Harrowed landscapes: white ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit and the cultivation of memory

Abstract

This article compares the ruins of Detroit and Namibia, focusing on the ways that previously dominant white groups use those ruins. In both cases ruined buildings appeal to these groups as particularly evocative objects. While the ruin seems always to signify transience, mortality and historicity, its more specific meanings are semantically underdetermined, varying by historical context and social group. Many white suburbanites use Detroit's industrial ruins to nourish their nostalgic longing for the city's golden era of Fordist prosperity. This does not seem to entail any confusion of past and present, however. The nostalgic object is unambiguously perceived as historical. By contrast, German‐Namibians use colonial ruins to satisfy and perpetuate a sense of melancholia that simultaneously denies and acknowledges the end of German colonial power. Both forms of consciousness prefer ruins that are gradually being reassimilated into nature to the restored heritage sites of the tourist industry.

Notes

1. In the regulation‐theoretical literature, the term ‘post‐Fordism’ is not just a chronological marker denoting systems that used to be Fordist but refers to a successor regime to Fordism. This new system is based on a flexible production process and information technologies, increased demand for differentiated services and niche‐market products, supply‐side forms of innovation, an increased role for credit and commercial capital and privatisation of the functions formerly fulfilled by the Keynesian welfare state (Jessop and Sum 2006, 76–82). Almost all of these features are missing or poorly represented in the city of Detroit. Another widely discussed characteristic of post‐Fordism, the geographic relocation of production to exurbs and central business districts, also points away from seeing Detroit as a post‐Fordist city, since the central business district there is partly abandoned (Figure 25) and economic growth is located almost exclusively outside the city. See Storper and Scott (1989); Hirsch (2006); and on Detroit's edge cities, Garreau (1991, ch. 4).

2. See also the website and publications of the late Klaus Dierks, especially http://www.klausdierks.com/.

3. The Detroit Ruins website is available at http://detroityes.com/maps/mapfulldetroit.htm.

4. The Arcadia website is available at http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/contact.html.

5. Some public radio and television documentaries, perhaps bowing to political pressure, force themselves to adopt a more boosterish ‘fall and rebirth’ narrative structure. See, for example, Michigan Public Radio's documentary ‘Ashes to Hope: Overcoming the Detroit Riots’, broadcast on 17 July 2007 (http://www.michiganradio.org/ashestohope.html). This Pollyannaish approach distracts from the gravity of Detroit's crisis. However well intentioned, it inevitably reflects a quarter century of right‐wing Republican domination of US politics in which poor people and poor cities were required to fend for themselves.

6. Detroit artist Kyong Park made a video in which images of the city's dereliction are accompanied by a voice‐over by a businessman‐like narrator:

Most of the buildings and houses have been burnt or demolished, and it won't take much more to ‘clear cut’ the rest of them. A tabula rasa has been created, so that we can take back the city dirt cheap. Using this plan, we have successfully tested new techniques of profitable land seizure, without resorting to the costly use of armed force. Hidden by countless layers of economic agreements and legal manipulations, we have written a new chapter of colonialism, with techniques deeply embedded in the automated global matrix of advanced capitalism. (Park 2000)

Park's video might be read as providinga reflexive analysis of the conspiracy theory, but in a presentation at the March 2005 conference ‘Ruins of Modernity’ at the University of Michigan, the artist expressed his personal belief in the existence of the 50‐year plan.

7. It is remarkable, for example, that the publisher Klaus Hess (based in Windhoek and Göttingen) offers reprints and colonial‐era memoirs (e.g. Ludwig Conradt's Erinnerungen aus zwanzigjährigem Händler‐ und Farmerleben in Deutsch‐Südwestafrika [originally published as a series of articles in the journal Deutsch‐Südwestafrikanische Zeitung in 1905 and 1906], Wilhelm H. Laakmann's Auf alten Spuren in Namibia. Die Erlebnisse des Frachtfahrers Richard Christel 1905–1907 und eigene Jagderinnerungen hüben wie drüben, and Gustav Frenssen's notorious novel about the Herero and Nama wars, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest). Similarly, the Namibia Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft sells a reprint of Theodor Leutwein's 1907 memoirs, Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch‐Südwestafrika.

