Reimagining the Rust Belt: South Bend, Indiana, and The Citizen Project
Reimagining the Rust Belt:South Bend, Indiana, and The Citizen Project
Theatricality can be and has been regarded in a far more positive manner if we regard theater not … as a pale, inadequate, or artificially abstract copy of the life process but … as a heightened celebration of that process and its possibilities.
—Marvin Carlson, "The Resistance to Theatricality"
Introduction
In his seminal book American Vertigo, which retraces Tocqueville's journey across the United States, Bernard-Henri Lévy tries to explicate America's uncertainty and envision the nation's future. Lévy finds that the evolution of the nation's insecurity varies greatly from place to place. The distinctive history, diverse needs, and immediate concerns of distinct areas of the country often obscure Lévy's hunt for broader national ideals. The people he encounters closely identify with their cities, often displaying the local fervor and pride of ancient Spartans or Athenians. Like their predecessors, their collective attention and action is based around their homes, their local involvement, their "citizenship" as intimately tied to their cities. Although the term is no longer used that way, for many Americans, being a "citizen" is often enacted as it once was, based on the word's Latin etymology indicating a pronounced affiliation with one's city, one's small-scale community.
The city of South Bend, Indiana, has been included in Newsweek's list of America's "Dying Cities," as well as Money Under 30's "Best Cities in America for Young People to Get Rich." The Economist maligned it as a "company town without a company" yet praised the area for "reinvention in the rust belt" (V. v. B.). The crisis of identity inherent in these seemingly absurd inconsistencies was not only confusing to outsiders but to South Bend residents as well. Viewing itself as a city in crisis with pockets of hopeful development, defined the area's narrative and, therefore, limited local remedies available. As a city that had experienced numerous calamities, [End Page 21] often signaling the radical endangerment of its own existence, South Bend seemed paralyzed between two competing narratives—one of disintegration and one of incessant improvement. As anthropologist Joseph Masco contends, framing problems in this manner produces a tendency to "reject the power of human agency" and "allow everyday structural inequalities to remain unaddressed" (S66). Daily experiences in the city marked by complicated contours and nuances and the residue of its history, its people, their aspirations and their conflicts were often eclipsed by fears about the future or longings for the past. In this article I will describe and contextualize an artistic initiative undertaken in South Bend that directly addressed these issues. A critical look at that project's efforts to productively interrogate both crises and progress could serve as a model for reconsidering the role of artistic expression as collective action.
Context: South Bend and The Citizen Project
In the summer of 2016, musings about citizenship led me, Rami Sadek, and many others to create an original play known as The Citizen Project. It began in South Bend, Indiana, with a sprawling conversation about how being a "citizen" might once again be more passionately related to one's city than to one's nationality. My collaborator Sadek and I primed each other's curiosity about what it meant to come from a city or to choose to live in that city, or to identify with it and to let it identify you. Yet we knew our perspectives on this topic were atypical and limited, as both of us were transplants to the Midwest and, specifically, to South Bend. We were outsiders, yet we knew that there were significant links between the city and the greater Midwest, America in general, and global cities with parallel concerns. In what ways was South Bend microcosmic? We were interested in how the people around us—from this, a city that had seen its share of both noteworthy triumphs and severe hardships—might respond to our questions about citizenship and identification.
Rather than speak for the people of South Bend, we decided to ask them. We planned to interview locals to...
