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Those the dead left behind: Gentrification and Haunting in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions.
Introduction: Haunting Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem describes Brooklyn as “a place where the renovations that are so
characteristic of American life never quite work. It’s a place where the past and memory are
lying around in chunks even after they’ve been displaced.”1 What intrigues about his
comments is the imbrication of the material and the abstract or spectral: memory enduring as
chunks. This is an essay about hauntings in contemporary Brooklyn fictions: specifically,
hauntings caused by changing socioeconomic relations as Brooklyn gentrifies (or attempts to
renovate, to borrow Lethem’s evocative word). My specific interest is in the supplementarity
of the material and spectral realms in gentrification, or, to express it more picturesquely, how
the physical chunks depend on the ghosts and the memories, and vice versa.
Although I refer to many novels published since 2000, the three analysed in detail are
Kate Christensen’s The Astral (2011), Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street (2013), and Jacqueline
Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016). Of these, it is only Pochoda’s that can be called, in any
conventional generic sense, a ghost story: characters communicate with the dead, and
sections toward the end are narrated from a drowned teenager’s point of view. However, all
three might be dubbed ghost stories if one agrees with Avery Gordon that “stories concerning
exclusion and invisibilities” are ghost stories and that the ghost is a “social figure” assuming
many forms and providing esoteric evidence of social transformations.2
In gentrification stories, ghosts – whether they take the form of two unfashionable
poets “in a hipster bar”;3 the walls of a waterfront dive “covered with buoys and life
preservers”;4 or pre-gentrification memories of white families departing for the suburbs5 –
inspire what Gordon calls a “transformative recognition” of the ways in which
gentrification’s material processes rely on marginalization and occlusion.6 Numerous studies,
including Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier (1996), Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of
Brownstone Brooklyn (2011) and Peter Moskowitz’s How To Kill a City (2017) have shown
this, albeit with widely differing levels of polemic. And countless Brooklyn fictions, from
Paula Fox’s biting bourgeois satire Desperate Characters (1970) to recent comedies of
Brooklyn motherhood such as Lucinda Rosenfeld’s Class (2017), have depicted the struggles
of competing demographics in neighborhoods at various stages of gentrification.
Whether framed, like Fox’s, as frontier narratives, or, like Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos
(2004), as urban picturesques, or, like the motherhood comedies, as combinations of the two,
these novels, ultimately, all explore power relations and capital’s role in community
formation. Haunting is a revealing approach – and one rarely taken before now – because it
complements observations on power and the concrete political, social and economic effects
of gentrification. It does so by offering, through literature’s multiple interior perspectives,
meaningful glimpses of gentrification’s affective and spiritual consequences, phenomena
much more difficult to grasp positivistically. This is why Gordon evokes Raymond Williams’
“structure of feeling,” correctly calling it “the most appropriate description of how hauntings
are transmitted and received.”7 Structures of feeling are means of conceptualizing complex
negotiations between social formations already established and understood, and “the kind of
feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase
before it can become fully articulate.”8 In so doing, Williams negotiates a path between
institutions defined as external and objective, and present, subjective lived experience, thus
avoiding “the twin pitfalls of subjectivism and positivism.” If Gordon explores “the structure
of feeling that is something akin to what it feels like to be the object of a social totality vexed
by the phantoms of modernity’s violence,” then she shares this interest with many
contemporary novelists writing on Brooklyn’s gentrification.9 Literature has a special part to
play because it offers a particular affective sociality through reading, interpretation and
enjoyment. Moreover, the novel’s abiding interest in multiple subjectivities, and its potential
for combining lyricism with ethnography, can allow for a nuanced treatment of gentrification
in all its messiness and avoid the Manicheanism, vitriol and moral reductionism of some
critical debates.10 The novels considered here thus make important contributions to a
contemporary understanding of gentrification as it is experienced and acted out within
communities, by exploring the complex relationship between structure and individual or
communal agency in driving neighborhood change.
