Dave Eggers's Zeitoun: 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in the United States

This research paper explores the aftermath of the 9/11 events within the American society in the context of another major social crisis of the 2000s in the United States: Hurricane Katrina, as presented by Dave Eggers's non-fictional narrative Zeitoun. The goal of this thesis is to examine the effects of 9/11 at the intersection of Katrina, especially for the Arab and Muslim communities, held collectively responsible for the attacks simply based on their ethnicity and origins. In this paper, I review dominant academic positions on this subject which, drawing from data collected predominantly in the immediate aftermath of the events of 9/11, claim that Arab Americans' status within the American mainstream changed from almost “invisible” to “hyper- visible” minority, experiencing feelings of insecurity and injustice as a result of a widespread racist sentiment and Islamophobia, a direct outcome of their treatment by the government and by denigrating media portrayals. Furthermore, scholarly research evidences that the collective backlash which targeted Arab Americans was not caused by the events of 9/11 themselves, but was instead the culmination of pre-existing social processes that constructed them as inherently different, as “others”. The first chapter of this thesis contextualises the two major events here analysed, namely 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. In the first section I provide a historical excursus which illustrates the processes of immigration and integration of the Arabs in the United States, a key to understand the social and cultural impact of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the Arab and Muslim American minorities, described afterwards. In the second section, I provide a timeline of the events of Hurricane Katrina on August 23-30, 2005 and its aftermath, showing how race and social class determined different responses to the natural disaster. In the second chapter I introduce Dave Eggers's non-fictional book Zeitoun, presenting the main characters and the plot to the reader. Then, I show the impact of media and political discourses on the perception of Arab Americans and Hurricane Katrina within the American mainstream. I end this chapter by illustrating government policies at the intersection of 9/11 and Katrina through Zeitoun's personal experience.