Southern Cultures

Abstract:

Examining the Hard Rock Hotel collapse of October 2019 in New Orleans and the Indura Resort in coastal Honduras through a transnational and comparative lens reveals two landscapes of redevelopment in the US South. These places are linked by narratives of cultural extractivism, disaster capitalism, and labor exploitation. Due to increasing privatization, they have also undergone a loss of public oversight and workers' rights. Deregulation driven by economic development stretches beyond New Orleans to Honduras, where residents have been displaced due to similar forms of corporate privatization that seize land for an ever-hungry tourism industry. These landscapes of development reveal the historical and transnational characteristics of the Hard Rock Hotel site by situating the US South within the circum-Caribbean and linking it to Honduras via extractive, globalized models of privatization.