The racialized discourse of Detroit redevelopment in four parts.

In chapter one, “Extreme Labor in a Bordertown: The Detroit Walking Man,” the Walking Man is a neoliberal discourse on citizenship and belonging in Detroit routed (invested) and rerouted (sustained) through Black labor, the counter to entrepreneurial (white) labor. Robertson’s story about extreme labor conditions is coopted by a neoliberal discourse merging individual hard work with political acquiescence. Media coverage and reader comments demonstrates the ways in which redevelopment discourses discipline Black labor in order to authorize privileged forms of white labor, more attractive to developers, employers, and the neoliberal city which thrive on creative, contract work. Yet, as I show, Black labor history demonstrates the precarity and extremity of Robertson’s situation runs consistent with a century of Black labor struggle in Detroit. Under neoliberalism, labor precarity moves from unsafe workplace conditions and job insecurity to unreliable transportation and improper personal attributes. Discipline takes place by bordering — flattening and fracturing —

subjects to prevent them from cohering as political subjects, which in the neoliberal city moves from the institution to public discourse. Therefore, I move into a border methodology to uncover the changing relations and multiple formations of identity that delimit boundaries of citizenship, belonging, and possession in Detroit. This close reading of Robertson’s case is an attempt to reveal the ways in which white citizens (i.e. the creative class) form their sense of belonging through individual acts of philanthropy. By establishing border theory as an analytic for understanding labor relations in Detroit, I set up the next chapter, where I interrogate popular and scholarly descriptions of Detroit as a settler colonial city — an “urban frontier,” where “urban pioneers” can rebuild the city, ostensibly bringing more jobs to town, while pursuing their own financial goals on cheap, empty land.[i]

In chapter two, “The White Possession of Detroit: Landscape and Place from Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive to the QLine Trolley,” I argue empire transits settler colonial ideology in Detroit through descriptions of Black Detroiters as “native Detroiters.” Where scholars understand 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 demonstrate the logic of white possession relies on a mythologized Indigenous past that continues to erase, deny or delegitimize Indigenous people. Thus, one goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the ways in which Indigeneity appears as an analytic in Detroit at the same time Indigenous viability is denied, even by scholars of Detroit. Deploying settler colonialism as an analytic for Black Detroiters means ignoring existing Indigenous claims to the region and accepting U.S. property law (a feature of white possession) as the basis of land tenure. It also negates the discursive role Black labor plays in redevelopment discourse, as discussed in the previous chapter. Searching for a rounder expression of settler colonialism in Detroit, I enter the argument through a vampire film by the auteur filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. While the film duplicates the image of Detroit as an “urban wilderness” for tourists and urban explorers, it does (however momentarily) recognize the futurity of Indigenous people. I understand Only Lovers Left Behind as an instance in which landscape representation, tourism, and land speculation collide and collude to suggest Detroit as not merely in need of saving from poor Black people, but more insidiously as a space reclaimed as white property through tourism and the settler colonial logic of prior white possession. OLLA suggests a Detroit in which Indigenous people do exist in the present, even if the film pushes them to the margins. Where OLLA demonstrates the degree to which tourism carries the urban frontier narrative into public discourse, I argue a new streetcar system on Woodward Avenue, the QLine, articulates settler ideology in the built environment of Detroit. By connecting the QLine to Only Lovers Left Alive, I bring broad discourses on white possession in Detroit to the ground, where the operate materially. In other words, the same discourses and rhetorics that make it possible to accept Jarmusch’s depiction of Detroit as a city for creative white entrepreneurs make it possible for us to understand the QLine as material evidence of growth and innovation. It is the literal, visual transit of settler colonial discourse in Detroit, carting tourists and tech entrepreneurs up and down the length of the Woodward Avenue redevelopment zone.

