Textbooks and Teaching

"It Was As If We Were Never There": Recovering Detroit's Past for History and Theater

Charles Bright

This project began in a conversation about Sophocles' tragedy Philoctetes and the ancient Greek practice of combining the telling of history with the rituals of theater. It was designed to address two problems I had encountered in teaching a course on the history of Detroit.	1
First, although the city celebrated its three hundredth anniversary this year with the Detroit 300 festival, it is in most respects a twentieth-century boomtown. Much of its early history has been erased by the power and speed of its dynamic expansion in the first half of the century—and its equally dramatic contraction in the second half. The dominant historical discourse is one of rise and fall, spiked by an immense nostalgia for the city that once (briefly) was.1 The recent past is often deployed as a cautionary tale about what goes wrong with urban spaces when racism, white flight, and industrial evacuation undercut a city's viability.2 Such a historical construction places Detroit in a past that is now lost and irretrievable and leaves current residents, especially the African American descendants of those who came to the city during the Great Migration, dangling at the end of history with little hope and no agency. There is a strange disconnect between the history of the city and the people who live in it.	2
Second, although Detroit is only forty minutes' drive from the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan (UM), a wide chasm separates the average undergraduate from the people of the city. This is not only a racial and class divide, but a gap of purposes in which the large research university tends to treat Detroit as a resource or laboratory, extracting data in the production of knowledge while returning little to the city. Recently, spurred on by the commitment of Provost Nancy Cantor to make the university a "public good," the graduate and professional schools have tried to overcome this legacy and the distrust that goes with it.3 But little of the new orientation has reached undergraduates. Indeed, my own rather traditional way of teaching Detroit history seemed to reinforce distance: my students did history projects in the city, interviewing residents, poking around archives, looking into and at the city like spectators, and producing essays, term projects, and research papers that I read, graded, and filed away, lifting here and there a fact or a citation for my own use. But I was open to new possibilities when, in a conversation with my colleague at the Residential College Kate Mendeloff (who had extensive background in community-based theater), the idea arose to use oral histories as the basis for creating stage pieces. We then received strong institutional and funding support from Professor David Scobey, whose Arts of Citizenship program is mandated to build cultural links between the academy and the community.	. . .