This paper aims to explore Paula L. Woods' crime novel, ＂Inner City Blues＂, with a focus on the protagonist's conflicting status as a black female detective in the L.A.P.D. and how she deals with the complex entanglements related to her personal trauma and the historical trauma of the black community in the city. As a law enforcement agent, the detective, Charlotte Justice, has to defend law and order which is sometimes problematic in itself. How does she situate herself inside and outside the establishment? Moreover, the conventional narrative structure of crime fiction usually demands that every story reaches a satisfying closure when the detective cracks a case. But in Charlotte's case, does her investigation into her personal trauma and the collective trauma of Los Angeles's black community also come to a comfortable end? In other words, is the narrative of traumas whitewashed and subsumed under the hegemony of the state? To address these issues, this paper will first employ Patricia Hill Collins's idea of the ＂outsider within,＂ a vantage point historically occupied by marginalized black females, so as to understand the detective's unusual position. Although Charlotte is an outsider in a male-dominated organization, she has an exclusive access to the knowledge of the white establishment. She is thus equipped with the abilities to move among a variety of groups and has the means to resist oppression. Furthermore, in the light of Dominick LaCapra's interpretation of trauma, the detective's murder investigation in the story can be viewed as her attempt to work through her trauma. While Charlotte struggles to deal with her personal trauma, the reader also witnesses the historical traumas of the black community, which have been caused not only by external abuse of power of institutional racism but also by internal patriarchal black cultural nationalism. The murder in the story is uncovered at some point, but it by no means suggests that traumas are cured and the detective's subjectivity is incorporated into the law. Charlotte's investigation of traumas should be considered a process, which allows different voices from the margins and provides more possibilities for the future.