8. It is also important to recognise that the category of ex‐Detroiters now included tens of thousands of African Americans who have moved to Macombe County north of Detroit or farther afield.

9. Stormfront is a ‘white nationalist’ Internet forum owned by Don Black, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who was a member of the American Nazi Party in the 1970s; see Abel (1998) and http://www.stormfront.org/.

10. Urban theorists have also shown how modes of regulation like Fordism have a specific spatial dimension and are linked to particular territories; see Storper and Scott (1989); Brenner (1998).

11. Nostalgic activities such as the non‐profit group currently restoring the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit therefore tend to bridge or efface class boundaries. The official Ford Motor Company presentation of the history of the River Rouge plant, as presented to participants in the Ford Rouge Factory Tour, emphasises that while Henry Ford himself opposed the UAW, that union was eventually fully integrated into the ‘great American production’ of ‘innovation in manufacturing’ (http://www.thehenryford.org/rouge/default.asp). What is essential about such statements, regardless of their accuracy, is the way they tap into and nourish neo‐corporatist public memories.

12. The one great exception to this, the Great Zimbabwe ruins, were from the moment of their rediscovery in 1871 by Carl Mauch – a German imbued with the specific German national culture of ruins – inscribed ‘with meanings that confirmed old beliefs’ (Shepherd 2002, 196–7) in a lost city of Africa, which in turn confirmed their singularity and led to the politicisation of the Great Zimbabwe site by post‐colonial nationalists (Mauch 1969; Hall 1995, 179).

13. Concern for the fate of ruins also emerged later in non‐European societies, as official nationalism began to call for markers of the nation's antiquity and as the needs of tourism grew (Johnson 1994). Thailand's government shifted to preserving ruins and supporting archaeological research in the second half of the nineteenth century (Peleggi 2002, 9, 13). Aztec and Mayan ruins only became objects of study, excavation and reconstruction in the nineteenth century, as Mexico emerged from colonial rule (Thomas 1999, 99, n. 5).

14. For example, ‘Pioneer Prospectors of the Sperrgebiet’, South West Africa Annual 4 (1948), 91; E. von Koenen, ‘Zessfontein’, South West Africa Annual 14 (1958), 71, 73.

15. ‘Swapo refuses to condemn Mugabe govt's rights abuses’, The Namibian, Thursday, 15 March 2007; Lindsay Dentlinger, ‘Land reform to move into higher gear’, The Namibian, 27 April 2006.

16. All of the forts and police stations built in Southwest Africa and in other German colonies in Africa during the 1890s had crenellated towers and walls (Schnee 1920, vol. 1, plates 13, 89; Peters 1981, 30, 56–61).

17. See http://www.klausdierks.com/images/Namibia_Erongo_Otjimbingwe_6.jpg.

18. For the Waterberg police station ruins, see http://www.sacktrick.com/igu/germancolonialuniforms/militaria/namibia.htm.

19. See http://www.paradisevalleyblues.com/tour/hastings0370.html. This was the heart of Detroit's black ghetto, which was demolished during the 1950s to create the expressway.

20. Although the 1945 plan for Detroit traffic had included rapid transit trains in depressed roadways between expressway lanes, the 1951 plan focused on expressways. Detroit, City Plan Commission (1951).

21. Two books that exude white suburban nostalgia for the old Tiger Stadium are by Detroit News (1999) and Betzold (1997). Like contemporary German‐Namibians, the author of the latter book acknowledges the fissure in public memory, gesturing toward African‐Americans' recollections of racial segregation in Detroit baseball.

22. This is not to say that the veneration of the rusting sites of working‐class solidarity and labour militancy is merely contemplative. Labour tours, for example, may serve to regenerate a culture of resistance in the present. But I have found no evidence of suburban labour unionists moving back into Detroit.

23. Self‐appointed guardians of the ruins defend them against invasion and are especially wary of the touristic suburban ruingazer. Russian photographer Boris Mikhailov and I were attacked by a posse of such guardians, who covered our parked car in garbage, while shooting pictures inside the abandoned Fisher Body 21 plant in March 2005.