“The next city.” Detroit, a narrative investigation”, by Raphaëlle Guillée, Flammarion, “Terra incognita”, 320 p., €23, digital €16.
Capitalism is dead, long live capitalism! This could be the motto of Detroit (Michigan), a city in disaster, officially bankrupt in 2013 (with a debt of approximately 18 billion dollars), which is now experiencing a new beginning. “Investors defend the idea that this new wealth in certain neighborhoods will end up reaching impoverished areas”reports, without conviction, Raphaëlle Guillée in The next city. Based on a colossal corpus, made up of testimonies, documentaries, films, series, novels, essays… the academic, a specialist in comparative literature, analyzes the complexity of the stories generated by this post-bankruptcy “American Pompeii.” “Since the global crisis of 2008, the city has been a literary, cinematographic and photographic vein where lovers of disasters and metaphors converge”writes. And rightly so… It is at the same time a symbol of the decline of the American empire, of rebirth and of utopia.
It must be said that when it comes to calamities, the automobile capital of the world stands out, that of the 1913 Ford T, mass production and the high salaries of workers. The author reminds us how the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (Detroit. Vestiges of the American dreamSteidl, 2010), published in The World, The Country or the New York Timeshad revealed the state of desolation in which the Motor City found itself: a ruined and abandoned metropolis, where nature invaded houses, schools, theaters and other stores. Detroit, which was the fourth largest city in the United States in the 1950s, had lost two-thirds of its population following a process well known on the other side of the Atlantic: flight of wealthy white populations and factories to the suburbs, decline of tax revenues, closure of public services (schools, police, hospitals, etc.) and businesses, unemployment, water, electricity, public lighting cuts, evictions, violence, extreme poverty, etc.
Subsistence garden
“What are, for the inhabitants of Detroit, the painful vestiges of the economic crisis that they must live through becomes, in the beautiful books that decorate the coffee tables, a spectacle as shocking as it is exultant”laments Raphaëlle Guillée. Tourists, mainly white, now come from all over the world to witness firsthand the end of capitalism, even the end of the world, when the inhabitants – 80% African American – fight daily to survive. Hence the old vacant lands, with contaminated soils, transformed into subsistence gardens or even the appearance of urban farms.
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