Commemorating Katrina Ten Years Later

This week in North Philly Notes, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the natural disaster, we feature various Temple University Press titles on and authors whose work relates to Hurricane Katrina.

Behind the Backlash author Lori Peek, was interviewed on the CBS Evening News on August 24 about the Children of Katrina.

Peek is the author of two books on Katrina,  Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora (with Lynn Weber) and Children of Katrina  (with Alice Fothergill).

Filling the Ark by Leslie Irvine

When disasters strike, people are not the only victims. Hurricane Katrina raised public attention about how disasters affect dogs, cats, and other animals considered members of the human family. In this short but powerful book, noted sociologist Leslie Irvine goes beyond Katrina to examine how disasters like oil spills, fires, and other calamities affect various animal populations—on factory farms, in research facilities, and in the wild.

Filling the Ark argues that humans cause most of the risks faced by animals and urges for better decisions about the treatment of animals in disasters. Furthermore, it makes a broad appeal for the ethical necessity of better planning to keep animals out of jeopardy. Irvine not only offers policy recommendations and practical advice for evacuating animals, she also makes a strong case for rethinking our use of animals, suggesting ways to create more secure conditions.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness by George Lipsitz

In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities.

Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, This revised and expanded edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city’s image as a tourist party town.

Rebuilding Community after Katrina, edited by Ken Reardon and John Forester (forthcoming in November)

Rebuilding Community after Katrina chronicles the innovative and ambitious partnership between Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning department and ACORN Housing, an affiliate of what was the nation’s largest low-income community organization. These unlikely allies came together to begin to rebuild devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The editors and contributors to this volume allow participants’ voices to show how this partnership integrated careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. With essays by activists, organizers, community members, and academics on the ground, Rebuilding Community after Katrina presents insights on the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.

What emerges from this complex drama are lessons about community planning, organizational relationships, and team building across multi-cultural lines. The accounts presented in Rebuilding Community after Katrina raise important and sensitive questions about the appropriate roles of outsiders in community-based planning processes.

TUP Authors on the outcry over Cecil the Lion

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost portions of a recent article by Alison Nastasi from HopesandFears.com about the outcry over Cecil the Lion, including quotes from Temple University Press authors Leslie Irvine, author of If You Tame Me, and Clint Sanders, author of Understanding Dogs.

Cecil—the 13-year-old male Southwest African lion named after Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia (known as Zimbabwe since 1980)—was a fixture at Hwange National Park, the country’s largest game reserve and the park’s biggest tourist attraction. He was accustomed to having his picture taken and reportedly trusting of humans. Scientists at Oxford University studied Cecil for an ongoing project about conservation. Last month, Cecil was shot with an arrow and, it is believed, lured out of the protected zone of the sanctuary.

Forty hours later, he was killed with a rifle, skinned, and decapitated. His headless body was missing the GPS tracking collar that he had been fitted with by Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). Walter Palmer, an American dentist and big-game hunter, paid over $50,000 to stalk and kill Cecil. The despised Minnesotan has since closed down his practice after becoming the target of widespread backlash from celebrities, activists and the public (trending on Twitter under #CecilTheLion).

But there’s another kind of backlash taking place over the killing, namely, expressing the troubling nature of such outspoken support over the death of a single animal, when mounting incidents of unarmed black men and women being brutalized and killed by police in the US, largely, with little to no recourse, don’t seem to inspire the same outpouring of mainstream attention and anger.

Hoping to gain some insights from sociological, behavioral, and ethical perspectives, we reached out to several experts whose professional focus included issues of human-animal relations, race, politics, and gender. We wanted to find out if people respond differently to images of animal versus human suffering—and, given the aforementioned cases and claims, why some people seem more moved by accounts of animal abuse and murder than those endured by fellow human beings.

