Imagetext and Post-Katrina Disaster Recovery in Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House (2019)

This essay attends to the ways in which vernacular photographs modulate into post-Katrina literature. In 2005, when the deluge receded, saltwater-stained snapshots were found to be enmeshed in the debris – a haunting reminder of the mnemonic violence of the storm and its widespread destruction of familial photographic archives. Various volunteer groups and non-profit organisations were therefore setup with the sole objective of restoring flood-damaged photographs and returning them to their original owners. Turning to Sarah M. Broom’s memoir, The Yellow House, this essay engages with the role of the literature in this process and within the ongoing, unresolved context of post-Katrina disaster recovery. In doing so, it reads The Yellow House in relation to W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of the imagetext, illuminating the visual-verbal entanglements that constellate throughout the memoir, with a particular focus on how language supplement images that were vulnerable to water-mediated erasure. By demonstrating how The Yellow House resists ecologically mediated, racialised violence and its ongoing assault on the Black archive, this article argues that Broom repurposes imagetext as a method for cultivating hope in times of crisis.