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 geopolitical barriers between divided Berlin and the Fordist heartland of the American Dream. This essay argues that the music brought together enthused communities to live out energetic experiments in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. In Berlin, displaced Cold War identifications met the placelessness of Detroit techno’s utopian-dystopian form. Detroit techno and re-unification met on this territory, where a social imaginary of radical difference strongly appealed, and experiments with social forms seemed possible. The music had long explored a placelessness that left behind earlier struggles, connecting it with the “transitional” experience of the Wende. Berlin’s nascent club scene became the place to play out Detroit techno’s alienated relation to identity. The article foregrounds alienation within Detroit techno and techno’s break with the past via Afrofuturism. In Berlin, Detroit techno becomes a trace of the future in a setting dedicated to the future’s exploration.

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 exposé musicologique non condescendant de ce genre musical, ou une approche sociologique autre que liée à l’univers des raves en Europe. Dans une démarche anthropologique, il est alors nécessaire de revenir sur les bases de la construction de ce terme entouré de mythes. Il faut donc se rendre à Detroit. Une terre envisagée comme origine de la techno où les différentes trajectoires des musiques électroniques s’entremêlent entre musiques, espaces, territoires et valeurs. (Re)Commencer à une échelle locale et humaine, c’est côtoyer les individus et les communautés qui se solidarisent autour d’une ou de musiques techno(s). C’est analyser la techno à Detroit en train de se faire, via notamment une ethnographie de la vie de jeunes DJs. C’est aussi s’interroger sur l’évolution professionnelle d’artistes-phares depuis près de 40 ans et leurs impacts aussi bien culturels, artistiques, pédagogiques que politiques à Detroit. Ainsi, au travers de la ou les techno(s), des interactions se créent, des échanges discursifs et points de vue sont développés et des barrières se forment. Se modélise alors une image nette et énergique, encore occultée aujourd’hui, de Detroit.

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 Detroit, in the midst of the Great Depression and in a city that epitomized both the good and the bad of the American 20th century industrial era.

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, unprecedented corruption in city government, the impact of a global recession and a federal bailout of the Big 3 automakers, and the still unknown effects of a historic municipal bankruptcy. During this time, the city also made important contributions to the arts, with Motown, the Broadside Press, the Detroit Institute of Art and two United States Poet Laureates – Robert Hayden and Philip Levine.
Born nearly a generation apart, these two men from different cultural backgrounds were influenced by their experiences in a way that is reflected in their poetry. Despite their differences – socio-economic, generational and cultural – the works of Hayden and Levine offer a unique look at the city which shaped them. Along with the explicitly autobiographical poems, their work can be examined in greater detail through an exploration of the ways in which each man wrote about the people and places around them. Through this context one can see how the traumas of his early childhood would play a part in Hayden's approach to writing about his family and his neighbors in Paradise Valley. Levine, on the other hand, often returns in his writing to the post-World War II factories in which he worked for several years. The differing approaches of both men to writing about the working class and underprivileged world they grew up in allows for a multifaceted analysis of their work. With Robert Hayden's folkloric approach to the characters and Philip Levine's mythologizing of the factories and city, the reader is given a full and engaging picture of Detroit. This offers a starting point for understanding and defining just what “Detroit Poetry” is.

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 initial phase of the movement. In 1933 and 1934, NOI members wrote a number of letters and editorials that were published in both Detroit and nationally-distributed African American newspapers. And, in the late summer of 1934, the group published its first periodical, the Final Call to Islam. Although for the most part, the content of these publications simply reflects the known ideology of the NOI of the early 1930s, this chapter will argue that these pieces add depth to our understanding and appreciation of both early NOI voices and of what was important for the movement at the time. For instance, in addition to promoting Fard's principal doctrines about the origins and destiny of African Americans, there is a strong emphasis on the current activities of Muslims around the world, which shows for us how much the early NOI identified with Muslims generally. We also see a stress on having a proper diet and good health, echoing Fard's ideas about " how to eat to live. " Perhaps the most valuable aspect about these publications, however, is that they give us a closer look at the leaders and followers of the early NOI. We see, for example, how precisely early NOI members—including Elijah Muhammad, who wrote several of the pieces that will be examined—interpreted and put in their own words Fard's teachings. This gives us a better glimpse at how NOI ideas were constructed and expressed by its African American members at the time. Most scholarship discussing early NOI discourse has not relied on pieces written by followers during this initial phase of the NOI—instead, there has been a reliance on the group's official teachings written by Fard, original NOI members' interviews and speeches that were often recorded many years after 1934, and early 1930s sensationalist newspaper reports about the NOI, which often contained quotes from members that might have been edited or taken out of context. A brief comparison will be made between these 1930s pieces and some 1950s NOI writings. Finally, these early publications also give us a few small, but reliable and important details about the group's structure and growth at the time.

