‘The City is Mine’: Black Capitalist Geographies and 'The Book of HOV’

Abstract

This paper explores the Black capitalist hagiography embodied in “The Book of HOV” exhibit (2023) at Brooklyn, New York’s Central Library. As a tribute to the career of Brooklyn-born hip-hop mogul Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, it chronicles his rise from Bedford-Stuyvesant’s gritty Marcy Projects to the top of the business and entertainment world. The exhibit’s emphasis on Carter’s singular success, driven by his own ambition, talent, and sheer will, echoes broader narratives of the American Dream. By putting a Black working-class veneer on the well-worn bootstraps narrative, it holds up liberal individualism as a multicultural and aspirational standard while co-opting the public space of the library in service of corporate-funded celebrity extravagance.

My analysis further contextualizes the exhibit and the story it tells within the gentrification of nearby Black Brooklyn neighborhoods. The highlighting of triumphant and sanitized images of Black Brooklyn’s history and culture in this context is a sharp contrast from the marginalization Black Brooklynites face daily in the context of displacement, hyperpolicing, and a growing crisis of unaffordability. To quote cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, the “selective visibility” of these triumphant images of blackness generates the invisibility of challenging conditions on the ground. I situate “The Book of Hov” within a broader “Disneyfication” of Black Brooklyn, which renders dynamic, diverse, and resistant cultural expressions into a standardized and easily recognizable format in order to generate interest and profit.