Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier

Though Detroit was once the iconic “Worst City of America”, since 2009 Americans have started to celebrate the possibility of the city’s resurgence. Beautiful Wasteland by Rebecca Kinney seeks to understand this cultural shift that has happened over less than a decade – from seeing Detroit as a postindustrial wasteland to a postindustrial frontier and a place of potential and possibility. Crucially woven into this analysis is Kinney’s sensitivity to the persistence of race in narrative tropes, and the significance of what is unsaid and what is forgotten, as much as what is said and remembered.

Kinney writes against the backdrop of America’s worst economic depression in 80 years and a particularly dark time in Detroit’s economic history. Although not adhering to these simple pronouncements of rise, fall and rise again, her central point of analysis is popular narratives of Detroit’s exodus, ruin, rebirth, possibility and rise. She selects five different types of everyday exchanges to analyse: photographs, internet discussion forums, a commercial, documentary films, and news media.

One of Kinney’s main goals is to show that new narratives of Detroit as a beautiful wasteland – an empty space full of potential – in fact blankets contemporary narratives of Detroit that are deeply steeped in racial conceptions of place (page xxi). For example, the dominant narrative of Detroit’s rise “is frequently told as a story not about race”; however, it represents the return of white people and the seeming disappearance of black people. Similarly, “the story of Detroit’s decline…is frequently told as a story of the destruction wrought by black integration of the city” (page xxi). Kinney therefore questions the success of a future rise if these racial issues are overlooked.

The portrayal of Detroit as a postindustrial frontier also harkens back to the American Western frontier. Kinney highlights that a frontier represents a place to stake claims and maybe realize success – and perhaps, more importantly, a place to locate dreams (page xix). Detroit has been a significant frontier in the past, first geographically and then ideologically, and now it represents a new frontier and links the American story to urban crisis. But Kinney is concerned that these neoliberal undercurrents, carrying on the ideology of the American Dream, have strong notions of individual effort and self-determination and perpetuate the myth of individualism. Kinney aims to overcome this myth to recognize the vast, though often unseen, actions of capital that lead to success (page xx).

This book is likely to be fascinating reading for students and academics of cultural studies, urban studies, or related topics, who are interested in the role of cultural narratives in urban development, in particular the intersection with race and capital.

Book note prepared by Hannah Keren Lee