In chapter three, “Motor City Indigenismo: Diego Rivera and the Space of Whiteness,” I interrogate the Detroit Institute of Arts’s promotion of “industry and technology as the indigenous culture of Detroit” through Linda Downs’s reading of Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals. Scholars and critics have written at length about the representation of labor in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, much of it focusing on Rivera’s departure from the Mexican Communist Party. Interpreting the murals themselves, scholars disagree whether Rivera’s message was received by workers and whether it succeeded in subtly subverting the capitalist narrative of his employers. And while scholars have spilled much theory over Rivera’s use of indigenismo, the Mexican nationalist ideology, they have not analyzed Indigeneity in the murals, especially as it relates to labor, and the ways in which it continues to be relevant to the DIA today in its location on Woodward Avenue. Thus, I argue Rivera’s mythologized Indigenous laborer subsumes Asian and Black labor into a universal whiteness while eliding immigrant (especially Mexican) labor, actual Indigenous people, and Indigenous land tenure. I suggest the DIA remains invested in this process through overtly discriminatory depictions in the 2015 exhibition, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, which includes comments on the “war whoops of Native Americans” and “terrified settlers” as well as conflations of Indigenous people with industrial laborers, the degradation of Rivera’s labor utopia, and the elevation of creativity as a moral, even revolutionary ethic realized through business and industry. Pairing theory from critical indigenous studies, visual studies, and architecture with regional and labor histories of Detroit, I argue the DIA’s investment in Detroit Industry is an attempt to hold space for whiteness on Woodward Avenue in the midst of a neoliberal redevelopment scheme focused on attracting creative white labor. Thus, the phrase “industry and technology as the indigenous culture of Detroit” can be interpreted as “whiteness as the indigenous culture of Detroit.”

In chapter 4, “‘Throw in The Blankets and The Corn’: Unsettling Neotopia,” I understand redevelopment as a progress narrative that “colonizes the future” to secure the capitalist present.[ii] I read development on the former site of J.L. Hudson’s department store as the visuality of redevelopment/progress, Dan Gilbert’s vision for a neoliberal utopia, or “neotopia.”[iii] The Hudson Site is the metonymic part (the visual evidence) that describes and authorizes Gilbert’s larger vision for the city, thereby empowering him to determine what the city with look like, who will have access to it, and, more importantly, who will work in it.[iv] Going further, I draw from Sarah Keenan’s definition of “unsettled space” to describe ways in which the utopic progress narrative depends on regular renewal and redevelopment to establish the impression of permanence. To “unsettle” the space of white possession, I discuss an attempt by several Michigan tribes to open casinos in the city. While anti-Indian sentiment and white possessive logic undermined those efforts, Indian casinos suggested an alternative to neoliberal, capitalist development models. Indian casinos create support networks for tribes and have economically benefited neighboring communities. Indigenous claims to the original Hudson building demonstrates the space is not fixed, even if it’s rebuilt with capitalistic intentions, so Indigenous people and other Detroit residents are free to imagine other uses for the Hudson Site.

In the conclusion, “Off-Site Countervisuality: Emergency Management and Emergent Indigenous Praxis in Southwest Detroit,” I go “off-site” in order to describe an instance in which emergency management instigated the rise of Indigenous resistance in the city along with coalitional efforts to reject any redevelopment plan designed to eliminate or exclude Detroit’s many residents and workers of color. This chapter provides a more detailed history of emergency management in Detroit in order to demonstrate the ways in which Detroit residents repeatedly showed up (i.e. emerged) to oppose it. I read the correlation between emergency and emergence as a contest for space that takes place through and as visual discourse. The emergency regime understands controlling the city means controlling its image. Using Nicholas Mirzoeff’s counter-history of visuality as a frame, I argue while the emergency regime claims the right to envision a Detroit absent people of color, the Raiz Up and other activist/artist groups create a field of appearance through cultural production and a form of appearance called “snatching the mic.”

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[i] Safranksy, “Greening the Urban Frontier,” 237-248.

[ii] Fredric Jameson, 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 211, 228.

[iii] Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, xv.

[iv] Ibid.