This dissertation provides a study of local Black media development in Detroit in the decade following the 1967 Rebellion, as Detroit became a majority Black city. I argue that Black Detroiters not only produced documentaries that challenged local white discourse within what George Lipsitz terms “a Black spatial imaginary,†but also developed media infrastructure to confront broader racialized systems of civic governance and community advocacy. Through production histories and discourse analyses of local documentary, I describe how Black media infrastructure was created in Detroit, and examine the local strategies designed to sustain it, despite ongoing depletion of opportunities for business development and economic advancement in the post-Rebellion city. I conceptualize Black media infrastructure as a networked system of economic, political, and cultural exchanges that undergird the operations of Black civic life and bind Black citizens together amidst deepening spatial and ideological divides. ', '\tWhile this period in Detroit history is largely associated with rising crime rates, economic recession, and accelerated architectural decline, I examine how Black citizens envisioned documentary as a platform to articulate the conditions of their own emplacement in the post-industrial city and produce content that countered the distorted representations of Black urban life found in mainstream fare. Local struggles to produce media emphasize the materiality of daily life, which contrasts sharply with the cautionary narrative of industrial decline that “Detroit†comes to signify for outsiders during this period. Thus, through archival research on documentaries produced by Black Detroiters, I argue that local documentary production and distribution historiography serves as a vital means to more deeply understand Black responses to political, spatial, and economic change in urban centers.

Last modified

• 10/21/2019

Creator

• Annie Laurie Sullivan

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tk3d-4g58

Subject

• Screen Cultures

Keyword

• film
• Detroit
• history
• television
• urbanism
• race

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation
• Dataset

Rights statement

• In Copyright