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Treme’s interest in representing the diverse styles of New Orleans music—many of which are products of the Congo Square convergence of African and Western music in the nineteenth century and are therefore heavily rhythmic— and how these concepts work their way into the fabric of the city is worth exploring through this lens. Several episodes feature Lambreux and his tribe performing traditional Indian songs, which are played with tambourines accompanied by call and response vocals.²⁴ With the procession of dancers following the tribe on St. Joseph’s Night, the music is meant to inspire the natural rhythms of the body. When musicians and dancers take to the streets, they bring these natural rhythms to bear on the organized rhythms of institutional power inscribed on city space. Furthermore, Indian music relies on “a cycle of traditional songs, of which there are fewer than twenty” (VanSpanckeren 44). By performing these traditional songs as part of a cycle, and by infiltrating the streets with natural rhythms, the Mardi Gras Indians suggest ways of challenging the institution’s control over time and space. Simon and Overmyer give significant




²⁴ For a more detailed discussion on Mardi Gras Indian music, see Kathryn VanSpanckeren’s essay, “The Mardi Gras Indian Song Cycle: A Heroic Tradition.”

attention to representing these practices as modes capable of challenging institutional authority. When the Guardians of the Flame are stopped by police on St. Joseph’s Night, Lambreaux stands his ground, and the police, commanded by the community liaison officer, retreat to their vehicles and leave the Indians to continue their rituals. In an earlier episode, a tour bus approaches the Indians as they perform a sacred funeral ritual. Recognizing that the tourists—with their cameras and video recorders—threaten to co-opt their rituals into the spectacle of Katrina tourism, Lambreaux curtly tells the bus driver to move on.²⁵ In each case, the communal power of Indian rituals trumps the institution, and this process owes itself largely to the ways that the Indians are able to inscribe themselves on urban spaces through song and dance, creating enclaves of communal agency.

Lambreaux is particularly adamant and vocal about establishing these sites of agency that resist institutional power and perhaps understands this process better than any character in the series. One of Lambreaux’s sub-narratives concerns the federal government’s plans to raze the public housing projects in New Orleans. Experiencing only minimal damage during the flooding (Browne- Dianis), these buildings were habitable by January of 2006 and were considered by architecture critics to be “some of the best public housing built in the United States” (Ouroussoff). Nonetheless, the federal government, claiming that the projects were hotbeds of crime and drug-use, decided to tear them down and build



²⁵ I again call attention to Treme’s investment in the same culture of disaster tourism that Simon and Overmyer critique in this scene. Try as it might, the series cannot totally separate itself from the processes of consumption and production that are fundamental to popular culture texts.

new government-subsidized apartments, which are only now, in 2013, accepting their first inhabitants. After construction is completed, these apartments will house 3,500 fewer inhabitants than the original projects (Jervis). Many New Orleanians were outraged over these plans, claiming that the federal government was deliberately preventing the predominantly-black inhabitants of the projects from returning to the city in an attempt to decrease the percentage of democratic voters in the city and, more generally, scale back the city’s “deviant” black population.

Lambreaux, concerned with both preserving the projects and making immediate housing available to New Orleanians in exile from the city, stages a media stunt by occupying one of the condemned units in the Calliope housing project. Inviting the media to broadcast his occupation, Lambreaux remains in the unit, even as police, sensitive to the political ramifications of violently removing him from the premises, wait outside. Lambreaux’s occupation of public domestic space in these scenes is significant. Owned by the federal government but nonetheless a site of street-level cultural production, the projects represent a critical site of political contestation; by claiming the authority—under somewhat dubious pretenses—to raze the housing projects, the state seeks to impose itself on the private lives of American citizens. Lambreaux understands the symbolic implications of the standoff, and, remaining in the unit, he compels the police to use force for his removal. By peacefully occupying public domestic space, Lambreaux embraces a position of delinquency in relation to the state. Taking to

the streets on St. Joseph’s Night without a public permit represents a similar transgression of state authority, and in each case, Lambreaux’s body becomes politically-subversive tool; his presence in space requires the state to enact physical violence in order to ensure his removal. Combined with his ability to use rhythm and music to colonize urban space, this ability to claim agency over space through embodiment is important to Simon and Overmyer’s commentary on how power is articulated in space.

The political dimensions of urban housing that Treme addresses in this episode also appear elsewhere in the series. One of the chief visual metaphors Simon and Overmyer employ throughout the series is the repeated image of a house rotting from the inside as a result of the flooding. On their most basic level, these images—which appear in the opening credits and elsewhere in the series as characters return to their damaged homes—reflect the devastation wrought on the private lives of New Orleanians in the wake of the hurricane. More specifically, though, these images speak to the dissolution of American privacy and domesticity as a result of institutional power. Just as the federal government executed plans to permanently remove African Americans from their homes, it equally failed to provide for those New Orleanians still in the city, living either in temporary housing or in the squalor of their flood-damaged homes. Antoine Batiste, even by the final episode, has yet to receive his FEMA trailer and Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens) is living in a home in a state of total disrepair. The state’s failure to provide for these characters—combined with its aggressive, politically-

motivated plans for urban renewal—suggest that the institution’s presence in domestic space does more harm than good. The image of the rotting interior implies that the American homeland—rhetorically figured as an extension of institutional power—is rotting from the inside out.

