Katrina's Diaspora: Lessons in Black Ambivalence

Abstract This essay examines post‐Katrina New Orleans to challenge overdetermining narratives of Black resistance at the expense of other modes of being, while countering portrayals reducing resistance to demands for inclusion into violent subjectivity. Drawing on trans‐feminist discourses of mobility and Black feminist geographies, I examine the Katrina diaspora's practices of (im)mobility—embodying illegible gender expression or inhabiting disposable spaces—to explore the capaciousness of Black fungibility. I offer diasporic choreography to examine post‐Katrina cartography alongside two oral history interviews, one in the immediate aftermath (2005–2006) and one in the long term (2022). Extending Katherine McKittrick's concept of a black sense of place as an entanglement of coloniality and resistance I foreground subtle, complex navigations Black communities make within coercive geographies. Attending to affective gestures, queer articulations of (non)belonging and shifting spatial strategies, I argue that Gulf South Black (im)mobility embodies an ontological ambivalence crucial to understanding Katrina's long‐term impact on Black sociality [Correction added on 10 October 2025, after first online publication: The Abstract section has been revised in this version.].