by John G. Rodwan
Provincialism is not the exclusive preserve of the provinces. Major cities can exhibit it just as much as comparatively minor ones. But what of the provincialism of the formerly major city reduced to lesser status, like Detroit? Perhaps it becomes the most provincial of all.
I don’t mean this as a dig at my hometown. Still, a city can’t go from a population of 1.85 million in 1950 to less than 700,000 – that is, less than 40 percent of what it had been – 65 years later, without a category reassignment. From being the quintessential industrial powerhouse and the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II, it turned into a city that declared bankruptcy in 2013 and had to scramble to find the funds to tear down the tens of thousands of buildings abandoned by residents in exodus.
It would be a mistake to try to make a single place within the city representative of its fall from the pinnacle of urban accomplishment to the nadir of municipal collapse, but one building did take on special symbolism (at least for those of us who remember it). With J.L. Hudson Company, in a 25-story tower on Woodward Avenue in the center of the city’s business district, Detroit once could boast of having the world’s tallest department store. In 1983, more than a century after the Hudson Company was founded, its flagship downtown store closed. While the demise of the once-grand retailer can be attributed to various developments not unique to Detroit, such as the rising of suburbs, the paving of expressways to them, and the construction of shopping malls surrounded by ample parking in them, there’s a uniquely Detroit aspect to the afterlife of this particular purveyor of clothing and other goods. The empty shell that housed it wasn’t imploded until 1998. While Detroit had plenty of empty, crumbling buildings (some of them even larger) before Hudson’s closed, and blight and abandonment metastasized afterward, the site assumed especially poignancy. During the decade and a half of its vacancy, the structure served as a reminder of former glory and, for some, fed unrealized fantasies of reuse, if not rebirth. Whether those who looked upon it longed for what once was or what they wished could be again, the empty building in the heart of the city was a regular, ragged reminder of all that Detroit wasn’t anymore.
No matter how one looks at it, Detroit is not what it used to be. It certainly wasn’t number-one with respect to anything to instill pride (unless, I suppose, one resorts to the success of some of its sports franchises). The quantitative and qualitative shifts that characterize Detroit affect how its residents look at the city in relation to the rest of the country and the world. If Detroiters became somewhat defensive and more than a tad provincial in outlook, who can blame them?
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Novelist and essayist Milan Kundera, who was born in Czechoslovakia and began writing in Czech but moved to France and switched to writing in French, experienced and described what he says are two types of provincialism, that of small nations and that of large ones. In either case, his definition of provincialism is the same: “the inability (or refusal) to see one’s own culture in the large context” (emphasis his). Kundera’s primary concern with respect to the provincialism of large and small nations is literature. “The large nations resist the Goethean idea of ‘world literature,’” he writes in The Curtain, “because their own literature seems to them sufficiently rich that they need to take no interest in what people write elsewhere.” In contrast, according to Kundera, small nations’ reticence toward what he calls the large context comes about for the opposite reason: “they hold world culture in high esteem but feel it to be something alien, a sky above their heads, distant, inaccessible, an ideal with little connection to their national literature.” In simplest terms, large nations feel superior and small ones inferior.
For large nations, in Kundera’s view, provincialism produces the paradox of failing to perceive the value of artistic achievements as the result of evaluating them “from the viewpoint of the small context, even if it be the prideful small context of a large nation.” He cites as an illustrative example a poll of French intellectuals in which the importance of writers such as Rabelais (a lodestar for Kundera) is astonishingly underestimated, which presumably would not happen among those with eyes out for the non-provincial large context of world, rather than national, literature.
For small nations, Kundera sees more dire consequences. “The small nation inculcates in its writers the conviction that he belongs to that place alone. To set his gaze beyond the boundary of the homeland, to join his colleagues in the supranational territory of art, is considered pretentious, disdainful of his own people.” Declare your allegiance, and represent. Kundera continues: “And since the small nations are often going through situations in which their survival is at stake, they readily manage to present their attitude as morally justified.” Ultimately, Kundera warns, such an inward focus reduces “the whole meaning of a work to the role it plays in the homeland.”
While Kundera may concentrate on national versus world literature, his argument applies to various types of artistic activity and the dynamics he describes can be seen at work at the city level as well as the national level. Thus, there’s the provincialism of larger cities and the provincialism of smaller cities.
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Around the time of the city’s bankruptcy, T-shirts bearing the slogan “Detroit vs. Everybody” became common sights around town. Whether that sentiment is taken as assertive pride or a perhaps inadvertent admission of beleaguerment, it wouldn’t resonate with, say, New York City substituted for Detroit. New York wouldn’t recognize any legitimate challengers to its position or feel the need to compare itself with other cities. When I lived in New York, I met plenty of people who knew without a scintilla of doubt that their city was supreme – the type of people who would have considered the middle parts of the United States as “flyover country” even if they saw no reason to fly over them. If you have the best museums, the best theater, the best restaurants, the best concert halls, the best this, and the best that, why would you ever go to the west coast, let alone the Midwest – or anywhere else (other than, perhaps, other first-class cities like Paris or London)?
