Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

David T. Humphries

Subject Categories

American Film Studies | Human Geography | Other Film and Media Studies | Urban Studies and Planning

Keywords

Durham, Leo Marx, Jail, Stadium, Post-Industrial

Abstract

By the late 1980s, Durham, North Carolina’s downtown-based industrial economy had been replaced by a powerful knowledge economy in the city’s peripheries. Downtown Durham’s vast array of tobacco and textiles manufacturing buildings stood empty, along with most of its commercial spaces, offices and sidewalks. This thesis argues that the local development of two major public works, a baseball stadium (the Durham Bulls Athletic Park) and a jail (the Durham County Detention Center), conceived and constructed on similar timelines in close physical proximity, was indicative of how—and for whom—city and county officials envisioned a revitalized downtown. The first chapter examines the complex mythic and material interplay between the film Bull Durham (1988) and post-industrial Durham, how the film helped produce the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and how the stadium represented (and ultimately, helped instantiate) city officials’ efforts to attract a wealthier knowledge economy class to the city center, in lieu of ameliorating the city’s residual social needs. The second chapter argues that the development and architectural form of the Durham County Detention Center—belying its reformist aspirations—served foremost to expand the county’s capacity to confine its post-industrial, overwhelmingly Black, ‘surplus’ population. By the time both were fully open, the stadium and the jail, dominating the skyline from the vantage point of the city’s busiest thoroughfare, broadcast officials’ split vision for downtown’s future—white knowledge-class leisure and Black working-class confinement.

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