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 politics and capitalist industry in the United States and Mexico. Her analysis falls short of recognizing the complexities that trouble the first-glance harmonious relationship between nature and technology and worker and manager.

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, Orientalism, and influences as diverse as occultism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, Anglo-Israelism, Judaism, and
Islam. The specter of African Americans adopting and using Orientalism puts a different twist on the concept.  The discourse of civilization was rarely simply rejected or resisted outright; rather it was recycled and reformulated. For at least some African Americans, adopting Orientalist identities could express anti-imperialist political sympathies, expand personal freedom, and even allow criticism of the West's conceit to be more civilized and technologically superior to the rest of the world.

Black Orientalists triangulated between dark and light by reaching outside of America, in an attempt to overcome American racism and criticize the dominant discourse of civilization.  The work shows that Harlem's networks of religious practitioners used religious, magical, and ideological systems to help create Black Israelism, Rastafarianism, Father Divine's movement, and some early forms of Black Islam. Orientalism is a construct that can help us to reconceptualize and reconnect many of the "Black Gods of the Metropolis."  Read in the larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the migration of rural
peoples into the quickened pace of Northern cities, this approach suggests that there was a rich substratum of working class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.  It challenges us to think of working class African Americans not merely as workers or migrants, but as organic intellectuals capable of voicing their own dreams, mysticism and religions that were articulate responses to the key concerns of the age.

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 curious transformation of this idea from the mid-20th century dissident outlook of Conceptual art where it served to a de-privilege the legacy of artist exceptionalism during a period of widespread social re-appraisal especially by disaffected young people, to the period of post-1968, the pessimism of the 1970s, followed by the rise of the neoliberal notion of creative worker where everyone was now supposed to work like an artist by "thinking outside the box"? This paper explores this question by focusing on the often agonizing self-critique of a small group of Marxian inspired artists in New York City who were determined to transform their practice into a form of cultural activism supportive of broader liberation struggles on the very cusp of the "free market" economic and ideological conversion of the 1980s.

"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, for example, the phrase was stenciled onto the sidewalk in front of the Jefferson Street subway station in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This same slogan has appeared on T-shirts and protest signs and has been incorporated into activism against gentrification in US urban centers from Brooklyn to Seattle. This comparison between gentrification and colonialism has been challenged by numerous Indigenous critics. In an online essay post reacting to such claims in the Northwest, Lakota writer Wakíƞyaƞ Waánataƞ (also known as Matt Remle) writes that gentrification "is absolutely horrible and is driven by classism and capitalism, and in many cases racism as well, and certainly needs to be addressed and fought against, but it is not colonialism." He adds, "no matter how expensive rents increased in their neighborhoods and no matter where in Seattle they may end up moving to, it was all Duwamish land." 1 Few conversations about gentrification in the United States wrestle seriously with either the land theft or genocide that undergirds the space of all US cities. Indeed, more often than not, the idea of colonization is evoked as a metaphor rather than a Jessi Quizar (Ch' orti' Maya) is an assistant professor in Ethnic Studies at Northern Arizona University and a parent of four. She researches racial struggles over urban space and grassroots communities' engagement with freedom dreams that envision futures that are decolonized, anti-racist, and other than capitalist.

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 is that Black dignity is (re)instilled through the reconstruction of Afrocentric identity and philosophy for the Black urbanite navigating the unresolved problem(s) of the color line. Pan African legacies in the African American encounter with the modern city erected the localization of "African Home," where the spiritual citizenship inhabited by Pan African architects generated an agency of self-determination in Black placemaking. In this way, Black placemaking "refers to the ways that Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction."

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 just-in-time inventories--and other elements of flexible production--were pioneered by the US auto industry in the first part of the 20th century; were the key elements in making Detroit the global capital of auto production, and were abandoned by Detroit just as Toyota was copying the system in Japan.

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 'Naming.'

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 existentially. As the film moves around an eerily post-apocalyptic Detroit, the straight line emmerges as the source of all that is monstrous, conducting its violence through the rigid geometries of inescapable architectures, infrastructures and lives.

