"We Are These Homes": Emplaced Racial Trauma in Documentary Film

Abstract

Movement and creative expression, then, offer the final possible outcomes of emplaced racial trauma taken up here. Each of the films studied above is itself an active product of emplaced racial trauma as well as part and parcel of its process. Although many manifestations of this phenomenon exist, even those presented above did not receive their full due. Thus, this initial theoretical framework leaves much to take up, refine, and reconsider. As it stands, emplaced racial trauma is a material, ontological geography that concentrates space and time; observes a dialectical relationship to placelessness, especially in the form of displacement; and results in spaces marked by harm, teeming with subversion, and/or anointed by aesthetic representation. The concept seeks to describe the lived, affective experience of spatialized racism as well as how it is (re)produced in material and cultural form. In so doing, it illuminates the magnetism such traumatized spaces hold, visibilizing the tangible weight of historical time, disparate spaces, and dislocation on the experienced present. Understanding these experiences and processes is crucial to understanding boththe perpetuation of spatialized racial harm and the strategies by which it is unsettled. Moreover, emplaced racial trauma adds to and extends the scholarship on race, space, trauma, and memory, filling in important topographical detail in existing Chocolate maps while potentially shedding light on ofteninvisibilized emotional terrains.36 Emplaced racial trauma as a geography and component of collective memory is productively studied through the films presented here, but the concept requires theoretical and empirical expansion. Namely, the concept's applicability to other historically marginalized racial groups and the particularities of the traumatic geographies forged in their communities deserve rigorous unpacking, especially given the United States' context of settler colonialism and the attendant land theft suffered by Indigenous peoples. Similarly, geographic experiences of Latinx and Asian American communities across the country require their own careful study, as well as consideration for how they craft and influence collective identity, memory, and activism. In the meantime, emplaced racial trauma offers a lens through which to acknowledge, analyze, and affectively experience space as it captures and perpetuates anti-Black racial trauma. Such acknowledgment and understanding are crucial, for the rippling, enduring effects of traumatized space carry steep implications for those who experience it as well as those involved in the fight for racial and spatial justice. Through the creation of group identity and transmission of historical memory; the political mobilization of oppressed groups across space and time; and the construction of healing, reparative zones, emplaced racial trauma offers more than just an indictment of historical wrongs. It is an avenue through which to see invisibilized spatial dynamics for what they are and reconstitute them toward ends of equity and repair. In other words, it is a way to honor the proclamation of the soapbox preacher-"We are these homes!"-for all the joy, sorrow, and significance such a cry holds.