Theater and Human Flourishing by Harvey Young

Author:Harvey Young
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Teaching Theater and Detroit History for Undergraduates to Flourish

Lisa L. Biggs

I moved to Michigan in 2013 to teach theater and performance studies at Michigan State University (MSU) in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH). I grew up in Chicago, just about two hundred miles from campus, but knew little about the state. As I unpacked, I began teaching myself Michigan history. I was struck early on by the 1967 Detroit rebellion,1 the fiftieth anniversary of which loomed on the horizon. As I got acquainted with my MSU colleagues, I engaged them in conversations about Detroit and slowly realized that many Michiganders were reluctant to discuss the unrest for varying reasons. Many white people who lived in and around East Lansing, the state’s capital, about eighty miles from Detroit and home to MSU, believed that Black Detroiters had been responsible for the 1967 “riot” and that they were to blame for the city’s failure to recover. They attributed Detroit’s ongoing decline to the presence of uncaring, immoral, and simply criminally minded “Blacks” who they believed had “burned the city down for no [good] reason” and continued to make life there unbearable. African American, Latinx, and Native/Indigenous people, in contrast, generally cited decades of systemic racism and capitalist economic exploitation as the root causes of the “rebellion.” Detroit, they argued, had not recovered due to the economic and political decisions taken by local corporate leaders and politicians. While battered, they believed, it was still a vibrant, culturally rich, if somewhat sketchy place to live and work.2

Since the Detroit rebellion/riot/disturbance/civil unrest began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, the city has become emblematic of a certain narrative about American urban decline. Dance and performance studies scholar Judith Hamera, herself a former Detroiter, finds that the city stands as an exemplar of popular declensionist narratives that attribute the loss of people, jobs, homes, schools, and other vital infrastructure to ill-conceived African American civil rights organizing (2). The most popular myth asserts that a group of angry militant Negroes burned the city down for no reason and that Detroit has been a mess ever since. Like other urbicidal narratives, it attributes decades of high un- and underemployment, poor housing, struggling schools, crime, ineffective governance, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate healthcare systems, and myriad other social problems to the presence of low-income African Americans and other people of color (McKittrick 251). The city that birthed the American automotive industry, armed the nation to fight World War II, and gave life to Motown is now fundamentally unsafe and in need of stringent antipoor, anti-immigrant, anti-Black public polices backed by aggressive policing. I spoke with many Michiganders, including many African Americans, for whom, some fifty years later, the ’67 Detroit unrest still evoked deep feelings of outrage, confusion, and shame.

Though often overlooked in discourses about human flourishing, the arts and humanities, theater and performance studies in particular, have a significant role to play in promoting and sustaining wellness. Plays are fundamentally about human life and relationships, and the best theater engages us in discourses about well-being.

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