On and beyond traumatic fallout: unsettling political ecology in practice and scholarship

Franz Fanon poignantly argued that trauma is both an act and a memory of wounding that haunts subjects of violence. Addressing geographies of trauma, and the way that trauma is treated in the discipline of geography, is a matter of both theoretical and practical importance for critical human-environment scholars. However, discussions about uneven and ongoing geographies of trauma and violence – particularly in ways that enroll researchers themselves as agents within these landscapes – have been limited among political ecologists. When broached, these conversations are sometimes short-circuited by post-racial liberalism, whiteness or Eurocentricity, and academic respectability politics. This risks the continuance of logics that separate "researchers" from "communities" and lionize representational commitments to justice over material practices of transformation. In this article, we interrogate some of the theoretical and personal implications for political ecologists working with the legacies of dispossession, disruption, displacement and death. We draw on a wide collective of scholarship on haunting, hope, and geographies of trauma as well as our current work as geographers and educators. In the process, we build an argument for an approach that encourages unsettling, uncomfortable, and generative conversations about and beyond trauma. We end with three suggestions for engaging more substantively with the traumatic fallout that has long been at the center of political ecology.

Neighbourhood exceptionalism and racial liberalism in the Great Society city: integration as civic showpiece at St Louis’ LaClede Town

This article analyses the role of LaClede Town, a nationally lauded housing development in St Louis (USA), in metropolitan and national contests over race, segregation and urban equity from the 1960s to 1990s. Built on the site of a massive slum-clearance project, the federally supported complex gained widespread fame for its startlingly heterogeneous racial mix and ostensibly colour-blind lifestyles. As the article argues, the quasi-utopian language applied to the neighbourhood illustrates the contours and limitations of a 1960s racial liberalism that sought to overcome structural inequalities through face-to-face neighbourly contact. Yet the project's 1990s demise signals that older ideology's supersession by a newly dominant urban neoliberalism.

Racial Liberalism Resurgent: Connecting Multi-Racial Protests and Electoral Politics Today

In this paper, we consider the changing nature of today's protest–election connection by looking back to the Blue Wave of the 2018 midterm elections that led to Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives. We ask whether White voters' participation in the Blue Wave of the 2018 elections is related to the multi-racial participation in the #BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020. Could it be that White participation in both is symptomatic of a larger resurgence of racial liberalism that is likely to continue to play a significant role in our politics going forward starting with the 2020 election?

Bones and Sinews

This chapter discusses how black student activists led a campus strike at the University of Michigan (UM) in 1970, challenging entrenched ideas and practices that seemed so natural and embedded in the institution that administrators had never questioned them. The institutional values and practices that justified an admissions system that created racial disparities began in the mid-nineteenth century. Two core values emerged at the first board of regents meetings in Ann Arbor. Campus leaders wanted to create a university on par with any in the United States, and they wanted the university to offer broad access to the people of Michigan. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, campus leaders chose to subordinate the ideal of access to the goal of attaining and sustaining UM's elite status. In the 1940s and 1950s, administrators slowly purged official practices that mandated or accommodated segregation in campus buildings and social clubs. They slowly incorporated the prevailing ideas of racial liberalism. However, administrators never anticipated how the implementation of racial liberalism would impact black students. The ways that UM leaders crafted the model multiracial community led to a toxic racial climate at UM.

The Obama Coalition

While the tensions between white hope and black despair were a dynamic that characterized politics in the Long Sixties, their structure is recursive. That is, the (positive and negative racial) feelings that undergird racial liberalism did not stop emerging and receding after law and order campaigns destroyed civil rights and Black Power organizing in the mid-70s. Nowhere is this clearer than in the entrance and disappearance of the so-called “Obama coalition” in 2008 to elect Barack Obama as the first biracial/black president in U.S. history. In considering how hope continues to be inextricably linked to rage, contempt, and despair, this brief conclusion considers hope as an ironic discourse of liberalism, particularly as it is racialized. The birth of Afro- pessimism as a coterminous discourse with what we now call the “post-racial” Obama coalition is important because it demonstrates how black feelings in the Long Sixties continue to shape national political discourse, demonstrating how affective politics are iterative as well as how they change over time.

American Negritude

This chapter contextualizes Malcolm X’s interventions about black feelings in the contemporary psychological literatures that framed and circulated about blackness to understand how new black psychology informed Malcolm’s emotional and rhetorical repertoire. Then, in excavating Malcolm’s performances of black rage as an easily identifiable feeling and an intended goal of his rhetorical corpus, Corrigan argues that Malcolm’s psychological strategy articulated what she calls “American Negritude.” Marrying black psychology to the work of African and Caribbean intellectuals theorizing postcolonial black subjectivity, Malcolm’s rhetorical skills hinged on his ability to resituate black political and social consciousness around black pride and disidentification from whites. Malcolm’s American Negritude, particularly as it embraced rage, was at odds with the affective orientation and the racial liberalism of the integrationists and created both tension and opportunity for a global blackness. Still, while Malcolm reconceptualized feeling and being black, his enactment of black rage was often confused with hatred, which fueled white opposition to Malcolm and the NOI and fed white fragility in the early 1960s. Malcolm’s critique of black loyalty to white civil religion hinged on his relentless exposure of faulty black identifications, which he saw as a form of modern slavery.

Feeling Riots

This chapter reflects upon the multiple interpretations of major urban rebellions in the United States between 1964-1969 to understand how descriptions of the major race riots, especially the metaphor of the powderkeg, created and reflected racialized political feelings where hopelessness replaced hope as the emotional framework for racial liberalism and as the possibility of integration ebbed. The assassinations of John Kennedy and, later, Malcolm X, along with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 evacuated black hope from political liberalism and replaced it with different political emotions, including rage, frustration, and fear. Blacks feared white terrorism and whites feared blacks. This impasse augmented the hopelessness and anger that undergirded riots. It prompted the passage of the 1967 DC Crime Bill and helped undermine the 1968 Civil Rights Bill as protest was elided with crime in news accounts and in public policy, effectively mystifying the context and content of urban rebellion. As the War on Poverty transformed into the War on Crime, feelings became a major rhetorical vector of policy discussions about urban rebellion. Law and order rhetoric reasserted white statism as the only permissible loyalty and effectively harnessed white anxiety and anger towards ending any possibility of black equality through the law.