Joseph Donica

The Bronx Isn't Burning, Is it?

Ruin Porn and Contemporary Perceptions of the Bronx

Thursday, September 6, NL 314, 2-4pm

Moderator: Laura Barberan

The editors of a recent volume on the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the collective imagination coined the term “The Katrina Effect” to describe how “the threat of disaster can have a powerful effect on the social imaginary.” Many still ask those of us who write about Katrina’s ongoing effects on the Gulf Coast if New Orleans is still under water. Perhaps they are half joking, but the lingering perception that the coverage and images of the city in ruins had an indelible impression on how people around the country still perceive New Orleans even more than ten years after the storm. Similar effects have shaped perceptions of places that have faced disaster—whether natural or economic—such as the Rust-Belt cities, Southside Chicago, and places in New York City that have been mapped over in the popular imagination. The Bronx has a well-known and often-told history of crime, blight, and urban decay. In the 1970s and 80s a phrase arose that described the burnt shells of buildings that were a common sight throughout the South Bronx. “The Bronx is Burning” stated the covers of local and national papers, and the images of those burnt out buildings still populate any simple online search for the Bronx. The Katrina effect is in full swing in the Bronx as the popular imagination is that the Bronx is really still burning. National media has fixated on this period of the Bronx with Baz Luhrmann setting his recent Netflix show The Get Down against the backdrop of a burning Bronx to Anthony Bourdain filming his CNN show in the Bronx and obsessively focusing on this period of the Bronx’s history.

In this talk, I argue against the frequently voiced objection to ruin porn as “morbid obsession with decay and desolation.” The contemporary perception of the Bronx as still burning has kept the Bronx one of the only places in New York that has been able to stave off gentrification—for now. This process has been named “distancing” by urban theorists who find ruin porn one way for many to reimagine American spaces as exotic—as has happened with Detroit. In order to map the effects of the ruin imagery of the Bronx from the 70s and 80s on contemporary perceptions of the Bronx I take my methodology in three directions: 1) First, I look to how the Bronx is represented in local and national media as a place where violence and decay still reign, 2) Next, I look to the tourism industry in the Bronx that is almost exclusively focused on the Hip Hop era of the Bronx in the 70s and 80s, 3) Finally, I provide four brief ethnographies—two from Bronx residents and two from Manhattan residents that provide evidence of just how powerful the images of the Bronx burning have on contemporary perceptions of the borough.

By looking to how these images of the Bronx shape our popular imagination of the borough, I make the larger argument that memories of place created by images of places we have never seen (my take on the “Katrina Effect”) can cut two ways. They can challenge our notion of what it means to be urban in an increasingly pre-urban world, or they can offer us some consolation as posthuman spaces evolve into prehuman landscapes once again.

Joseph Donica is an assistant professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. He teaches American literature, literary criticism and theory, and writing courses. He focuses his work on Arab-American literature and culture, the privatization of everyday life, the history of technology, and queer theory. He has published articles and reviews on American architecture, 9/11 literature, Edward P. Jones, Arab-American literature, Netflix and the digital future, the politics of the Internet, Hurricane Katrina memoirs, Digital Humanities' methodology, and disability studies. He is also a contributor to the Sage Encyclopedia of War as well as the website American Muslims: History, Culture, and Politics. His latest articles are "Rethinking Utopia for the Twenty-First Century: The Good Life after Occupy and the Arab Spring," "Negative Memory after Katrina: The Persistence of Memoir," "The Erosion of the Cultural Commons and the Possibilities of Participatory Urbanism," "Not All Roads Lead to Rome: The State of the Humanities at Community Colleges," "The challenges of our generation," and "Is Computer Code Queer?" His article on everyday life in Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War is forthcoming in College Literature. And his essay "The Bronx isn't burning, is it?" is coming out in the collection Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay. Along with Kristen Marangoni, Donica is co-editing a special issue of the journal Pedagogy (Duke UP) titled Sustaining English Departments in the Twenty-First Century. And he is writing his first monograph titled Inequality's Subjects: Neoliberalism and American Literature after The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. In addition, he serves on the executive board of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, is a monthly columnist for the UK-based magazine Screen Shot, and is the chair of the committee awarding the John Leo and Dana Heller Award in LGBTQ studies through the Popular Culture Association.