These novels feature artistic or disciplinary practices which radiate throughout the
stories and determine structures of feeling in Brooklyn neighborhoods at different historical
moments. In The Astral, it is poetry. First-person narrator Harry Quirk writes poems stripped
of “transcendence” and “lyricism” corresponding to what he considers his empiricist sense
(and to the determinedly realist mode of the novel): “I see what’s there and act accordingly”
(298, 307). As his marriage collapses, his career dissipates, and Brooklyn gentrifies around
him, his rejection of affect and spirituality as catalysts for social change comes under
scrutiny. Visitation Street, narrated in free indirect discourse from multiple points of view,
conceives of neighborhood interactions as that most symbolic and spectral of art forms –
music: “Days pass in Red Hook like musical compositions. Sometimes they are fugues,
sometimes sonatas” (19). Aspiring to the status of a chorus, with diverse voices uniting to tell
the story of a neighborhood undergoing violent changes and tragic events, Visitation Street
proposes that the voices of the dead linger. To hear them, alongside the voices of the living, is
to hear the neighborhood in its intersubjective, transhistorical completeness, and to resist the
consignment of certain communities to permanent forgetting. Similarly, August, the
protagonist of Another Brooklyn, resists forgetfulness. She is an anthropologist whose
specialty is death rituals and memorial cultures, and her narrative, jumping in time and space
between adolescent Brooklyn and childhood Tennessee, becomes an anthropology of loss
focussed on her mother and her high school friends. Characters in Woodson’s story, like
Pochoda’s, hear voices, and memory equates to haunting. Unlike both Christensen’s and
Pochoda’s novels, however, Woodson’s does not refer explicitly to gentrification. By
returning to its pre-history – African-American migration from the south, white flight from
the inner cities – it renders gentrification as another ghost, haunting the textual margins and
reminding us that hauntings come from the future, not just the past. And thus, as we shall see,
Woodson offers a subtle critique of gentrification. To consign it to the novel’s margins, to
make of it a spectral trace, is to deny gentrification any privileged claims to realism,
authenticity or permanence.
(In)Authentic Ghosts
Of these terms, “authenticity” casts the longest shadow and is key to understanding
representations of gentrification and haunting, because it, too, demands to be understood in
terms of supplementarity. As Zukin explains, it carries multiple, contradictory temporal
senses which are parasitical upon each other, connoting timelessness and originality as well
as innovation and change.11 Contemporary Brooklyn fictions abound with characters striving
for an “authentic” lifestyle in the face of gentrification, a process regarded by these
characters, as it is in many critical accounts, as homogenizing and detrimental to local color.
In Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, for example, Dylan Ebdus’ mother insists he play with
the black girls on his block and attend P.S. 38, where he is “one of three white children in the
whole school,” because she regards blackness as the mark of the authentic Gowanus that
existed before its bourgeois rebranding as Boerum Hill. As Dylan passes into adulthood, he is
hamstrung by inheritance of these attitudes. Haunted by the decline of his friendship with
Mingus Rude, who is black, he regards the graffiti tags through which they bonded as ghosts
of an authentic Brooklyn childhood realer to him than the present. As he says upon returning
to the borough after living in California: “I saw meanings encoded everywhere on these
streets, like the DMD and FMD tags still visible where they’d been sprayed twenty years
before.”12 Dylan’s eventual maturation consists in understanding that nostalgia is a dangerous
impulse, and that the yearned-for authenticity is a racially-charged utopian construct.
Whereas Dylan’s sense of authenticity is frozen pre-gentrification, the protagonist of
Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos, Emily Lime, commits to a notion of authenticity emerging at an
early stage of regeneration. Prior to the arrival of artists and eccentrics, Williamsburg was “an
urban wilderness.” Now it is a picturesque place of bohemian diversity, its authenticity
signalled by the consumer choices available to the new arrivals, rendered paratactically:
“They pass the sushi place, the Mexican restaurant, the video store, the Syrian deli, the Polish
bakery.” Emily’s latest photographic project, “Disappearing Brooklyn,” memorializes the
neighborhood “before it dies.” Nostalgic for the present and for her personal vision of the
“true” neighborhood, Emily dreads the time when “the Polish meat markets and the Hispanic
delis will be replaced by fast food outlets” and cheap, spacious apartments full of flowers and
art by loft developments “untrue to the spirit of Brooklyn in general and Williamsburg in
particular.”13 She fears “supergentrification,” the shift, broadly, from independent outlets to
global brands.
Authenticity is always connected to economics, and this opposition between different
forms of consumer capitalism – those perceived as community-oriented and those viewed as
predatory upon neighborhood spirit – leads to some irregular treatments of authenticity in
recent motherhood comedies. Two protagonists in these novels – Eve in Thomas Rayfiel’s
Parallel Play (2007) and Jenny in The Mermaid of Brooklyn (2013) – make money producing
copies of designer clothing for Park Slope mothers. Far from being inauthentic, these copies
are benignly authentic because they challenge the large, faceless corporations producing
expensive brands; they offer a local alternative that reinforces a sense of community between
cash-strapped but stylish mothers.
