Performing New Orleans: Toward a Political Poetics

This essay documents an embodied model for doing scholarship in and about post-Katrina New Orleans. It suggests lived experience as human capital that provides a public good for rebuilding communities. Specifically, a research-based performance (“Performance and New Orleans: Citizenship, Identity and Housing”) serves as a case study for situating scholarship between theory and practice as a “political poetics.” The essay draws on performance theory and the values of public scholarship to negotiate the challenges of authenticity and motive that confront scholars working in New Orleans. The essay also argues for performance as a means of reaffirming human value and exposing the complexity that surrounds the problems of African American citizenship, identity, and housing in New Orleans 5 years after the storm.     

NGOs Address Structural Racism: After the Storm in New Orleans

The long history of institutional and historical racism found an explosive expression in the events around Katrina in New Orleans. Racial inequalities were evident in the actual destruction caused by the hurricane and even more significantly in the government response to the disaster. The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) sector provided alternative approaches to recovery and reconstruction, but such alternatives were inadequate to counter the formidable forces of capitalism arrayed against them. NGOs provided substantial direct service to the most distressed residents of the city and, in some cases, provided important advocacy roles in addressing the inequities caused by government action and/or inaction. The specific initiatives of six NGOs are reviewed here, including the work of the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, the Common Ground Collective, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, and the People’s Organizing Committee. NGO initiatives were not structurally capable of generating a broad militant anti-racist mass movement of New Orleans’ working class for social change. Five years after the storm the working class of New Orleans faces deepened racial and economic distress. A return to the strategy of bold anti-racist mass movements confronting capital and the state would seem to be in order for the coming period of time.     

Public Housing in New Orleans Post Katrina: The Struggle for Housing as a Human Right

This article reflects on the post-Katrina demolition of public housing communities in New Orleans and associated loss of affordable apartments with a focus on the Columbia Parc redevelopment. Some key issues regarding displacement, race, gender, and public housing policies are referenced throughout. A concluding discussion of advocacy efforts to frame housing as a human right highlights a central, unmet movement demand: one for one replacement of all demolished public housing.     

Strangers′ Disease: Determinants of Yellow Fever Mortality during the New Orleans Epidemic of 1853

During the summer of 1853, New Orleans experienced one of the worst epidemics in the history of the United States. Immigrants accounted for a vast majority of the deaths. In this paper, we analyze differential mortality risk from yellow fever using microdata form interment records. Using a logit model, we sort out the influence of demographic and socioeconomic factors on mortality risk. We establish that the strong relationship between nativity and yellow fever mortality disappears once we control for poverty status and immunization as measured by duration of residence in New Orleans.     

The impact of black mayors on the black community: The case of New Orleans’ ernest morial

Conclusion Dutch Morial is deeply respected by the New Orleans black community. According to a poll conducted in April 1983 by Rose-Stekler Associates, 80% of the black respondents gave Morial “excellent” or “good” job ratings, compared to only 11% who found him doing a “fair” or “poor” job. Despite very limited resourses, the Morial mayoralty has facilitated the entrance of the black middle class into the governmental process, providing access to city contracts and administrative positions. On the other hand, the black underclass has received meager rewards in the form of employment or a reduction in police brutality. Hopefully, economic development, in the long-run, will create jobs and provide additional city revenue to fund services for the poor. But for now, the primary impact of a black mayor on the black community of New Orleans has been symbolic kinds of benefits. Yet the potential positive benefits of a black mayor serving as a role model for black youth, as well as the value of civil rights rhetoric in fostering hopefulness and a more self-reliant black community, should not be underestimated. The characterization of the status of the civil rights movement in 1983 offered by C. T. Vivian, head of the Anti-Klan Network, well applies to New Orleans black community today: “Everything has changed and nothing has changed. The statistics are still terrible. But the atmosphere is totally different.”⁴⁹     

Ethnic Concentration and Bank Use in Immigrant Communities

Despite the many benefits of bank use, large portions of the U.S. population remain unbanked. One of the largest is immigrants, where the incidence of being unbanked is over 13% higher than among natives in 2001. We document growth in the nativity gap in bank use over time. We also test the importance of immigrant enclaves, defined as areas with high concentrations of immigrants from the same region, in explaining the increasing differential in bank use. Combining data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, Census, and FDIC we find that immigrants living in enclaves are significantly less likely to have a bank account. We take steps to isolate one particular channel through which this might operate: the use of informal financial services provided by co‐ethnics in enclaves. The results suggest that demand‐side preferences may have power in explaining the persistence of the nativity gap in bank use in the United States.     

