The 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina entrenched natural disaster studies within the disciplinary territory of the social sciences. For scholars of this specialized field of knowledge, examining the geological and hydrometerological aspects of the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States made little sense without also asserting its historical origins and societal impact. One goal of this dissertation is to secure the human concerns of natural disaster studies further by aligning them with a singular historical social science, a Marxist paradigm that reframes contemporary natural disasters as misfortunes inherent to the neoliberal form of late capitalism. Although Marxism provides the most expansive view of the unnatural forces of natural disasters, this approach itself must be philosophically generous and rigorous, not politically expedient, hence I clarify the ontological status of natural disasters by enlisting reinforcements from the humanities-existential philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The second goal of this dissertation is to redress a deficiency in the social scientific approach to the cultural representation of natural disasters, which is undeveloped and still largely beholden to positivist methodologies. Drawing on the jointly Marxist and psychoanalytic approach developed by dialectical thinkers like Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, I show how literary and cultural imaginations of catastrophes shape their real formation within the capitalist world-economy. A comparative analysis of the recent Hollywood disaster films Children of Men (2006) and I Am Legend (2007) demonstrates the divergent response of progressives and conservatives to what Naomi Klein dubs “disaster capitalism.” While some works of mass culture disguise and expose the role of the political economy in exacerbating the disastrous effects of so-called natural disasters, others naturalize economic crises. Close readings of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) and Knowing (2009) unearth both ideological and utopian projections of the current “global financial crisis.”