These examples demonstrate the plurality of authenticities in Brooklyn fictions:
authenticity variously conceived of in terms of racial demography; pre-gentrified grittiness;
the bohemianism of early gentrification; or consumer choices outside prevailing norms. As
Suleiman Osman demonstrates, multiple discourses of authenticity competed in the post-war
transformation of Brooklyn neighborhoods. Brownstone Brooklyn has always been “a
tectonic cityscape with the architectural and social imprints of multiple economic stages”
which become strategically legible to different communities seeking different ideas of
authenticity at different times as layers of the built environment are “symbolically stripped
off.”14 For Sharon Zukin, the rhetoric of authenticity is fundamental to urban redevelopment.
Trading on ideals of inclusivity and sensitivity to historical origins, gentrifiers are in fact
engaged in a “performance” of individuality and authenticity for reasons of product
differentiation: “Authenticity differentiates a person, a product, or a group from its
competitors; it confers an aura of moral superiority.”15 And the internal contradictions of the
term, signifying as it does both tradition and innovation, mean that no group can lay claim to
a definitive version.
Claims to authenticity in Brooklyn fictions connect to the pervasive nostalgic feeling,
reaching back to Brooklyn’s assimilation into New York City on 1 January 1898, that
something vital has been lost. As Pete Hamill expresses it: in Brooklyn literature “[a] voice
always seems to whisper: There was another place here once and it was better than this.”16
This disembodied voice partakes of the ghostly, and in different forms and contexts talks to
characters in Visitation Street and Another Brooklyn about loss. And yet Hamill’s assertion,
pivoting on the adverbial “once,” exemplifies the danger of nostalgic treatments of
gentrification and authenticity. As Osman and Zukin show, gentrification is not a simplistic
matter of befores and afters, of an authentic past supplanted by an inauthentic present. Rather,
it is about the interpenetration of competing discourses, a continual dialogue between visions
of authenticity rooted in economics and culture. Even if this dialogue leads, as Judith DeSena
argues, to “the eventual colonization of the neighborhood by the gentry class” and thus the
ascendancy of its vision of authenticity, this vision still contains aspects of competing
cultures and is subject to reiteration.17
Incorporating the Ghostly
What is crucial for my discussion is gentrification’s adeptness at incorporating and
aestheticizing material and symbolic traces. At its most cynical, perhaps, incorporation is
revealed through signifiers of “grittiness” – “artfully painted graffiti on a shop window” or, in
an extreme recent example, a wall strewn with “bullet holes” in a Crown Heights sandwich
bar, legacy of an illegal gun shop rumored to be based on the premises at the height of the
neighborhood’s gang wars. The bullet holes were actually anchor holes for fridges.18
Contemporary Brooklyn gentrification fictions frequently acknowledge this incorporative
impulse toward authentic grittiness. Dylan Ebdus, returning to Brooklyn, is shocked to
discover that his geeky adolescent companion Arthur Lomb now owns a section of Smith
Street full of fashionable establishments with “local-historical monikers” trading on
Gowanus’ pre-gentrification style.19 And in Visitation Street the renovation of a
longshoreman’s bar involves the polishing of shelves and rails, but also the retention of the
old “mermaid figurehead” – a fossilized reference to Red Hook’s seafaring history (166).
Such examples are not trivial. They speak, in Zukin’s terms to a “kind of authenticity
[that] allows us to see an inhabited space in aesthetic terms” and conflate aesthetics with
social and political considerations about desirable and virtuous lifestyles.20 In so doing, they
highlight gentrification’s complex material and ideological interactions. But most important
here is the fact that if one views them, as I argue one must, as absent-presences and thus as
hauntings, then their spectral repetition is absolutely deliberate and consciously enacted as
part of the gentrification process. It is an aesthetic manifestation of socioeconomic power.
