HypheNationAn Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Critical Moments Discourse

Katrina: Caught in the Eye of the Storm"
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category, the citizen-refugee. These citizens pleaded for asylum from the storm in their own country. The journal highlights in a variety of ways the issues conscribing the life choices of these citizen-refugees as they now rebuild lives in new, foreign, and yet familiar places.

We were literally in the process of naming and organizing this academic endeavor when we witnessed the literal and figurative rupturing of our nation, in ways that resonate most profoundly with the First Reconstruction (Post Civil War) and Second Reconstruction (Post Civil Rights) eras of our country. During those periods, too, we were a hypheNation, joined together syntactically and grammatically as the United States of America, but simultaneously a profoundly ruptured nation in terms of our sense of imagined community. “Hurricane Katrina: Caught in the Eye of the Storm” focuses our attention in humane and critical ways on the treatment and plight of Katrina’s victims during and since the Storm. Is there a way that we can turn our gaze on Katrina as a critical moment without engaging in the types of representative and rhetorical violence that have characterized the moment thus far? We think the possibilities offered by hyphens allow us to focus, shift, adjoin and highlight in order to bring meaning, as we are simultaneously forced into a hyperawareness of the possibilities for violence conjured through the artifice of each use of the hyphen. At best, we
commit to a responsibleand critical engagement with and employment of the hyphen as a tool. The

well-placed hyphen has a way of bringing together the best of many worlds, and HypheNation’s commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship offers to you not only new analytic frameworks to inform the content of your thinking; we additionally hope to serve as a model for the ways that we are thinking about the theme of this inaugural issue “Hurricane Katrina: Caught in the Eye of the Storm.”

Martha Carey
Brittney Cooper
Pellom McDaniels III

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