Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier

Amazon.com Price: $87.50 (as of 06/05/2019 15:46 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

According to popular media and scholarship, Detroit, the once-vibrant city that crumbled with the departure of the auto industry, is where dreams can also be reborn. This can be a place that, like The united states itself, is gritty and made up our minds. It has faced the worst more or less adversity, and supposedly now it’s back. But what does this narrative of “new Detroit” leave out? Beautiful Wasteland reveals that the up to date story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined get admission to to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. They’re not. As Rebecca J. Kinney shows, the narratives of Detroit’s rise, decline, and potential to rise again are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness. 

By remapping the narratives of up to date Detroit through an extension of The united states’s frontier mythology, Kinney analyzes a cross-section of twentieth and twenty-first century cultural locations—an Web forum, ruin photography, advertising, documentary film, and print and online media. She illuminates how the stories we tell about Detroit as a frontier of possibility enable the erasure of white privilege and systemic racism. By situating Detroit as a “beautiful wasteland,” both desirable and distressed, this shows how the narrative of ruin and possibility form a mutually constituted relationship: the city is possible precisely as a result of its perceived ruin.

Beautiful Wasteland tackles the key questions about the way forward for postindustrial The united states. As cities around the country reckon with their own postindustrial landscapes, Rebecca Kinney cautions that development that elides considerations of race and class will only continue to replicate uneven get admission to to the city for the poor, working class, and people of color. 


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier

Recent Products