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 University, Summer Semester 2019.

Course Description: The changing nicknames of Detroit illustrate its shifting fortunes in recent history. In the middle of the 20th century, Detroit was known as "Motor City" and "The City on the Move." It was the center of the US automobile industry, a bastion of labor unionism, and the home of working-class prosperity and social mobility. By the 1960s, times they were a-changin' as Bob Dylan famously put it. Detroit was transforming rapidly. Soon it became synonymous with decline, decay, and failure. When the city finally filed for bankruptcy in 2013, commentators were convinced that Detroit was "America's First Failed City." Yet lately, different nicknames have surfaced. In accordance with a recent economic and demographic upsurge, Detroit was crowned "The All-American Comeback City" and "The Most Exciting City in America." Detroit's trajectory throughout the second half of the 20th century into the first decades of the 21st has been modeled by profound changes in the economic and political order in the transatlantic realm. In this regard, Detroit is a "signature site" as historian Scott Kurashige put it. It is a place where processes and developments, which eventually shaped other places as well, had manifested much earlier and more severely. By studying the shifting fortunes of Detroit, and placing them in a transnational context, we can learn a lot about the recent transformations of transatlantic capitalism and how those transformations have affected the residents of Detroit, the US, and the transatlantic realm.

In the first part of this seminar, we will develop an understanding of the twists and turns in recent Detroit history and the history of transatlantic capitalism. We will study and discuss primary and secondary sources by historians, writers, political-economists, filmmakers, sociologists, and activists who have investigated these entangled histories through their very own respective lenses.

In the second part of this seminar, you will have the opportunity to explore various aspects connected to recent Detroit history and the history of transatlantic capitalism through an individual research project. This project might revolve around notions of politics, history or economics, but you could also bring in literature, popular culture or the arts as crucial media for making sense of Detroit's shifting fortunes, the transformations of transatlantic capitalism, and the economic, political, and social consequences of those transformations.

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 theatres and symphony halls, alluding to the time when Detroit was a wealthy cultural center. These images serve to showcase the city’s deterioration since its golden era. Without context, these images can feel make a viewer believe Detroit has been suddenly deserted. Many authors fixate on the cultural conditions that led to such deterioration, but less has been written regarding the pursuit of beauty captured in pictures of a young city in the throes of decline. What is the line between beauty and decay, so often blurred in the context of Detroit? I will examine Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's photographs to analyze the degeneration of “The Motor City” through a formal lens. Furthermore, I will scrutinize the aesthetic and psychological rationales behind these images, the sheer popularity of which attests to their proliferation as a uniquely morbid mass preoccupation. I reveal what lurks uncomfortably beneath the viewer’s pleasure when confronted with urban decay, as well as what particular images of abandonment can adroitly give rise to a mixture of guilt and captivation. It is my assertion that the United States, as a fledgling country without many ancient sites, has instead created an internal tourist industry off of its postmodern ruins, thus allowing citizens and foreigners alike the opportunity to witness true anachronisms. The remains of Detroit are a manufactured artificiality that were created before their time was meant to be over, and despite their oxymoronic existence within a city that still functions as a cultural hub for many, these abandoned spaces are seen as emblematic of beauty inherent in the loss of the American dream. The media attention and vast dissemination of these photographs have allowed the conflicts within these images to be seen and consumed widely, thereby creating a perpetual motion machine feeding gratification to urban explorers and aesthetic hedonists lusting after decay.

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" the postindustrial landscape. An image of care of single-family homes presents an invented morality-one which sets itself as distinct from another manufactured idiom: blight. This duality allows for processes of domestication to be defined, defended, policed, and politicized. Creative interventions on Detroit's built environment that appear to "domesticate" the postindustrial landscape become valorized by the state and its neoliberal partners (corporate business leaders, philanthropic foundations, and public-private partnerships), despite artists' intentions to subvert the power of such interests. So long as blight is conceived of and imagined as the absence of care, instead of being the end result of decisions made, laws passed, and policies enacted, the racial and economic segregation of the 20th century will continue to shape our urban spaces. So long as artistic and creative interventions are conscripted into this image of care as a domestication of blight, social and aesthetic innovators will be instrumentalized in market-driven regimes of value.

