Living Detroit (on the edge of disorder): Time and space in the twentieth century.

Abstract

In the United States, cultural studies has been limited in the way in which it has thus far informed rhetorical studies. The failure of cultural studies to play a greater role in informing the study of rhetoric is a result both of the prevalence of classical rhetorical theory in contemporary rhetoric and of a postmodern appropriation of cultural studies that attenuates this field of scholarship. Theologian and cultural critic Cornel West has emerged at this time as a key spokesperson on the subject of race and on the subject of American culture in general. I identify West as a postmodern pragmatist, a characterization which points to the new grounds for his rhetoric. In Part One of my dissertation, I make use of West's writings on race in order to problematize the time and space from which his rhetoric moves, as well as to illustrate what I believe to be a dominant postmodern time/space. In Part Two of the dissertation, a migration narrative of my family's movement from rural Mississippi to urban Detroit in the Forties is offered. The narrative, which came together as a result both of my own childhood memories of stories told by my father and his siblings and of interviews, is used to describe these migrants' senses of time and space, suggestive of the orientation of migrants and suggestive also of the industrial and post-industrial milieu. The dissertation concludes that due to a religious-cultural disposition of the migrants (an other-worldliness or suffering disposition), they have transcended time and space even while their bodies have been systematically located within the city due to racist practices in housing. The transcendent orientation informs, nevertheless, not only the migrant's sense of time and space but the production of rhetoric in agreement with postmodern models produced by West and others.