"Is Space Political?": Oppositional Strategies in Treme

[First paragraph] Fredric Jameson’s pointed question1 from his 1997 essay is persistently examined and explored throughout David Simon’s Treme (HBO, 2010-). Indeed, Treme asks how space is political and in response incorporates multiple figurations of negotiations of public spaces in post-Katrina New Orleans. Like Simon’s The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008) before it, Treme functions as a sustained critique of the ways in which city spaces are used by both disenfranchised individuals as well as political and corporate elites. For Simon, the local is the primary point of departure for systemic political critique. While his New Orleans narrative/s may be flawed at times and are, perhaps, primarily based on learned knowledge rather than acquired through experience (as in The Wire), Treme nonetheless provides a sustained spatial critique at the level of the local. Storylines turn on the ways in which central characters struggle to reclaim their place in the city, whether through finding a new place to live, locating exiled friends and family, re-building a business or simply dodging disaster tourists. As in real life, individual strategies for surviving in the city after the storm are predicated in Treme on the degree of privilege prior to it; the ways in which social advantages, or the lack thereof, inform everyday life after the hurricane is traced and contrasted in overlapping character narratives.