I suspect that what could be called the prideful small context of the large city causes many a New Yorker to inflate the significance of certain New York artists and slight those active in lesser places. When your city – or even your neighborhood – houses writers regularly reviewed in the New York Times, musicians routinely written about in the New York Times, artists whose shows get listed in the New Yorker, actors profiled in New York, you just might assume you reside in the center of the cultural universe. It’s not that New Yorkers take special pride in influential artists’ connections to the city; rather, it’s that they’d assume artists prominent in New York automatically mattered everywhere, which, in a certain way, they do, since papers like the New York Times and other media based in the city have a national influence that publications like the Detroit Free Press, frankly, do not. Still, when I lived there, I remember conversations in which certain artists were regarded as both pioneers and preeminent leaders in their fields in ways that felt absolutely false to me. Just because they were a big deal in New York, I tried to explain, didn’t mean they were the trailblazers, the key figures, the originators, overall. Didn’t matter. History is written by the big-city provincials. Those of us outside of the metropolitan center can only think of our big-city brethren, “Man, there’s so much you just don’t know.”
At the same time, this strain of provincialism meant New York artists didn’t feel threatened by the arrival of those from other places, which I have observed happening in Detroit. Indeed, many figures who came to be regarded as quintessentially New York artists actually grew up elsewhere. In Detroit, in contrast, artists coming from elsewhere, whether temporarily or permanently, can become causes for concern. Will they take attention (and maybe grant money too) away from already existing local artists? Will newcomers overshadow those who’d been living and working in the city all their lives? Will the realization that cheaper studio space can be found in Detroit’s old school buildings and former factories than anywhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn attract still more interlopers who might steal whatever bit of spotlight might shine on the city’s art scene? Regardless of the obvious provincialism of this unconcealed wariness of outsiders, the Detroiters who display it believe it is morally justified, presumably because they don’t feel confident confronting the challenge artists from bigger cities evidently pose. They don’t assume artists prominent in Detroit (with the exception of some musicians) automatically matter everywhere.
Consequently, Detroit-style provincialism sees the formation of art scenes as support groups. Detroit artists belong to Detroit, and they look out for each other. So the same artists’ works will be shown together, over and over, in cooperative gallery after cooperative gallery. Frequently, the city itself serves as the subject: photographs and paintings of Detroiters and Detroit buildings, sculptures and installations constructed from recognizably Detroit detritus, plays sets in the city, songs and poems about living in the city (and essays about the place, too). Is any of it good? Sure, some if it is, but it’s all very Detroit, and damn it that’s enough. No need to look beyond its borders, or be so pretentious as to critique or compare. Remember, it’s Detroit against the world. Take your side. Show your support. (Detroiters do take special pride in influential artists’ connections to the city.)
Along with concentration on the small context comes a kind of conservatism. This is not to say that Detroit artists, musicians, and writers don’t experiment or try new things in their work. They do, some of them remarkably well. Rather, perhaps because they feel their circumstances to be precarious, because they feel their survival is at stake, they resist alterations in their surroundings. Around the same time as the bankruptcy proceedings, some moneyed types concluded that downtown Detroit represented an area ripe for redevelopment and a worthwhile investment. Apartment buildings not far from where Hudson’s once stood and where some artists lived and worked were purchased and rehabilitated, forcing tenants who couldn’t afford higher rents to move. Predictably, outrage ensued in certain quarters. Apparently, to some, having artists live in ill-maintained and unsafe buildings was preferable to, well, any other scenario. Better that artists remain in their hovels than that the city start, once again, to attract residents who actually want decent places to live. Perhaps, given where they are and have been, that to which they’d become accustomed was all Detroit artists came to believe they deserved, or all they could imagine.
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Add to the provincialism observable in any smaller city Detroit’s awareness of lost major-city standing. It can only intensify the sense of inferiority. The city not only can’t hold its own against world-class cities; it even flounders in comparison with itself. Sure, Detroit never stopped making great music, but it couldn’t again seize the prestige lost when Motown moved away.
Yet, much like provincialism itself, such lamentation for better times is selective in what it sees. Provincialism turns away from the larger context; nostalgia ignores at least as much as it adores. When Detroit was an expanding economic marvel, it was also a rigidly segregated city, with restrictive housing covenants enforcing separation of black and white residents. There was even a wall built in the northwestern part of the city to divide an all-white neighborhood from areas where black Detroiters began buying houses. Into the 1960s, when Hudson’s was thriving, the store had no black employees.
Those were the days? I don’t think so.
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I, for one, was glad when Hudson’s came down. Regardless of whether the historic building feasibly could have been salvaged – something of which I am generally in favor – it seemed like the city needed to get over and get past what the tower came to signify.
I was also glad when I learned of plans taking shape for something other than an underground parking structure to finally take its place.
Something needed to take its place.
John G. Rodwan, Jr., author of the essay collections “Holidays and Other Disasters” (Humanist Press, 2013) and “Fighters & Writers” (Mongrel Empire Press, 2010) as well as the chapbook “Christmas Things” (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2011), lives in Detroit, Michigan.