Nostalgia never seems far from the surface in these assessments. A way to perceive the past, nostalgia is characterized by a desire, often bittersweet or melancholy, to return to a bygone era. [...] A nostalgic view creates a kind of imagined, Utopian past that stands in stark contrast to the present day, which has been judged deficient in some important way. Why else would one want to revive what has been lost? (Andrew Parnaby, Life Among the Ruins 286-287)Discussions of Detroit in popular culture often touch upon the delicate subject of nostalgia-not always rooted in, but often perpetuating, an (unspoken) desire to imagine life in the Motor City before suburban white flight and the consolidation of African-American political power in the city. More cautiously, however, one could also argue that such nostalgia is more intentionally situated within a postracial framework that seeks to remove the question of race altogether-either in active denial of the ugly histories haunting the subject, or in a sincere, if misguided, attempt to perpetuate the utopie kind of color-blind rhetoric that appeals to humanity's highest ideals. And there is still another nostalgia here-longing for the age of Fordist-based manufacturing economies, and the birth of a sustainable middle class and leisure culture, which was anchored by a strong labor movement and maintained a manageable balance with the market-driven pressures and efficiency-minded management of capitalist industries. George Steinmetz writes that Walter Reut her's 1950 ?Treaty of Detroit' with General Motors (GM) was a model of the neo-corporatist labor-management agreements that proliferated in the United States and Western Europe during the Fordist era. GM was protected from strikes while the United Auto Workers (UAW) gained health, unemployment and pension benefits, [and] expanded vacation time (220). Nostalgia for this is perhaps enabled (albeit unintentionally) by Chrysler's 2011 Super Bowl Ad, Imported from Detroit, which reimagined the Motor City not as a hotbed of racial tension, capitalist exploitation, and increasing urban decay, but as a testament to the importance of the American worker. Beneath the surface, however, such a workforce is essentially redundant, if not completely obsolete, in the current age of late capitalist, information-based global economies.Of course, the fact that it was a car commercial (broadcast during modern consumer culture's most grotesque night) is not a lost irony-the auto industry's larger indifference to the value of US labor was one central factor in Detroit's present economic state in the first place. Just as importantly, meanwhile, lingering racial tensions in the city for decades played as major a part in decimating the city as the collapsed manufacturing base had. Most distressingly, the two are deeply interrelated-playing on racial divides slowly, but steadily, pitted middle and working class workers against each other, essentially killing off the modern labor movement. And the rise of a consumeost-driven individualism, which commercials pander to on a persistent basis, further undermined any sense of a collective struggle for better futures. Certainly, none of these issues would make it into a car commercial whose first goal, whatever its stated intentions, would be to sell a product far more than to rebuild a city, let alone reconstruct an imagined way of life.After all, nostalgia is just that-a mythic depiction of the past that leaves out far more than it includes, and filters history through the kind of rose-colored glasses which serve the interests of present hegemonic ideologies. We should not expect a Chrysler commercial, of all texts, to be markedly different. And yet the ideal embedded in there-of the mythical American workforce and the middle class culture built by it-is not necessarily a bad one. Likewise, nostalgia is not only reactionary or conservative (although it mostly is)-and the particular kind of Fordist nostalgia glimpsed by gloriously idealized visions of Detroit's manufacturing past, selective although they are, can be as much a mobilizing hope for the future as a melancholic look back-particularly as urgent issues of economic instability and income inequality come increasingly to the forefront of popular consciousness. …