![]() | Down in the Dumps An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus--office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore-- Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno's divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West's multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West's "dump of dreams," in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America. Jani Scandura is Associate Professor of English and Co-Founder of the Space and Place Research Collective at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital . |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)