Whatever the deconstructive tendencies of specters in gentrified settings, this question of
agency and intention cannot be ignored. If one wishes to analyze the ghostly in contemporary
Brooklyn stories, and to draw upon hauntological criticism for that purpose, then one has to
acknowledge its active exploitation in urban regeneration. This is not to deny the
transgressive or destabilizing potential of ghosts, their ability to disrupt simplistic narratives
of before and after, to expose the power dynamics which drive gentrification and recall that
which has been repressed by those with a vested interest in its repression. It is to deny,
however, that there is anything inherently dissident about them. Although “[h]aunting
belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because hegemony is intent upon its repression,
the parasitic supplementarity underpinning Derrida’s analysis works both ways: hegemony
participates in every haunting.21 In fact, hegemony – in this case the dominant discourse of
gentrification – thrives on haunting. Rather than viewing the ghost as a visitor from a lost,
authentic community, then, one must regard it as a phenomenon which disrupts authenticity
per se by revealing what is incorporated, or elided, or coveted in is construction.
Hauntology: Critical Issues
In making these claims, I am employing similar critical tools to Miranda Joseph in Against
the Romance of Community (2002). Joseph deconstructs oppositions between community and
capital, local and global, and argues that community, far from being separable temporally,
spatially and conceptually from global capital, is constituted by it, such that the two have a
supplementary relationship. Community is about “belonging and power”: it generates
divisions and hierarchies of ethnicity, class, gender and nation, oppositions between self and
other, required but disavowed by capitalism.22 Echoing Williams’ insistence on the
historicization of community formations, Joseph continues: “To imagine that a long-lost
communality might return to nurture contemporary capitalism requires detaching community
from the social, economic, political and historical conditions that enabled the particular forms
of sociality that would seem to be so appealing.”23 In other words, community did not come
“before” capitalism in a “better” past time.
Joseph’s reference to the “return” of communality signals a connection with
hauntology, and her warning that community always be seen as dependent on capital, not
antecedent to it, demands that a similar warning be offered about spectrality. This is
especially true given that hauntological readings are so often concerned with community
groupings occluded by forces of modernity and capital. The field of hauntological criticism
has greatly expanded since the critical “spectral turn” prompted by Derrida’s Specters of
Marx (1994). Texts including Jeffrey Weinstock’s Spectral America (2003); Gordon’s
Ghostly Matters (2008); and Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen’s The Spectralities
Reader (2013) show the increased prominence of spectrality as a “conceptual metaphor”
which enables critics across disciplines “to theorize a variety of social, ethical, and political
questions.”24 These questions include memory and trauma, the effects of digital media, issues
of gender, race and class, and acts of textual analysis.
Many accounts of haunting, it is true, flirt with romanticism and risk viewing
spectrality as inherently counter-hegemonic. For Gordon, in a work that del Pilar Blanco calls
“redemptive, palliative but ultimately unmanageable” for its dense theorizing, haunting is the
realm of affect and magic.25 According to Adrián E. Arancibia, haunting is inherently
“oppositional” in that it can open up “representational spaces” for marginalized people and
suggest alternatives to, and thus resistance to, gentrification’s dominant narratives of middle-
class consumption.26 Arancibia takes his cue from Michel de Certeau, who sees haunted
spaces as overturning the hegemonic logic of the panopticon in urban locales thus, in Roger
Luckhurst’s words, becoming an “emblem of resistance” to that logic.27 Given such
characterizations of haunting – as intersubjective, affective, pluralistic, attentive to
communities and individuals, potentially radical – the temptation to romanticize hauntology,
to view it in utopian terms as a means of recuperating the real or “authentic,” communality of
the past, is strong.
