Jason Young and John Hartigan, speakers of the "Talking Books, Talking Detroit" event sponsored by the American Studies Program, implicitly addressed these questions in their two separate talks. The talks, offering brief introductions to their respective books, both focused on exploring and understanding aspects of Detroit.

The physical Detroit, its materiality and spatiality, was discussed by the first speaker, Jason Young, an architect and Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Young provided the audience with a sneak preview of his forthcoming book, Stalking Detroit (ACTAR Press), a co-edited anthology of essays offering a "thick description" of Detroit. Using slides to illustrate his points, Young challenged the audience to reconsider how Detroit is defined as an urban environment. Starting with figure ground drawings that demonstrate how the Detroit is increasingly characterized by empty space and abandoned buildings, Young noted many people casually equate the terms urban and city. He went on to provocatively ask, "What if the city is just one of the many faces of urbanism?" Young suggested defining Detroit using those qualities people associate with cities (high densities of people, congestion, limited areas of green space) interferes with actually seeing Detroit as an urban environment. Once the notion of what Detroit is or should look like becomes fixed, Young claims, what Detroit does look like becomes obscured. Young's talk then asked the audience to re-examine Detroit by re-examining urbanism in order to see "what works" in Detroit.

The more interesting it [Detroit] got, the less it looked like a city...those two things worked with one another." --Jason Young

What works? A brief list includes: 1) The Woodward plan of 1807, with its decentralized plan and radial nature; 2) the Detroit People Mover, not as public transportation but as an ever-present concrete horizon and operating as a Detroit marker; 3) the Michigan Theater and its conversion to a parking garage, because of its pragmatism and as an icon of the material reality of Detroit in the 1990s; 4) the Heidelberg Project, with the Heidelberg artist Tyree Guyton's reappropriation of space and accompanying commentary; and 5) the Hotel Parking Lot Coin Boxes near the Fox Theater, for bringing undefined spaces into relationship with the rest of the city. What works for Young, in essence, are those spaces that expose Detroit as a unique urban environment and which are interesting on many levels, not to be viewed simply as problems needing solutions. Overall, Young's talk, with its juxtaposition of images, emphasized how Detroit engages in a complex relationship with itself and its image.

In his ethnographic account of whites in three areas of Detroit--Briggs, Corktown, and Warrendale--John Hartigan, author of Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, 1999), also explored some of the complex relationships found in Detroit. Three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs--offer an examination of how whites identify themselves in Detroit and how whiteness operates a source of tension. His talk complicated commonly-held assumptions about race and class in Detroit by noting that whiteness and the privileges associated with whiteness require forms of material support that have gradually deteriorated in Detroit.

"I use these stories to convey a sense about how the infrastructure of whiteness shifts." --John Hartigan

Hartigan examined the names whites in Detroit use to make distinctions among themselves, referring to these distinctions as their rhetorical identities. His anecdotes about Briggs centered on the rhetoric of "hillbilly," which operates both as a derogatory class marker and as a form of self-identification. Corktown residents used the term "gentrifier" as a distancing term to label other whites as young professionals who have no investment in the neighborhood. In Warrendale, a debate about the operation and curriculum of a community school was played out among whites through the word "racist" and the fear of being viewed as such. Hartigan's examples emphasized that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters.

The discussions following their two talks, a lively question-and-answer period and an informal reception, suggest that many audience members agree with the speakers' assessments of Detroit as a fertile site for interdisciplinary investigation.