ASRC 3305 - Motor City Blues: Detroit, America’s Past, America’s Future?

(crosslisted)
(also ENGL 3653) (LA-AS)

Spring. 3 credits.

G. Farred.

Detroit, it seems, is inescapable these days. The city’s ubiquity extends from the 2008 economic crisis – the ways in which it devastated the last remnants of the car industry and reduced the Big Three’s executives to embaressed beggars made to drive to Washington, DC to secure a government bailout for the industry – to the Oscars – where a documentary about a Detroit musician won an award; from the latest financial crisis – the bankrupt city of Detroit was put under administration by the governor of Michigan – to horror stories about underfunded public education, fire department and corrupt police department; and, of course, the corruption that marks every level of political life in the Motor City. In fact, writing about the decay – the urban devastation, the ways in which large swathes of the city is returning to “native vegetation,” coyotes roaming the deserted downtown streets, a population that shrinks rapidly with every census, a city where more murders go unsolved than any other – has in itself become an industry. This course will examine this phenomenon through a series of readings, from first-person accounts to documentaries to a DVD about its dystopian present. Detroit, the destruction of a city that was once deemed the engine of America’s rise to global economic prominence. Now, with Detroit in danger of “disappearing” except as the beachhead of devastation, how are we to think the American condition? Is Detroit, a city marked for decades with white flight to the suburbs, riddled by crime, corruption and economic abandonment, the face of America’s future? Is Detroit the bookends of the American Century: a thriving symbol of its economic power and a stinging indictment of its economic and social malaise? A city condemned because it is abandoned by all but its poorest inhabitants, the vast majority of whom are black? Is Detroit the final American morality play, imploding right before our eyes?