The Social Contract, Biopolitics and Hurricane Katrina: Two Perspectives from Sarah Broom's Memoir The Yellow House and Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial

Abstract

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc along the Mexican Gulf Coast, and the aftermaths have (again) revealed the racial inequality that endures in the US. The fact that the US government was unable to protect their weak and most vulnerable citizens points to a fractured social contract. Through the memoir The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, and the non-fiction text Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, using the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and Charles Mills and Giorgio Agamben, I will argue how the US government historically, and even in modern times, has failed to uphold the social contract, and that certain places in the US are comparable to a state of nature. In addition, I will critically examine the idea that the US has entered a post-Civil Rights era. Racial inequality and discrimination are shown through the disproportionate number of (poor) African Americans who were left to fend for themselves after Hurricane Katrina. This is tied into Agamben’s theory of biopolitics (following Foucalt), and how a government or other authority figures (such as doctors) can judge certain people’s lives as disposable, which is what happened at Memorial Hospital following Katrina when doctors performed euthanasia on patients who were unable to evacuate.