好剧《移民金大花》

以获得第二十一届中国电视金鹰奖的同名电视剧改编而成的方言话剧“移民金大花》，自去年九月首演以来，在社会上产生了很大反响。国务院三建委副主任、三峡办主任蒲海清说：“《移民金大花》是出好戏，充分反映了库区人民舍小家顾大家为国家的大局意识，     

国际外包中“影子移民”及其影响

本文在Baldwin和Robert-Nicoud(2007)提出的影子移民概念基础上,通过新古典的移民模型来重新阐释国际外包的含义。模型分析表明,由于承接外包的影子移民的边际产品大于其工资,国际外包形成外包租,这种租为发包国获得。在理论模型的基础上,本文进一步阐述影子移民对于发达国家解决人口短缺问题和发展中国家实现二元经济结构转变的意义。     

Gender equality rights versus traditional practices: Struggles for control and change in Swaziland

In Swaziland, as in many other African nations, women have historically faced unequal social, economic, legal, political and cultural treatment because of their gender. This article assesses the extent of gender inequality currently in practice in this southern African kingdom. In addition, it provides policy recommendations to assist the Swazis to move progressively towards greater gender balance in their governance and public policy systems. Will change occur peacefully over the next decade? Change is likely, as Swazi women have more exposure to information and telecommunications technology, and as the growing international women's movement allows for increased gender comparisons with other cultures.     

古村落镶嵌移民文化

从涪陵城区出发,往蔺市一两汇方向驱车需要1个半小时左右,就可到达大顺村.大顺村的建筑年代从清代迄今,跨度200余年,拥有多种建筑格式和实体,展现了不同时期和地域间建筑文明的融合.据考,大顺村早在东汉时期即有人类居住,明清时因何大顺兴场而得名.客家人何大顺清初移民落脚此地,为养家糊口,在大路边搭了一个草棚,施舍茶水,也做点小生意.落户的客家人,秉承农闲经商、农忙耕地、农商并举的传统,做生意外出和归来时,都要在何大顺茶亭歇脚喝茶.     

铁肩挑出“移民藕”

生活有时就是一个战场,需要去拼搏。他就像一个斗士,屡战屡败,却又屡败屡战。当他手持坚毅和顽强的盾牌的时候,他就握紧了胜利!他把特色、优质、良种莲藕,挑出了泥泞、挑出了富足,用一副铁肩,他挑出了移民创业的豪迈。     

The in-hospital mortality rates of slaves and freemen: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1855-1860

Using a rich sample of admission records from New Orleans Touro Infirmary, we examine the in-hospital mortality risk of free and enslaved patients. Despite a higher mortality rate in the general population, slaves were significantly less likely to die in the hospital than the whites. We analyze the determinants of in-hospital mortality at Touro using Oaxaca-type decomposition to aggregate our regression results. After controlling for differences in characteristics and maladies, we find that much of the mortality gap remains unexplained. In conclusion, we propose an alternative explanation for the mortality gap based on the selective hospital admission of slaves.     

Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalized groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements’ internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining) and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense, one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies, and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilization and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.     

Building the <Emphasis Type="Italic">New</Emphasis> New Orleans: Foundation and NGO Power

Most accounts of organized philanthropy’s response to the Katrina disaster portray foundations as either providing critical resources in the absence of federal, state, and municipal leadership, or as mildly ineffective and uncommitted grantmakers with little understanding of local nonprofit and community needs. Through an in-depth case study of the three largest regional foundations and two largest foundations established as a direct response to Hurricane Katrina, I examine the overall role of philanthropy in the post-Katrina New Orleans, including the history, leadership, grantmaking practices, and ideology of the largest and most influential foundations. Far from being saviors in the absence of state leadership, nor bumbling and ineffective grantmakers, it is shown that dominant foundations and major NGOs have proven very effective in leading the local growth coalition’s opportunistic response to the disaster.