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Adding to Benedict Anderson's influential argument that nations are imagined communities,1 Rob Nixon notes how these entities also require the production of what he calls “unimagined communities” (2013, p. 150). Through a process of “spatial amnesia,” nations physically and imaginatively displace communities within their borders whose existence disrupts teleological narratives of national progress (p. 151). Operating in tandem with physical removal, imaginative displacement renders targeted communities invisible, a necessary first step to their physical evacuation.
Nixon highlights how the desire for environmental resources often underlies and justifies spatial amnesia, as “communities, under the banner of development, are physically unsettled and imaginatively removed, evacuated from place and time and thus uncoupled from the idea of both a national future and a national memory” (p. 151). Physical removal coupled with imaginative displacement temporally severs these communities, tearing them from the fabric of national time. Labeling this “violent conversion of inhabitant into uninhabitant” a “recurrent trauma,” Nixon draws on an existing discourse of trauma theory that codified a commonly understood definition of what that “trauma” entails (p. 153).
Nixon is hardly alone in using the rhetoric of trauma to conceptualize the crisis posed to humanity by environmental destruction and resource extraction. Timothy Morton calls global