Access Type
Open Access Dissertation
Date of Award
January 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
First Advisor
Barrett Watten
Abstract
This dissertation establishes the single-family house and lot as a political economy of its own. This project maps a political economy of race and class by focusing on both literary representations of the single-family house and lot and this space and structure’s historical, geographical, and architectural significance in and around the city of Detroit. Focusing on Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), John Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971), Amy Haimerl’s Detroit Hustle: A Memoir of Love, Life & Home (2016), and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House (2015) this analysis illuminates the values that underly and permeate this space and structure and shape the social and political discourses by which it is penetrated, mediated, and determined. By doing so, this project maps a kind of genealogy of epistemologies of the home (Mezel and Briganti 837), beginning with the ways that men like Henry Ford and William J. Levitt worked to mold this space and structure into a sine qua non of American middle-class identity for working-class whites. Proceeding from the conception and spread of the modern institution of homeownership in the early twentieth century, and leading up to a pivotal point in the 1970s when the cracks began to show in the promise that was supposed to have been built into this institution for working-class whites, I illustrate how these cracks appeared along lines of class and race. By then focusing on divergent experiences of homeownership of lifelong Detroiters and “New Detroiters” in the “rebirth” narrative of Detroit in our current century, this historical trajectory sheds light on the easily missed historical connections between working-class whites who fought black encroachment in their white neighborhoods in the city earlier and a new generation of privileged white newcomers and gentrifiers moving to Detroit to be part of its touted “rebirth.” This history ultimately frames my concluding picture of the dispossession and displacement experienced by many of Detroit’s lifelong black residents, which I argue is built into this process of “rebirth,” and the importance of the right to return home.
Recommended Citation
Degregoris, Scott A., "Property Value(s): Race, Class, And Political Economy In Narratives Of The Single-Family House And Lot" (2025). Wayne State University Dissertations. 4276.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/4276