Lambreaux, again, takes productive steps to situate cultural practices within this political milieu and thereby reclaim spaces of agency. In the first episode, he converts the flood-damaged neighborhood bar, The Tavern, into a practice space for his tribe, and, with nowhere else to go, eventually makes it his home. As a safe harbor for Indian traditions, The Tavern functions as a heterotopic space that exists within and challenges the forces of discipline that have claimed much of the urban space of New Orleans. Simon and Overmyer emphasize the bar’s function as a site of resistance throughout the show. In his first attempts to clean out the damaged interior, Lambreaux toils in the bar while military helicopters hover outside, shining lights through the windows and reminding the viewer of the enduring presence of discipline in the city. In the ninth episode, “Wish Someone Would Care,” when the police enter The Tavern to advise Lambreaux against the use of violence on St. Joseph’s Night, he promptly ushers them outside and into the street, recognizing that The Tavern must remain free of institutional discipline. By fostering marginalized discourse and building community through the material place of The Tavern, Lambreaux offers important new ways of articulating private space in relation to institutional power. Simon and Overmyer here seem to suggest that producing private spaces that exist

apart from the institution is not only possible but necessary for reclaiming cultural traditions and building communities. Where the institutional response to Katrina disenfranchised, and, indeed, traumatized many New Orleanians who had lost their homes, Lambreaux’s vision of community, culture, and tradition seems particularly attractive.

In addition to offering a new vision of de-institutionalized domestic space, The Tavern provides the Indians with a performative space in which to embody their traditions. In several episodes, Simon and Overmyer depict the Indians performing their songs in the manner described above. When they finally take to the streets on St. Joseph’s Night, they symbolically move these practices to the public space of the city, colonizing it and disseminating the discourses of resistance into the public sphere. What is significant about this act—as well the culture of second lining and Mardi Gras—is that embodied performance provides a medium through which to confront trauma. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor describes the potential for embodied performance to “generate, record, and transmit knowledge” in ways that resist institutional power, which is vested in the written archive (21). Enacted in the space of the city, performance involves embodied spatial practices that cannot be recorded into archival history. Furthermore, embodied performance facilitates a culturally-ameliorating confrontation with trauma. Taylor writes, “Performance protest helps survivors cope with individual and collective trauma by using it to animate political denunciation” (165). Later, she explains, “In performance, behaviors and actions

can be separated from the social actors performing them. These actions can be learned, enacted, and passed on to others. The transmission of traumatic experience more closely resembles ‘contagion”: one ‘catches’ and embodies the burden, pain, and responsibility of past behaviors/events” (167-168). Through this lens, the spatial tactics described over the course of this chapter—producing situations, embodying rhythms, etc.—achieve new political dimensions in their relation to trauma theory.

The characters of Treme are united in their experience of political trauma.
When Ladonna dances in the second line for her brother’s funeral in the final episode, her dramatic, jerky movements are an attempt to express a sense of despair that exists outside of language. Traumatized by the news of David’s death and the circumstances surrounding it, she cannot bring herself to uncover the full dimensions of the state’s role in the tragedy, but dancing in the second line, Simon and Overmyer seem to suggest, provides her with a personally productive sense of closure. Aware of the politically-traumatic circumstances under which David died, the audience recognizes the dance as more than an expression of grief; it functions as a performance—one shared by her community of second liners—that confronts her betrayal by the state through modes that exist outside of language. Likewise, Creighton Bernette’s political satire during Mardi Gras is an embodied act that, despite its humorous dimensions, reveals a deep frustration with the institution’s response to Katrina. Concealing his experience with trauma

from his family, he commits suicide in the penultimate episode.²⁶ Lambreaux embodies Indian traditions as a means of reasserting his political subjectivity, but performing these rituals in the space of the city allows him to act out the traumatic loss of New Orleans—in ways that exist beyond institutional language— alongside those equally traumatized by the military’s disciplining of urban space. If these tactics are situated as attempts to confront political trauma attached to Katrina, then not only are they politically-empowering, but they furthermore provide New Orleanians with important avenues for working through trauma.

Political trauma is unique in that its psychological impact derives from the realization that the state and the systems of power that support it have placed its victims in an untenable position of political subjection. The “bare life” created and sustained by the state of exception seemingly renders individuals politically impotent, and the idea that political agency is a hollow abstraction can be psychologically devastating for victims, such as those living in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. In its dual role, embodied performance provides individuals with the ideal means of confronting political trauma; it provides a medium for physically acting out trauma and, situated in material place, it claims and colonizes spaces, thereby carving out temporary positions of political agency. Embodied performance, then, offers valuable means of challenging an institutional presence that operates beyond the law and therefore represents a perpetual source of political trauma.




²⁶ Bernette’s suicide stands in for a disheartening trend developing from Katrina’s aftermath; the suicide rate in New Orleans tripled in the year after the hurricane (Greene 216).

Through these spatial practices, Treme demonstrates the potential for New Orleanians to reestablish themselves in their city by confronting the trauma they experienced and by challenging institutional power. To be sure, Simon and Overmyer are realistic in their representation of this process: even though she half-heartedly participates in the second line during David’s funeral, Bernette’s wife, Toni (Melissa Leo), clearly traumatized by the events that have transpired, refuses to give her dead husband his own funeral, regarding his suicide as an act of cowardice. Nonetheless, Treme suggests spatial practices that, through the processes described above, help to rebuild communities in the urban space of New Orleans. In fact, reclaiming the city as a democratic space involves claiming power from the institution and dispersing it among communities. In Zeitoun, Eggers early on establishes his protagonist as an upstanding, well-liked member of his community. Through his painting business, he brings the community together, leaving his mark on the houses that he paints. After the hurricane, the state disciplines the city in such a way as to abolish Zeitoun’s membership in this community; as a Muslim, his identity is politically-linked to the enemy, not to the citizenry of the United States, much less the people of New Orleans. The question that Eggers asks at the book’s end is how to rebuild a democratic, heterogeneous New Orleans in the wake of such divisive policies of discrimination.

Treme begins to answer this question. Through their concern for representing spatial practices, Simon and Overmyer suggest that communities are rebuilt by uniting people in urban space and that embodied performance facilitates

productive exchanges, both in terms of trauma and politics. This chapter has demonstrated how Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, smooth space and striated space, operated in the days and months following Katrina and how these terms are important to our understanding of the individual’s relationship to the state. For a brief moment after the hurricane, the streets of New Orleans, for better or for worse, were stripped of institutional discipline. When the state clumsily, but with presumably good intentions, attempted to establish order in the city through military force, it imposed radical modes of discipline that revealed deeply rooted institutional prejudices; the city of New Orleans was rapidly being transformed into an intensely striated space. Treme is the story of how the people of New Orleans would gradually reclaim their city, transforming it, through trying spatial practices, into a democratic, heterogeneous, demilitarized smooth space, once again. Of course, as Deleuze and Guattari are quick to point out, these concepts always exist in relation to one another, expanding and contracting in tandem with the individual’s dynamic relation to the state. Post-Katrina New Orleans provides fertile ground for this brand of spatial analysis, and these two texts demonstrate the traumatic dimensions embedded in the reconfiguration of urban space.

As valuable as these spatial practices were to the people of New Orleans, the extent to which they provide opportunities for engaging memorial practices and exercising political subjectivity in the broader arena of metropolitan life is still up for debate. As I discuss in the following chapter on the new American metropolis, cities experiencing dramatic growth in the postwar period in many

ways preclude the opportunities for productive discursive exchange that we witness in the post-traumatic, post-Katrina environment of New Orleans.

CHAPTER 4
TRAUMATIC DISLOCATION: THE NEW AMERICAN METROPOLIS

In this city, where suburb, strip, and urban center have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as places. Amidst the ruins of monuments no longer significant because deprived of their systematic status, and often of their corporeality, walking on the dust of inscriptions no longer decipherable because lacking so many words, whether carved in stone or shaped in neon, we cross nothing to go nowhere.

Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny

How does a city ‘house’ the memory of a people no longer at ‘home’ there?

James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge

I went back to Ohio / But my city was gone / There was no train station / There was no downtown / South Howard had disappeared / All my favorite places / My city had been pulled down / Reduced to parking spaces / A, O, way to go, Ohio.

The Pretenders, “My City Was Gone”

The street-level narratives of post-Katrina New Orleans—haunted, as they were, by political trauma and institutional oppression—suggest the possibility of urban renewal and, along with it, cultural redemption in times of political instability. This spirit of optimism, as detailed in the previous chapter, articulates itself in urban space, as individuals utilize dynamic spatial practices and revitalize traditional cultural practices in order to reestablish themselves in the space of their city, which was and still is very much the site of institutional discipline. Part of what made this redemptive narrative possible was the rich cultural history of New Orleans and, more specifically, the city’s urban design, with its local districts, dense concentration of lived space, multiracial communities, and relatively liberal policies regarding public space. Even in the face of institutional discipline, the city’s physical and cultural makeup facilitated performative cultural practices that helped its residents come to terms with political trauma.

In many respects, however, New Orleans cannot serve as the representative American metropolis. Urban planning in the postwar years has ventured far from conceptions of metropolitan space that insist on centralized city planning, where closely-situated downtown districts serve as hubs for commerce, housing, and social interaction. Moving away from these turn-of-the-century urban models, the contemporary metropolis favors policies of decentralization and privatization, which lead to so-called suburban sprawl and, concomitantly, the loss of local, tightly-knit cultural communities that arise out of concentrated urban life. Beginning with the publication of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great