Five days before her death in 2009, Antoinette K-Doe paraded as Queen of the Camel Toe Lady Steppers, an all-female marching group. Danced articulations of race, class, and locality, performed by old and new New Orleanians, reveal why negotiations of the city's “local” culture are central to concerns of resource inequity before and after Hurricane Katrina.

This issue's Critical Acts focuses on “war and other bad shit” in terms of censorship, immigration, and art as a form of political protest and recovery. In “Habeas Corpus,” Ann Pellegrini uses Sally Field's censored Emmy-acceptance speech to exemplify the Bush administration's privatization of mourning as a means “to bind us to acts of fatal violence against an objectified and dehumanized ‘enemy.’” In her account of Luigi Nono's The Forest Is Young and Full of Life , Judy Lochhead examines the possibility of music as activism, noting how history is recycled from the Vietnam War to today. William Bowling and Rachel Carrico describe how art heals in Lakeviews , part of a post-Katrina project. Guillermo GÓmez-Peña rages against “border hysteria,” when the “War on Terror” becomes a “war on difference.”