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Reviews
“Dispossession is a key analytic for understanding Detroit. In The Detroit Genre, using cultural and literary analysis of comics, films, and literature from Post-Rebellion Detroit until after the 2013 Bankruptcy, Vincent Haddad’s work will forever change how we perceive the most misrepresented city in the U.S. Centering Black voices to show how they resist narratives of dispossession, this brilliantly written book comes at a perfect time so that we can have new ways to talk about Detroit’s history and future. It is a must read!”
- Kyle T. Mays, author of City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit
“This is a brilliant, compelling, and vitally important book. It combines careful and insightful readings of literary and cinematic works with a contextual understanding of the social and economic circumstances to which the works both refer and offer expression. It considers, not just the ideological underpinnings of the works being discussed, but also their affective and emotional registers, and the ways in which they manipulate diverse points of view (both of outside and suburban gazes upon Detroit, and those of the city’s actual residents)."
- Steven Shaviro, Author of Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality
Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the post-apocalyptic genre, the sci-fi dystopia, crime fiction, the superhero genre, and contemporary horror would not exist in the way they do today without the aesthetic material and racial history of Detroit. When DC Comics wanted to compete with Marvel and market “socially relevant” comics, especially ones dealing with issues of race, they swapped Gotham and Metropolis for Detroit. What about vampires concerned with de-industrialization, heritage conservation, and impending water wars? Must be Detroit. A story about a half-man, half-robot wrestling with what it means to be human by fighting crime? Improbably, Detroit has two.The Detroit Genre provides the first comprehensive literary and cultural investigation of the representations of Detroit in popular and literary culture.
The book first establishes the concept of the “Detroit genre” that emerged in late 1960s and traces the tropes of this white-centric narrative genre in popular culture, touching on key texts including Blue Collar, Robocop, The Crow, It Follows, and Barbarian. The second part shows how Black writers, including Alice Randall, adrienne maree brown, Stephen Mack Jones, and Angela Flournoy, reclaimed and revised the Detroit genre by un-fixing Detroit narratives of dispossession, criminality, and industrial and social failure through formal experimentations on genre itself.
Where Detroit has typically been painted in the news as one of three things—the center of the automotive industry; crime-ridden and in ruins; or as a “blank canvas” with limitless potential of entrepreneurship—Vincent Haddad shows that the Detroit genre in literature and film can be far more powerful than news media in narrating Black dispossession as a pragmatic, even liberal consensus. The texts studied here condition forgetfulness about Detroit’s history or expose it to a full reckoning, direct attention toward or away from the city’s agents of injustice, fetishize resilience or model resistance, and foreclose or imagine a future of Black liberation. Appealing to scholars of popular literature, media, race, and American studies, The Detroit Genre is an accessible and engaging study of the city’s influence on a wide array of genres in pop culture.
“In an astonishingly vast array of literature and media—from TV to film to music to comics—The Detroit Genre argues that white-centric visions of Detroit in permanent decline must be read alongside and in contradistinction to Black artistic reclamations of the city as a site of potential liberation. Haddad not only demonstrates why Detroit is a critical interlocutor in discourses about race, nation, and class in the U.S., but why it matters that we rethink the city and its meaning now.”
- Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies, University of North Texas
“Haddad's wide-ranging study examines Detroit's black culture and history of rebellion against white-centered representations of the city as a symbol of resilience, opportunity, and "comeback." This book provides timely research that convincingly posits Detroit as a genre and a space of black experimentation, creativity, and resistance.”
- Kevin D. Ball, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Wesleyan University