Chapter 5 - Urban Borders, Open Wounds

Summary

This chapter analyzes novels set in gentrifying US neighborhoods to propose that the novel’s complex, dialogic system offers opportunities for exploring the negotiations between structure and individual agency that precipitate processes of gentrification. Adept as the novel is at representing a diverse range of subjectivities and interpersonal relations, stories of gentrification must also show how subjecthood is molded by larger historical, political, and economic forces. The texts are read through close attention to genre, treated neither as a taxonomy of fixed structures nor a concept so anarchic as to be practically non-existent, but as a form of textuality emerging through negotiations between communities comprised of individual genre consumers with specific preferences, and the industries producing texts for consumption. Thus, genre is a useful lens for exploring similar interactions between structure and agency underlying gentrification. There is no single genre of gentrification novel. Rather, the best examples bring genres and modes such as the frontier story and the picturesque into collision or merger in order to show gentrification’s effects on different communities.