Living with Ghosts: How Physical Traces of the Past Shape Cultural Trauma in Chinatowns

Abstract

Cultural trauma refers to how past experiences of harm can fundamentally transform a community’s shared identity, potentially generating feelings of solidarity and providing communities with a sense of common purpose. This article examines the role of cultural trauma in motivating and guiding ongoing efforts to preserve historic Chinatowns in Canada and the United States in the face of contemporary challenges such as gentrification. We demonstrate how activists understand themselves to be continuing a struggle against anti-Chinese racism that extends back to the nineteenth century. Explaining the contemporary salience of trauma, we conceptualize Chinatowns as “cultural reservoirs” that have accumulated physical traces of past harms. These traces serve as iconic representations of trauma: haunting reminders of the tenuous place of Chinatowns in North American cities. We identify three types of icons produced by distinct material processes: stubborn, entropic, and remedial. By identifying the importance of the physical environment in the trauma process, we reconcile a realist focus on historical events themselves with a constructivist account of their subsequent incorporation into collective memory. Cultural reservoirs do not determine how contemporary communities will remember their past, but the physical traces they preserve create experiences and situations in which trauma narratives seem intuitive and salient to contemporary communities.