Resumen de Flooded City: Affects of (Slow) Catastrophe in Post-Harvey Houston
Within 24 months (2015–2017), Houston was struck by three “500-year flood” events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted Houstonians’ emotional and epistemic attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and city. In dialogue with the anthropology and science and technology studies literature on disasters and its focus on technopolitical regimes of disaster anticipation and risk mitigation, we offer an analysis of the “affective publics of slow catastrophe” that have emerged in Houston in response to a situation that experts and citizens alike fear represents a “new normal” in the context of climate change. We focus on three affective orientations around which floodies are clustering: diluvial individualism (a wounded retreat from public engagement in favor of highly individualized recovery strategies), hydraulic citizenship (an activist political subjectivity oriented around creating better infrastructures of water management), and amphibious acceptance (an emergent affective orientation oriented to learning to live with rather than against floodwater). Although we ultimately argue that amphibious acceptance’s time has not yet come in Houston, our fieldwork suggests that the repetitive experience of catastrophic flooding is changing the affective presence of water in Houston.
