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Zeitoun and Treme work in tandem as texts that uncover the dimensions of political trauma immediately after the storm and during the extended rehabilitation of New Orleans. The first part of this chapter investigates Zeitoun to examine the ways that institutional power immediately inscribed itself on urban space, and how the intersection of racism and the politics of Homeland Security propelled many inhabitants of New Orleans into a state of “bare life.” The regimentation and militarization of urban space represent extreme examples of Foucault’s control society and Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, and the task for residents of the city after the hurricane was to reestablish sites of resistance and cultural mobility in order to reclaim the urban spaces that fell under institutional control. Following this thread, over the course of its ten episodes, the first season of Treme—taking place three months after the flooding of the city—describes the modes by which New Orleanians attempted to reclaim the city space of New Orleans. The series describes the racial politics of the city, from the recent debates on public housing projects to the policing of urban spaces to the “Disneyfication”

have been permanently displaced by the hurricane, Hogue uses her poetry as a “performative speech act,” giving voice to survivors and witnesses through the written word, the performed poem, and the visual image. Hogue’s poems are positioned alongside Ross’ portraits of survivors and their homes, and these portraits utilize the visual image to resist the spectacular representations of Katrina’s aftermath that were broadcast by the news media. By depicting the quotidian, everyday lives of survivors (none of the photographs depict the usual horrors now associated with Katrina), and combining these images with affective, politically-charged testimony through the poems, Ross and Hogue resist mediated, sensational narratives of Katrina, and successfully generate channels for the processing of trauma. Furthermore, the book’s overt concern for depicting the urban space of New Orleans through the photographs suggests that the act of testimony provides opportunities for reclaiming—at least on psychological levels—the urban spaces that were lost after the hurricane.

of New Orleans, and suggests critical spatial practices that allow individuals to reclaim spaces of agency and cultural expression in their city. Utilizing the space of the city as a site for embodied performance, characters in Treme take positive steps toward reasserting themselves in the urban spaces they inhabit. By applying theoretical approaches equally invested in trauma studies and spatial theory, this chapter demonstrates how the characters in these texts practice space as a means of both confronting trauma and challenging the institutional discourses responsible for provoking it.