Abstract
Diseasing the City: Colonial Noir and the Ruins of Modernity
Highlights
A decade – two since the collapse of the USSR – may be the right critical distance from which to reassess the shattered remnants of modernity’s dreamworlds that continue to haunt contemporary culture in the blown-out cityscapes of disaster movies, such as the remake of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend (2007)
The future resembles a pre-modern past in which the hunter-gatherer protagonist stalks and is stalked through the wild canyons of Manhattan, paradoxically recuperating, in the midst of the shattered metropolis, indigenous meanings buried in the toponym: ‘the island of hills.’
Noir can perhaps best be understood, in this context, as a form of allegory in the sense identified by Benjamin in his account of baroque tragedy (1928); a form preoccupied with death, anguish and alienation: The baroque writer and the modern writer are both anti-romantic in their pessimistic conviction that meaning has fled from the earth and left behind only the ‘signs’ of things unreadable – a script we can no longer decipher with confident clarity (Kearney 1988: 156)
Summary
Writing during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Susan Buck-Morss reflected on the demise of what, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, she termed the dreamworlds of industrial modernity. The future resembles a pre-modern past in which the hunter-gatherer protagonist stalks and is stalked through the wild canyons of Manhattan, paradoxically recuperating, in the midst of the shattered metropolis, indigenous meanings buried in the toponym: ‘the island of hills.’ It may be time, too, to reconnect neo-noir visions of wrecked cityscapes with earlier responses to catastrophes and in so doing to resituate discussions of noir within the fragmented territory of industrial modernity, in the ruins of the colonial city. At least as a genre of political engagement, took shape in a world that had experienced the Nazi blitzkrieg, the holocaust, occupation, and the disintegration of empire – as well as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which, as Albert Camus noted, marked “the end of ideologies” (Camus 1989: 53) In this post-war environment, history no longer appeared to furnish a framework for elucidating the present, nor did it provide guideposts for the future. As allegory in a time of waiting; as a means of “[coming] to terms with dreamworlds at the moment of their passing” (Buck-Morss 2002: x)
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