For several reasons, it should be resisted. First, it downplays the complexity of
Derrida’s deconstructive logic. Notions of origin and presence are meticulously destabilized
in Specters of Marx. Luckhurst blames Derrida, in part, for the over-extension and over-
application of haunting in recent criticism, citing one of Derrida’s seemingly grander claims
as the cause: “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of
every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time.”28 Though Luckhurst is
justified in questioning some of the generalizing responses to Derrida by critics such as
Wolfreys, who places haunting at the heart of every modern narrative,29 he disregards the fact
that hauntology is absolutely consistent with Derrida’s career work of deconstruction, the
ethical project of breaking down factitious binaries. And, as Luckhurst recognizes, Specters
of Marx focusses not on aesthetics or hermeneutics, but politics. That it has spawned “a
curious form of meta-Gothic” criticism in which “the spectral infiltrates the hermeneutic act
itself” is partly to do with the genuine, enduring power of the ghost in speaking to aspects of
modernity and textuality, but also with critical fads.30
In the crowd of hauntologists I stand alongside scholars who view hauntology not as
an all-purpose hermeneutic tool but as a means of exploring specific historical, political and
geographical contexts. Jeffrey Weinstock, for example, argues for “the general importance of
phantoms and haunting” to “the ‘American imagination’” but rightly insists that “particular
ghostly manifestations are always constructions embedded within specific historical contexts
and invoked for more or less explicit political purposes.”31 Del Pilar Blanco prefers “close
reading” to generalized historiography because she wishes to study particular ghostly
manifestations in particular American locations.32 Luckhurst, arguing for similar specificity in
his analysis of London gothic, sees spectralization “as a grounded manifestation of
communities in highly delimited locales subjected to cruel and unusual forms of political
disempowerment.”33 As we shall see, Luckhurst’s comments, which remind us of the role
played by vested political and economic interests in the discourse of haunting, apply equally
well to Brooklyn gentrification stories. David Pinder, though his work on urban walking is
suffused with romantic “echoes and whispers,” recognizes that “a move towards the idea of
obscurity or illegibility itself carries risks.” Spectrality can be “the effect of the operation of
powerful interests” and “highly comforting for those who benefit from the unequal
distribution of power in the city and from the masking of their interests and actions”:
spectrality in this case is hegemonic.34 In the case of the mermaid figurehead, for example:
the ascendancy of powerful economic interests is signalled by the appropriation of the relic
from an “authentic” maritime past. Its very romantic aura, the way it seems to whisper of the
sea and of communities of hard-drinking longshoremen from a bygone age, confirms its
incorporation into a narrative of global capital exemplified by gentrification.
Recent ghostly Brooklyn fictions thrive on these tensions. The Astral, Visitation Street
and Another Brooklyn show how romance and economics, community and capital, affect and
materialism stand not in opposition but in supplementary relation. They illustrate how
haunting as a structure of feeling, like any other structure, depends on apparently
contradictory, external elements, in this case capital and commodity culture. (Indeed,
Williams conceived of structures of feeling as ways of mediating these different elements.) In
showing how ghosts both challenge and bolster gentrification, how they are both abstract and
material, these texts refuse to fix the past in a yearning for lost community. Rather, “in an
active, dynamic engagement,” they may do what Del Pilar Blanco and Pereen hope for from
haunted texts: “reveal the insufficiency of the present moment, as well as the disconsolations
and erasures of the past, and a tentative hopefulness for future resolutions.”35 Such hope
derives from a deeper understanding of how ghosts signify. Ghosts, as Gordon argues,
mediate relations between the individual, the communities in which the individual
participates and wider history.36 Gentrification throws these relations into relief, and
contemporary depictions of gentrifying Brooklyn, where the process has been particularly
extensive, intense and divisive, are especially revealing of the tensions between material and
spectral, structure and individual agency, Brooklyn and the wider world.
The Astral: His Ghostly Materials
Once a seemingly timeless, quiet community with a large Polish (combined with Irish and Italian)
population, [Greenpoint]’s been enlivened by the arrival of young professionals and college grads.37
The Astral begins with an opposition familiar from novels as diverse as Betty Smith’s A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn (1989) and Emily
Barton’s Brookland (2006): Manhattan versus Brooklyn. Typically in Brooklyn fictions the
topographical and architectural differences between the two boroughs translate into
ideological contrasts: Manhattan’s verticality stands for its future-driven aspiration and
Brooklyn’s horizontality for its sense of community, down-home values and an embrace of
history that can be either comforting or frustrating.
For poet Harry Quirk, recently separated from his wife Luz, Brooklyn represents dirt
and stultification; presumably he would disagree with Ellen Freudenheim (quoted in the
epigraph above) that Greenpoint has been “enlivened.” Walking through Greenpoint early on,
he stops at Newtown Creek to gaze across the water toward Manhattan, “the long glittering
skyscrapery isle.” By contrast, Greenpoint remains a place of “low-slung old warehouses”
and “spilled oil,” despite gentrification. He reflects: “I had named this place the End of the
World years ago, when it was an even more polluted, hopeless wasteland, but it still fit” (3).
The specificity of the first-person descriptions, full of details like “polyfluorocarbons from
the industrial warehouses,” parallels Quirk’s verse, an example of which is offered on the
first page: “your mollusc voice / Quietly swathing my cochlea” (3). Later he admits to a
“stubborn need and desire for the concrete and emotionally direct” and a rejection of
“fairyland” in his writing (131). His family, he supposes, are better able to experience the
transcendence he has denied himself. Luz has Catholicism, the magic of confession and
Communion; his son Hector, involved in a Christian cult, has the mother’s “ability to live
among the deities”; and his daughter Karina’s “religiosity” consists in obsessive recycling
(131).
