Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani
Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great
Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four
locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating
these Depression-era "dumps," places that she claims contained and
reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern
America, Scandura introduces the concept of "depressive modernity,"
an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes
itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and
progressive modernity--capitalism, democracy, individualism,
secularism, utopian aspiration--are thrown into question.
Depressive modernity is modernity at a "standstill." Such a
modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is
constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory,
language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of
place.
An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of
1930s detritus--office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks,
ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated
stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore--"Down in the
Dumps" escorts its readers through Reno's divorce factory of the
1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly
dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West's multilingual salvage economy
and its status as the island that became the center of an
ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and
a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the
process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a
modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood,
Nathanael West's "dump of dreams," in which the introduction of
sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how
Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on
Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present,
exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11
America.
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