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Steven High and David W. Lewis. Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization.

Article Excerpt
Steven High and David W. Lewis. Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 192 pp. $18.95 paper.

I live in North America's Rust Belt and have seen firsthand the deindustrialized landscapes that are the locus of Corporate Wasteland. Before moving to Michigan. I lived in Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak. In 1970. the company employed about 60,000 Rochesterians; in 2008 the figure is about 14,000. The company's enormous manufacturing complex that sprawled across the city's north side is now abandoned and scheduled for demolition. In Michigan, the declining auto industry has produced a vast landscape of abandoned factories and vacant lots in the state's southeastern corner, a scene that has been replicated in countless communities across the Rust Belt. The authors of Corporate Wasteland instead of viewing this process in strictly economic terms, focus on the cultural meaning of industrial ruins by analyzing "the landscape and memory of deindustrialization" through a series of "interpretative chapters, transcribed shutdown stories and photographic images" (2).

Part 1, "The Deindustrial Sublime" (Chapters 1 through 3), comprises the bulk of the...

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