‘Your Wilderness’

The White Possession of Detroit
in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

As an example of landscape representation, Jim Jarmush’s vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive is a process and a discourse that constructs Detroit as a landscape of monstrosity to mark its availability to settlers. Where scholars have understood the settler-colonial return to Detroit in terms of a black/white binary, I employ Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theoretical intervention into whiteness studies and Kyle Mays’s study of “Indigenous Detroit” to understand how the logic of white possession relies on a mythologized Indigenous past that also erases, denies or delegitimizes Indigenous people.

Published in Capitalism Nature Socialism; available through the CNS open access project.