Trauma

Due to the extensive influence of Transcendental philosophy on the U.S. environmental imaginary, the idea of "trauma" may seem antithetical to discussions of the environment and the landscape, especially when we center those... [ view full abstract ]

Due to the extensive influence of Transcendental philosophy on the U.S. environmental imaginary, the idea of "trauma" may seem antithetical to discussions of the environment and the landscape, especially when we center those discussions on the 19th century. Yet "trauma" is a crucial term for understanding both the environmental crises we face in the 21^st century and for understanding how people have experienced landscapes throughout American history. I come to the term “trauma” due to my interest in both the experiences of and representations produced by non-dominant populations in relation to what has come to be constructed as “nature.” For those populations, the landscapes that are typically romanticized as wilderness symbolizing freedom, possibility, land ownership, and tranquility have been sites of persecution, terror, land-theft, and labor.  As a character in Sydney Portier’s 1972 Western film, Buck and The Preacher, (set in the late 1860s) says of America for black people, “this land itself is poisoned.” When we think about poisoned land, we can expand the keyword “trauma” to include both the cruelty inflicted on some subjects within the landscape and to refer to the impact humans have had on the landscape. At times, these “traumas” have been mutual, in cases where the exploitation of land and the exploitations of bodies have fed into one another (as with agriculture). In this sense, “trauma” is not only a key term for thinking through the questions of the Environmental Humanities but it also links environmental experiences from C19 through C21.