Leslie Irvine, PhD

Professor, Gender, Qualitative and Interpretive Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder

The short answer is that it depends on which animals and which people. The sympathy people feel depends on their perceived innocence of the victim. In a paper forthcoming in the journal Society & Animals, Arnold Arluke, Jack Levin, and I examine the assumption that people are more concerned about the suffering of animals than of people. Arnie and Jack conducted research on this at Northeastern University. They had 240 students read one of four hypothetical stories, allegedly from the Boston Globe. The accounts were the same, but the victims were either a puppy, an adult dog, a human infant, or a human adult. After reading the fictitious article, students rated the degree of sympathy they felt on a 15-point scale. They were most upset by the stories about the infant, followed by the puppy, then the adult dog, and, finally, the adult human.

Clinton R. Sanders, PhD

Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut

It’s likely that dependence is the predominant issue surrounding the difference in people’s emotional response to animal pain and death as opposed to that of humans. Nonhuman animals typically are defined in western culture as far less “able” than humans. Of course, there’s a considerable continuum here since we routinely kill animals for food, sport, or convenience (overpopulations, danger, etc.). To the extent we see animals as “minded” or as viable social partners (i.e., “pets”), they are seen as worthy of intense emotional connection (Cecil was, in many ways, afforded this designation).

The difference between the typical emotional response to news of a child’s abuse or murder as opposed to violence committed against an adult is another example of the importance of dependence to people’s socially generated feelings of relative distress. When doing the interviews with “everyday” dog caretakers that formed part of the basis for Understanding Dogs, a number of those I talked to spoke of feeling more acute sorrow when their canine companions died than when close family members passed on.

Coming soon to a Philadelphia library near you

This week in North Philly Notes, we preview three  forthcoming events at Philadelphia area libraries featuring Temple University Press authors.
Wednesday, August 19 at 6:30PM

Dan Rottenberg, The Outsider: Albert M. Greenfield and the Fall of the Protestant Establishment

At the Community Room of the City Institute Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1905 Locust Street.

Cost: FREE, No tickets required.

In The Outsider, veteran journalist and best-selling author Dan Rottenberg deftly chronicles the astonishing rises, falls, and countless reinventions of Albert M. Greenfield, a Russian immigrant outsider, and combative businessman.

“With The Outsider, Rottenberg [shows how] Greenfield carefully managed his public image, from the time of his emergence as a real estate trader pledged to the corrupt Vare Republican political gang of the 1910s and ’20s, through his emergence as a banking and retail baron and patron of FDR’s New Deal, to his post-World War II national prominence.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

Friday, September 18 at 7:30PM

An Evening with Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate and author of  Mayan Drifter 

Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia

Cost: $15 General Admission, $7 Students
Ticket and Subscription Packages

Tickets on sale Thursday, September 3 at 10:00 AM!

“Grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual” (New York Times), Juan Felipe Herrera is the virtuosic first Mexican American U.S. Poet Laureate. The son of migrant farm workers, his writing is strongly influenced by his experiences in California as a campesino and the artistic movements he discovered in 1960s San Francisco. His poetry collections include 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007,Senegal Taxi, and Half the World in Light, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of several works of prose, short stories, young adult novels, and bilingual picture books for children, Herrera joins the Free Library for a celebration of identity, cultural perspective, and the verses of a lyrical life.

Wednesday, October 7 at 7:30PM

Beth Kephart | Love: A Philadelphia Affair

Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia

Cost: FREE
No tickets required. For Info: 215-567-4341.

In conversation with Marciarose Shestack

“A gifted, even poetic writer” (New York Times), Beth Kephart is the author of 18 books across a wide range of genres, most notably the memoir. The award-winning Handling the Truth offers a thoughtful meditation on the questions that lie at the heart of the genre. Another memoir, A Slant of Sun, was a National Book Award finalist. A writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Kephart is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. From the suburbs to SEPTA to Salumeria sandwiches at the Terminal Market, Kephart’s new volume of personal essays and photos is an ode to all things Philly.

Musing on “the most beautiful and valuable place on the Delaware River”

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost an essay by Beth Kephart, author of Flow the forthcoming Love, from the August 2 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer about the Delaware River Mansion, Andalusia.

There were speed traps set down along East Roosevelt Boulevard on my way to Andalusia. The air was steam, the heat was yellow gravy, and at every little stretch of road, like commas marking a long sentence, police cruisers were doing business with the newly penalized.

