Chapter 17 - From Trauma Theory to Systemic Violence

Summary

This chapter begins with a discussion of contemporary critiques aimed at trauma theory, specifically how Lauren Berlant’s and Rob Nixon’s work urges us to attend to systemic and/or slow violence. The chapter argues that, rather than wholly discarding the discourses and applications of trauma theory, we can employ it to attend to the way trauma occurs in contexts of slow or systemic violence. As case studies, it turns to two contemporary narratives of post––Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Dave Eggers’s narrative nonfiction, Zeitoun (2009) and David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s serial television show, Treme (2009––13). These texts dramatize the human suffering that occurs at the intersections of traumatic rupture and ongoing systemic violence. The chapter notes the ways these texts situate New Orleans as a vividly unique American metropolis while simultaneously considering the ways they articulate national and international issues. In doing so, It also attends to the way these texts insist on larger historical contexts for the central moment of rupture –– Katrina –– that is the gravitational force of their narratives.