Decolonizing Trauma Theory by Way of Housing Disrepair: The Case of Santa Teresa, Australia

What happens if, instead of the Holocaust being the baseline event for understanding cultural trauma, settler colonial examples are recruited to decolonize cultural trauma framings? Here, a partly successful tribunal hearing lodged by Arrernte residents in Santa Teresa, central Australia, over neglected repair and maintenance issues, shows how settler state deployments of the traumatic and the traumatizing also pivot on event models. Such containment tactics enable more perennial forms of cultural trauma to thrive in insidious and distributed ways. This litigation case study highlights the need to decolonize, rather than reproduce, countersovereignty acts of cultural trauma in our conceptual models.