“Your Wilderness:” The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive*

After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form.     

Japanese civil society in global governance: the case of 2015 UN World Conference on disaster risk reduction

In 2015, the Hyogo Framework for Action on disaster risk reduction (DRR) expired, necessitating the introduction of a new international agreement. This article investigates the activities and achievements of the Japan civil society organization coalition for the 2015 UN World Conference on DRR (JCC2015) from the point of view of its involvement in the shaping of the new Sendai Framework for DRR. Although JCC2015 contributed to agenda setting and policy development processes and managed to secure recognition for its position on nuclear risk at a regional level, its participation did not translate into impact on the Sendai Framework to the extent it wished to achieve. The article’s findings testify to the on-going and active inclusion of non-governmental stakeholders in the UN-led global policy-making processes concerning reducing disaster risk, but they also illustrate difficulties that actors who aim to introduce new elements into the agenda need to tackle.