Futures after Progress
Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore
Abstract
A powerful ethnographic study of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures.
Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.
Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains—“that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.
Keywords
late industrialism, United States, toxicity, uncertainty, environmental governance, urban history, speculation, social movements, atmosphere, BaltimoreDOI
10.7208/chicago/9780226833606.001.0001ISBN
9780226833590, 9780226833613, 9780226833606, 9780226833606Publisher
University of Chicago PressPublisher website
https://press.uchicago.edu/index.htmlPublication date and place
2024Classification
Society and culture: general
Social and cultural anthropology
Ethnic studies
Conservation of the environment