(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit

This webpage is a companion to my dissertation project, “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit.” It contains many of the raw materials informing the historiography and analysis: photographs, maps, quotations, source links, and a complete bibliography. I’m making it available as a resource for further research and discussion on settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and border imperialism in Detroit. Please feel free to contact me to talk or to access materials I’m unable to post here because of copyright restrictions.

The project itself examines the relationality of dispossession, racialization, and migration in Detroit, connecting the neoliberal rationality of (re)development to its foundations in Indigenous dispossession and racial capital. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” understands Detroit as a bordertown, where “the border” is the organizing structure and condition for the operation of settler colonialism in Detroit. From the international boundary to the county line, the border is the on-the-ground, everyday method for controlling space, disciplining populations, and limiting mobility for racialized subjects. To examine possession and belonging in a Black city on an international border, this project introduces “(sīˈtĭng)” — a methodology for locating (siting), seeing (sighting), and discussing (citing) dispossession as a social process and discourse produced and reproduced in the built environment through news reports, maps, plans, statements, advertisements, murals, graffiti, landscape, and architecture. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” cites the sites and sights of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue to halt the dispossessive logics of renewal and redevelopment. Then, it goes “off-site” to unsettle them.