee policies and procedures and how this transmutation manifested around Hurricane Katrina. The article focuses on  Beasts of the Southern Wild , which is an allegory of Hurricane Katrina, and its black death-birthing narrative— Beasts  calls upon a black girl to produce an imagined future grounded in the reproduction of a structure hostile to black life. By positing her as harbinger of a more sustainable ecological future,  Beasts ’ black death-birthing narrative queers Hushpuppy, a 6-year old living in intense poverty. This article focuses on  Beasts  to explore the relationship among the watery deaths and depths of Hurricane Katrina, refugee policies, and transatlantic slavery. The article closes with a brief turn to a “real-life” black death-birthing narrative featured in  People magazine  in order to not only to suggest the breadth of media forms that utilize black death-birthing narratives centering on childhood and disaster, but also to begin to interrogate the material conditions that enable the proliferation of these narratives as well as the narratives’ material effects.