A01=Cassandra Shepard
abolition
Author_Cassandra Shepard
Beyonce
Big Freddia
Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians
Black community in New Orleans
Black Fantastic
Black music
Black Natives
Black political life
Bonfouca
bounce music
Bush administration and Katrina
case studies
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSL11
Category=JP
Category=NHTQ
Chicago
chocolate cities
climate change
climate refugees
colonial disaster
conquest
consent decrees
Coronavirus
decolonization
Dee-1
disaster
disaster management
disaster preparedness
disaster theory
Emergency Management
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
FEMA
flooding
government response
grassroots
Gulf South
hip hop
hip hop response
hurricane
Hurricane Katrina
Indian resettlement
indigenous communities
Isle de Jean Charles
liberalism
Louisiana indigenous communities
Lower 9th Ward
Lower Ninth Ward
managed retreat
Mos Def
natural disaster
neoliberalism
New Orleans
New Orleans history
Nolia Clap
organizing
people of color
people of color in New Orleans
people of color Katrina
Post-colonialism
post-Katrina
rebuilding
rebuilding cities
recovery
reparations
resilience
rising sea levels
seizure of Indigenous land
settler colonialism
Tchefuncta Nation
urban
Product details
- ISBN 9780252089145
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jan 2026
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
