Performing the Post-Traumatic City: Treme and the Politics of Urban Space

I have one message for these hoodlums . . . These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well-trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco

We going down to Bedford town / Iko iko unday / We gonna dance / Bout to mess around / Jockomo feena nay.

"Iko Iko," Mardi Gras Indian Traditional Song

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco's ominous declaration, publicly circulated in the days following Hurricane Katrina's landfall, betrays the militant stance adopted by the state of Louisiana and, more broadly, the federal government as authorities attempted to restore order to the streets of New Orleans. Working from this position, the state's initial response set the stage for a political project that—unsurprisingly, from Blanco's unapologetically racist remark—would mobilize state power to systematically disempower African Americans and the poor in New Orleans. The processes by which this response was enunciated through the space of the city would in the months and years after Hurricane Katrina drastically alter New Orleanians' relationship to their city and to the institutions responsible for their protection. The state's political stance would evolve, with the rebuilding of the city, into a posture of political exclusion, in which New Orleans would open itself to private development and thereby disenfranchise many of its lower income residents. As a result of the destruction of much of the city and the exclusionary politics that accompanied it, New Orleans would emerge from the hurricane as a site of political trauma, where residents were forced to resituate themselves in relation both to their city and to the neoliberal order that would lay claim to its urban space.

This essay examines the first season of the HBO series, Treme (2010), in order to uncover the critical relationship between trauma, performance, and urban space. Utilizing Jenny Edkins's writings on political trauma, this article positions the trauma of Hurricane Katrina not as a result of the storm or of the subsequent flooding of the city, but as a result of neoliberal strategies that placed residents of New Orleans in a psychologically precarious position in relation to the state and its institutional auxiliaries. Edkins explains, "What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger."¹ The well-documented injustices perpetrated against New Orleanians in the aftermath of the hurricane certainly position residents of the city as victims of the political trauma that Edkins describes. Working within this framework, David Simon and Eric Overmyer's series demonstrates, through sophisticated depictions of urban spatial practices and complex negotiations of media spaces, the opportunities for working through trauma made available by "performing" the space of the city.

The federal government's inability to execute a well-orchestrated recovery resulted in a profound destabilization of city space, one that opened the city to new modes of urban redevelopment. As the flooding subsided and reconstruction began, the city found itself within a political milieu that privileged neoliberal visions of urban progress, visions that too often politically disempowered African Americans and the poor, those affected most immediately by the destruction. This article discusses how individuals would position themselves against both material discipline in the city and the more nebulous institutional forces that continue to shape the racial, social, and political terrain of New Orleans. For many residents of the city, these institutional forces were themselves the source of lingering political trauma, and the characters and actors in Treme, by laying claim to the city as a performative space, suggest the possibility not only of reclaiming political agency in Katrina's aftermath, but also of processing psychological trauma in intimate and personally productive ways.

Even...