MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In recent years, Chrysler has developed Super Bowl commercials that sell “Detroit” as a brand. In their 2011 advertisement, for example, rapper Eminem drives past the city’s iconic buildings then, against the backdrop of an all Black Gospel choir, Eminem announces that “this is the Motor City, and this is what we do.” The commercial cuts to black with the simple tagline embossed in white block letters: Imported from Detroit. Perhaps the intention of the campaign is to pair the perceived quality and luxury of foreign-made vehicles with their domestically made counterparts. However, an alternative reading is equally true: the ad campaign renders Detroit foreign to the properly “American” nation, even if intimately so. Detroit is at one and the same time a perfect representation of the United States of America as a geopolitical state and a complete aberration of “America” as an ideological and mythic structure. Something of a resident alien, an illegal immigrant, a municipality integrally part of yet separate from the state it calls home. In this paper, I focus on advertisements to explore the various positionalities Detroit, and the Rust Belt more broadly, has assumed: simultaneously excised from the national imaginary and reintegrated as the keystone of American nationalism. I argue that these competing and often oppositional narratives suggest that the Rust Belt has emerged in the popular imagination as something that must be dealt with, but how to deal with it is left unresolved, precisely because the future to which such representations belong is so uncertain. The claims made on the Rust Belt in the present are mainly claims made about the future of American national identity.