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 establishing food security—or their rights to have access to healthy food. The following chapter briefly introduces environmental justice and eco-racism in relationship to education and then addresses how when faced with such a challenge the radical activist educators in urban communities asked: How is it that such exploitation and systemic violence is rationalized, justified, and/or ignored and what could be done to resist such violence and engage youth in building healthy and autonomous communities? While often responses to address conditions faced by students, teachers, and families in urban educational settings include the intersections of race, class, and gender, examinations of urban education are rarely connected with the high levels of environmental racism experienced by urban communities. The story that follows in this chapter is a story about what happens when educators and activists in an urban community have had enough and take action to resist the poisoning and imprisonment of their community. As a result, an embedded story within this story of resistance, is a story of how schools—more specifically culturally-relevant urban education—can play a significant role in organizing food sovereignty as a key step toward, and facet of, autonomy and self reliance through access to healthy and culturally appropriate food that is produced by ecologically sustainable means as part of a local economy—in Detroit, Michigan.

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 radical and totally disenchanted bargaining strategy of the workers’ “rude pagan race” produced the finest capitalist technical response: the absolute industrial architecture of Albert Kahn.

His factories literally demonstrated how the opposition of the working class effectively generated the space of production and in which way all the peaks of strife, the “blood and fire” of the American labor history, have been translated into new rational configurations of the workshop layout and in more sophisticated strategies of social integration.

In order to understand the evolving logic of such a dialectics between struggle and development, architecture and revolution, there is nothing more revealing than retracing the evolution of the factory plan. For its intrinsic tendency to approximate the source of living labor, which was reduced by mass production to an abstract generic form - a labor “sans phrase” uniform in quality and only different in quantity - the industrial fixed capital progressively simplified towards its barest form of possibility: a “typical plan”, or a coherent, flexible and reproducible plan scheme, made of an homogeneous envelope, a technical core and a minimum of supports, able to make productive the human tacit potential by means of its calculated indeterminacy, suitable either to force the employees in rational choreographies or simply to let them free of “performing themselves”.

Following the path traced by Mario Tronti in his postscript to Workers and Capital, in which the straight political strategy of the American pre-union workers is elected as a model for the European working class movements in the 60s, a genealogy of the Albert Kahn’s industrial buildings would conceptually redefine the “typical plan” not as a mere default condition of the modern metropolis but rather as the true measure of its deepest principle of growth: the generic ability to produce proper of the human species-being.

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 expression of her soul, but accepts that approach to be non-paradig-matic. On a universal level, she sees the role of an artist as one of sharing: of ideas, a story, an aesthetic experience. Hence, the bridge analogy; one has to be willing to step on it and cross to the other side to see, to understand and to learn. As she puts it, " There is always something to learn, something to experience and, therefore, always something to express. " The inspiration to create art grows from her personal experience, and often originates from a basic fascination with color or form. From there, she believes that her role is to convey the personal experience in a meaningful and visually engaging way. Color and composition are crucial. While most of her art is figurative, her exploration of color-form potency occasionally results in abstraction. The effect can be seen in Humming-bird 5813 (2012) where the palette shifts, drawing the viewer from the sharp and bright upper left to the subtle pastel tones at the lower right, as if intimating the darting flight of a hummingbird. Even in her quick figure studies, she remains mindful of the composition: " I like to choreograph the viewer's eye—what is the first thing that you see and how does it make the eye travel? " Fascination with color underpins " Conversations with Color, " a recent series that depicts celebrities, but in a non-commercialized fashion. Rather, Morisseau attempts to convey in it the complexity of lives spent on the pedestal of publicity. The frequent juxtaposition of colors in the portraits, as if to contrast both the glamour

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 their political economic system, which they saw as forward-thinking in its promotion of free market capitalism, and the now vanquished southern system, which had been built on slavery. But this interest in legal race neutrality should not be mistaken for an effort to integrate northern African Americans into the state or society on an equal footing with whites. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African Americans into Northern cities after World War I, white northern leaders faced new challenges from both white and African American activists and were pushed to manage race relations in a more formalized and proactive manner.

The result was northern racial liberalism: the idea that all Americans, regardless of race, should be politically equal, but that the state cannot and indeed should not enforce racial equality by interfering with existing social or economic relations. In Managing Inequality, Karen R. Miller examines the formulation, uses, and growing political importance of northern racial liberalism in Detroit between the two World Wars. Miller argues that racial inequality was built into the liberal state at its inception, rather than produced by antagonists of liberalism. Managing Inequality shows that our current racial system—where race neutral language coincides with extreme racial inequalities that appear natural rather than political—has a history that is deeply embedded in contemporary governmental systems and political economies.