Reading the City: Toward a Poetics of Gentrification

Keywords: gentrification, literature, narrative, Brooklyn
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 23

Abstract

In 2017, the owner of Summerhill, a bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY sent out a press release announcing its opening in the “perfect piece of real estate around the corner from [her] Crown Heights apartment: a long-vacant corner bodega (with rumored backroom illegal gun shop to boot”). The design would be edgy – a “bullet hole-ridden wall” would remain from the bodega’s earlier days. The “instagrammable” bar would serve a “Forty Ounce Rose” in paper bags, along with $10 grilled cheese sandwiches.
The bar told a very specific story about Crown Heights, trading in ideas about race and class for marketing and advertising to new residents. However, Summerhill quickly became the subject of protests, who saw in it a different story of gentrification: the deployment of stereotypes of African American young men in the service of creating a market for expensive goods; a tone-deafnesses to the community in which the bar opened; and a possible contribution to the pattern of displacement of long-term working-class residents of color.
This paper investigates not gentrification but the stories told about it. I argue that there is a literary genre of gentrification, a set of novels that address, interrogate, and complicate gentrification from the 1970s through the present-day though a common set of tropes, language, and images. Furthermore, I argue that through their deployment of and playing with genre and its conventions, literary work to create and are created by urban imaginaries, the shared cultural narratives about urban space.