I’m a good driver, but I’m rarely a happy one. I’ll take a quiet country road to any speed-trapped high- or byway. By the time I finally turned left on State Road and paralleled the Delaware River, I felt my heart rate slowing. Here were trees and here was calm. Here was space for pondering.

Down a pebbled road I saw the famed estate – “the most beautiful and valuable place on the Delaware River, or, in fact, in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” it was said of Andalusia in November 1865. I rolled down my window and heard the crunching of my tires. A gardener waved. I parked on grass. I was by myself, and now wandering.

I could hear the sound of shears in a garden of wisteria, the quick sprint of wild turkeys, the rustle of squirrels in trees. I could walk in any direction upon this pastoral and see – that mansion, this cottage, that garden, that restored grapery, this grotto, that river walk, this legacy of the historic Craig and Biddle families.

It was Jane Craig who, at the age of 18, in 1811, married Nicholas Biddle. She was shy and disinclined to parade her wealth; she loved her childhood home of Andalusia. He was, and would continue to be, something – graduating at 15 from Princeton as the valedictorian, attending Napoleon Bonaparte’s coronation, befriending Daniel Webster, auditing the Louisiana Purchase, carrying on as a financier even as he edited a fine-arts journal (and the Lewis and Clark report), undertaking the creation of Girard College (on behalf of his deceased friend, Stephen Girard), and ultimately becoming the last president of the Second Bank of the United States.

As a public man, Biddle lived glorious days and panicked ones.He was beloved but also (in the end) held (fairly or not) partly responsible for a broken economy. But at Andalusia, where the slight hill rises up from the rocky riverbank, where the tall ships still sometimes come, where the turtles float, where the clangor of Philadelphia was 13 miles south, he had his share of peace.

Having bought the place from the John Craig estate, Biddle raised his family there, built (trial and error) that grapery there, dreamed of mulberry trees. He brought his friends to the house, hung their portraits in his library, pursued the sweet-milked Guernsey cow until it became established on both his property and in other herds.

Benjamin Latrobe and Thomas U. Walter had both influenced the architecture of Biddle’s home. He left their imprints as they were. Left history in place, and history is indeed what you find as you walk the grounds, as you travel in past the door and in through the rooms that are bright with yellow velvet, marble busts, glassed-in bookcases.

I was to meet students that day at Andalusia. The young people of the Fairmount Water Works Project FLOW as well as a dozen youth (and their adult leaders) from the San Angelo Independent School District of Texas – kids who call themselves the Aqua Squad.

I had been asked to draw these young people from opposite parts of our country together through interviews and conversations. To set them off on minor explorations in pursuit of Andalusian wonder. I was to sit with them on the checkerboard veranda of the mansion beside the ample Doric columns, read to them from the 1886 diary pages of a young Kitty Biddle, and send them out into that garden to explore the inner lives of colors.

But right then I was alone. The bus had not arrived. Yet. Not Project FLOW, not Aqua Squad. Not the dark-haired girl who would write her story from the perspective of a shadow. Not the boy who would confide about his Mexican grandparents, not the tall kid with the “Let’s Get Weird” T-shirt who would speak on behalf of the color red, not 14-year-old Sashoya Dougan, who would sit on that veranda contemplating the river and counting the years between now and the time she will say her wedding vows just beyond those Doric columns.

None of that. Yet. It was still just me and the gravy of heat and the crunch of the pebbles on the path beneath my flip-flops and the quill-sized feathers that the scrambling turkeys had shirked off. Me thinking about the early goodness of the Biddle days, about the big risks of any ambitious life, about the tides that always turn and, if we’re lucky, if we live and hope long enough, will turn back again.

I was thinking about how it is the land itself that quiets us, the rivers and their flow, the overlay of big tree boughs, the breeze that finally blows. It’s the land we return to in a blaring speed-trap world, it’s the pastoral up from the city. It’s also the middle-school kids who roll in on that bus and run quick up that path. Those kids, declaring themselves ready for magic.