Detroit: Race, Sound, and the American City

Undergraduate

Detroit is the most American of American cities — and the most contested. Once the ‘arsenal of democracy’ and capital of the automobile age, Detroit has also been a paradigm of racial capitalism’s contradictions: a city whose extraordinary cultural productivity emerged precisely from, and in response to, structural dispossession. This seminar takes Detroit seriously as a site of Black urban life, radical thought, and aesthetic invention, examining what the city’s cultural scenes tell us about the United States as a whole. Moving across multiple cultural domains — Motown and soul, punk and proto-punk, techno and Afrofuturism, hip-hop, visual art and muralism, ruin photography, and theater and opera — the seminar asks how artists, musicians, playwrights, and cultural workers have responded to deindustrialization, racial segregation, municipal crisis, and the aesthetics of ruins. We read structural accounts of Detroit’s history alongside primary cultural texts: albums, photographs, plays, manifestos, films, and memoirs. A recurring question across the semester is: who tells Detroit’s story, from what position, and to what ends? The seminar has a sustained engagement with performance studies: from Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Project trilogy, to regional Black Arts tradition, to Yuval Sharon’s innovation at the Detroit Opera, to techno and hip-hop as regional musical dance music cultures. Students find the seminar especially relevant to questions of community-based performance, the politics of space and sound, and documentary theater. HU W 1:30pm-3:25pm