An Orderly Landscape of Remnants: Notes for Reflecting on the Spatiality of the Disappeared

Abstract

We first witnessed David Simon’s analytical capacity a few years ago in The Wire (Simon, 2002). In that HBO series, the city of Baltimore was neatly dissected to reveal an intricate web formed by inner-city residents, police officers, trade unions, the media, government agencies, politicians… that snares the lives (both everyday and not-so-everyday, public and private) of all these subjects, linking them together in interdependencies almost impossible to escape. Some years after completing The Wire, Simon teamed up with Eric Overmayer to write and produce another series, Treme (Simon and Overmayer, 2010). In this new series, which has also gained a cult following, the same dissecting skills applied to Baltimore are now deployed for the city of New Orleans.