Abstract
This essay explores the use of situated testimony in documentary films and videos about belonging, displacement, and return while calling for a ‘spatial turn’ in trauma studies. Through an analysis of selected works about Hurricane Katrina (Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, and the activist video New Orleans for Sale! by Brandan Odums, Nik Richard, and the group 2-cent), this paper extrapolates from Cathy Caruth's insights about psychoanalytic ‘belatedness’ and critical human geography's anti-essentializing conceptions of place to expose the concomitant materiality and unassimilability of traumatic space. The essay questions assumptions about home and right of return, ultimately advocating what architect Eyal Weizman has called a new mode of ‘practising space’ in the service of social justice.
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