Your Wilderness
The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch'sOnly Lovers Left Alive
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5074466 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthew J Irwin (American Studies, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 78-95 |
| Publication date | 2017-10-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Capitalism Nature Socialism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1045-5752 • E-ISSN: 1548-3290 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10455752.2016.1260614 |
| OpenAlex | W2559672944 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 14 |
After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form
Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Convict · Criminology · Frontier · Ideology · Indigenous · Literature · Political science · Politics · Possession (linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Racism · Sociology · The Imaginary · Vampire · White (mutation · White privilege · White supremacy · Zombie · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law
Landscape and ideology
The White Possessive
Uneven Development
The fatal environment
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture
Stuart Hall
The potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the resilience building of cities
Class/racial conflict, intolerance, and distortions in urban form
Ghosts, Devils, and the Undead City
White
Greening the urban frontier
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2018 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |