Detroit, History and Culture
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Recent papers in Detroit, History and Culture
The events around the Mauerfall provided conditions for encounters between Detroit techno producers and a nascent Berlin scene celebrating a new – short-lived – openness. Cemented in Berlin’s Wende era, techno reached across decades-old... more
This is the final draft version of an essay that was published last year (2017) in Joel Stone, ed., Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 67-75.
La techno est un genre musical qui parle à tous les connaisseurs de musiques électroniques, et plus largement. Dans certains ouvrages scientifiques et divers contenus médiatiques des vingt dernières années, il est rare d’en extraire un... more
How an avowed marxist, the son of the most famous industrialist in the United States, and a museologist who already held one of the most prestigious positions in the art world, came together to produce the most famous set of frescoes in... more
The city of Detroit has experienced both a meteoric rise and massive decline over the last hundred years. It has undergone a series of changes: the birth of the auto industry, a civil rights movement book-ended by two tragic riots,... more
While in the scholarship on the NOI there has been much discussion about the press's coverage of the NOI in the early 1930s, there has been almost no attempt to analyze the group's own use of media to promote its message during this... more
In "The Detroit murals of Diego Rivera," Saronne Rubyan-Ling analyzes the subject matter and associated symbolic content of Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes as part of an examination of Rivera’s complex relationship to communist... more
VIIIe siècle avant J.-C. _ 40 ap. J.-C.
This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who collaborated with each other and created new identities in the context of the marketplace, the Marcus Garvey movement,... more
The concept of Art Worker first appeared in the US context in the 1930s, returning in the late 1960s particularly amongst members of Art Workers' Coalition in New York City and similar, vanguard cultural groups. But what do we make of the... more
"Walking on Indigenous land we call the ghetto."-Soufy, "Soul Alive" T he idea that "gentrification is the new colonialism" has become increasingly ubiquitous in anti-gentrification movements in the United States. In the spring of 2016,... more
Review of Beth Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford ( University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
The article argues that a distinctive character of the Black city is revealed in its connections to African heritage preservation. The Africanized Black city is situated within the long foundations of Pan African thought. A main assertion... more
Just-in-time inventories have been portrayed as the centerpiece of the flexible production system developed by Toyota, and the key element in outperforming the mass production systems utilized in the United States. We demonstrate that... more
This article explores the ways in which working class religion became entwined in the social and political debates surrounding World War II. It was published in the "Journal of American History" in September 2012.
Detroit is a crucial subject of Philip Levine's poetry, from the 1960s until the present. This paper provides contextual elements for poems such as 'To Cipriano, In the Wind,' 'They Feed They Lion,' 'Sweet Will,' 'New Season,' and... more
In this article for cult media journal Intentisities, I review David Robert Mitchell's film "It Follows" (2014). My reading is primarily formalist, arguing the film to be predominantly concerned with straight lines, both aesthetically and... more
Syllabus for the undergraduate course "As Detroit Goes, So Goes the Nation: The Shifting Fortunes of the Motor City and the Recent Transformations of Transatlantic Capitalism", taught at the Institute for American Studies, Leipzig... more
The United States’ national conversation around the city of Detroit, Michigan, is shaped largely by photographs taken in the last ten years of interiors that are shells of their former selves. Depictions include abandoned hospitals... more
Public circulations of politicized visualizations and definitions of blight serve not only to define and police an idealized image of care, but also bolster the state's valorization of creative interventions that appear to "domesticate"... more
This essay was published in "The Pew and the Picket Line" (Illinois, 2016), eds. Cantwell, Drake, and Carter. It uses the experiences of the Detroit Industrial Mission to examine the way class shapes religious cultures and worldviews.
This paper deals with the symbolic role that the picturesque plays int he Mies van der Rohe's design for Lafayette Park.
Confronted by the systemic violence of Eurocentrism—or white, male, wealthy supremacy—a group of activists and educators set out to interrogate systems of such supremacy at work in their neighborhoods and confronted the need for... more
The early stages of Fordism in Detroit, ranging between 1905 and 1941, knew an unprecedented level of labor struggle, devoid of any ideology and only “asking for more”: more wages, better working conditions and freedom of assembly. The... more
Covenant House Michigan mural by Roy Sproule. 8Feet by 24 Feet oil on canvas.
Consider the art of Carole Morisseau as a bridge—as an expansive structure made of color, composition, and story that is intended to join differing generations, cultures, ethnicities, and classes. Morisseau makes art, she says, as an... more
URL: http://nyupress.org/books/978-1-4798-8009-6/ In the wake of the Civil War, many white northern leaders supported race-neutral laws and anti-discrimination statutes. These positions helped amplify the distinctions they drew between... more