Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post‐bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process of business and investment descending upon the city. In spite of this narrative, Detroit today remains a city of intense poverty and inequality. Between 2009 and 2013, an estimated 39 percent of Detroit residents were living below the Federal Poverty Line. This figure renders Detroit as statistically the poorest city in the country. In addition to a mythical narrative of rapid‐fire investment, popular media representations of Detroit are peppered with racialized references to white business investment. These references position whiteness as “saving” Detroit and center whiteness in the urban process. This racialized narrative is false and divisive in a city that is upwards of 83 percent African American. In this paper, we map the disparity between the racial politics of Detroit and the anti‐black public discourse narrative currently surrounding the city. We demonstrate that the public discourse valorization of a profit‐driven urban process results in an anti‐black prioritization of whiteness in Detroit's post‐bankruptcy redevelopment process. This narrative, if unchecked, will have serious consequences in the city's present and future. As such, we propose a re‐centering of the blackness of the city and the racial politics of generations that have shaped current conditions, toward a more equitable recovery process.
African Americans have been integral in shaping the aesthetics of modernity generally, and with respect to dance in particular. Through labor, art, cultural technology, and social life, African American aesthetics have breathed life into modern and contemporary American culture. The stress and fatigue of machines, labor, capitalism, and racism, imposed on bodies during the industrial revolution and in the post-industrial era have provided raw material for black artistic expressions during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Furthermore, this artistic expression, fueled by the angst of changing times generally and tensions facing African Americans in particular, has served as American catharsis through the creation of innovative cultural expressions. This article analyzes the dialectical relationships of industrialization, racism, and modern aesthetics, through the lens of the innovative African American social dance form, the Lindy Hop; and the virtuosic pop performances of Michael Jackson. The important contributions of the Lindy Hop as a dance style and Michael Jackson as a performer have had a profound impact on the aesthetics of modernity in American social and popular concert dance. To better understand the relationship between industrialization and the African American shaping of aesthetics of modernity, this article analyzes black experiences and embodiment of industrial labor and the ways that African Americans drew from their particular experiences of industrial labor toward the creation of critical cultural technology.The Negroes of the USA have breathed into jazz the song, the rhythm, and the sound of machines. -Le CorbusierMichael Jackson both incarnates and transcends the trope of the human motor, combining the virtuoso's seemingly mechanical exactitude with suprahuman charisma.-Judith Hamera
This article pursues an African American feminist critical geographic approach in locating experiential geographies that help shape people's perceptions of city life. I center the culturally symbolic site of Detroit bus stops as point of ethnographic departure. With my choreography as strategy approach to ethnography, I hang out at the site of the bus stop itself, finding perceptions of city life are shaped by people's subjective‐geographic understandings, and reflect the paradox of place. In other words, people's perceptions exist both within and beyond built environment and prefigured assumptions of group membership. However, the philosophical, the choreographic, and the paradox do not substitute for historical‐materialist, political economic analysis. Rather, I suggest that people's subjectivities and philosophical stances be considered alongside the political economic in an anthropology of cities. Demonstrative of such an approach, I offer several ethnographic sketches and some of the nuances that emerge as I wander bus stops in Detroit. Ultimately, I argue for an approach to urban anthropological research that prioritizes people's complex subjectivities alongside onto‐historical context.
The public video project The Public Library includes the performance of writing field notes and of choreographed dance sequences — which together serve as an ethnographic prompt for discussions about city life in northwestern Canada. The growing presence of crystal methamphetamine in sidewalk life and in the lives of First Nations persons is part of the discussion.
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