“We Are These Homes”: Emplaced Racial Trauma in Documentary Film

Abstract:This essay contributes the concept of emplaced racial trauma to theoretical conceptualizations of race, space, and trauma. Defined as the spatialization of racism-induced traumatic experiences, emplaced racial trauma seeks to describe the geography that the felt experience of race and racism creates, particularly as it relates to anti-Black spatial dynamics. This geography is characterized by the materiality of its ontological existence, the manner in which it concentrates historical memory and connects disparate spaces of racial trauma, and the dialectical relationship it maintains with placelessness, especially as it pertains to displacement. I ground the theory in empirical examples drawn from three films that center Black people, stories, and spaces: Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, Whose Streets?, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Through an analysis of the spaces and people represented in these films, I demonstrate the (re)production of spaces of emplaced racial trauma, their impacts on the material world, and the relationships that their residents form with them. These geographies are shown to inform the sociospatial world as it is continually constructed, operating as sites of racial harm but also localities in which inhabitants might subvert spatial domination.