Professor Mike Dwyer of Arcadia University will discuss his new book, Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt.
What is the Rust Belt? This seemingly simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer. In response to the difficulty that scholars and commentators alike have faced in defining the term (is it a place? a historical period? an economic condition?), this presentation redirects our attention toward the ongoing cultural production of the idea of the Rust Belt through popular film and media.
Borrowing the concept of “landscape” from cultural geographers like Don Mitchell, Dwyer analyzes the way that Hollywood film in the 1980s trained Americans to see smokestacks and factories as symbols of inescapable toxicity and decay, rather than sites of ongoing struggle and negotiation involving actual human beings.