Quirk’s love of the empirical, his certainty that he has “accepted reality” and rejected
“holy ghosts” (307), appears stubbornly to endure until the end. After a climactic argument
with Luz that heralds their relationship’s final demise, he returns to Newtown Creek and
interrupts two boys crab-fishing. In a reprise of the imagery with which the story begins, but
with added metaphorical reference to his toxic marriage, he tells them: “There’s a lot of really
nasty chemicals and poisons in there” (311). For Daniel Handler, the apparent consistency of
Quirk’s “unsentimental” realist perspective weakens Christensen’s work. Despite his
surname, our narrator is neither quirky nor unreliable enough to provide “narrative tension”
or character development. Indeed, “nowhere in The Astral does Christensen give us anything
to indicate we should take Quirk’s narration at anything other than face value.” Similarly,
Handler is disappointed that Quirk’s narration underplays the transcendence suggested by the
novel’s title. The Astral is named after the Greenpoint apartment building where Harry and
Luz once lived together, but “the author makes no hay with its metaphorical, metaphysical
implications.”38
On both counts Handler errs, but in illuminating ways. First, the implications of
the building’s name are fully exploited. Having been banished from the marital apartment,
Quirk moves back into a smaller room in The Astral, driven by a sentimental “homing
instinct” (125). If the religious connotations of his wife’s name – Luz – are not obvious
enough, the description of their apartment as “the sunlit, spacious aerie on the top floor”
confirms the heavenly associations (126). Not only this, but Quirk then starts work on an epic
poem called The Astral: “the story of Adam banished by Eve, sent from the marital Edenic
nest to live alone in the cold wilderness” (123). The novel also acknowledges that the
building’s metaphorical associations derive from, and are parasitical on, its material origins.
The block is so named because it originally housed workers from the Astral Oil Works,
founded by Charles Pratt in 1867. Pratt coined the slogan, “The holy lamps of Tibet are
primed with Astral Oil,” to which Quirk wryly adds, “And the refineries of Astral Oil are
primed with cheap labor” (38). If the spiritual affectation is a marketing gimmick, it also
intimates the deeper truth that commodities are specters, trading on faith, and likewise money
something virtual endowed with power through collective belief.39 Fittingly enough, gas
refinery was referred to as one of the “five black arts” thriving in Greenpoint in the late
nineteenth century.40 In the novel’s representation of the apartment block, then, lies a
reminder of the reification that undergirds commodity culture, and confirmation that capital is
more magical than material.
And this is how Handler misreads Quirk’s narrative: as straightforward realism rather
than repeated acts of reification – in the classical Marxian sense of a specific form of
alienation and in the phenomenological sense of disengagement between subject and object,
self and others. Quirk’s sentiments cannot be taken at face value precisely because his
narration is peppered with references – to memories, magic and ghosts – that undermine his
avowed materialist realism and betray the disavowals necessary for him to continue seeing
the world through ironic disengagement. On the first page he remarks: “At my back thronged
the dark ghosts of Greenpoint” (3). Such an observation links the neighborhood’s industrial
heritage to the poet’s obsessions, his urge to place his personal history at the heart of the area.
Elsewhere, admitting that his professional success “dried up and blew away” at the turn of the
millennium, Quirk muses: “I was still writing, a ghost ship icebound in a frozen sea” (27).
Greenpoint was a center for shipbuilding in the mid-nineteenth century, and Quirk’s choice of
metaphor shows how the neighborhood and his poetry are haunted by the industrial past, how
the concreteness of manufacturing exists in supplementary relation to a discourse of
spectrality, and how his narration is full of spectral images.
These images persist as Quirk comments on changing uses of urban space under
gentrification. Passing the site of a restaurant where he and his friends once danced, he says:
“I saw our ghosts there, held in time like a stuck thought burned into the air.” A nearby street
is suffused with “decades of lingering memories” and has a nostalgic, “sepia, long-ago cast”
(93). Further on in his peregrinations, he describes an unfinished waterfront development as
“the new ghost town” and anticipates future specters in a factory “soon to be torn down to be
made into condos” (102). A gentrified space such as the Kensington apartment of his new
lover Diane is “like a museum [. . .] essentially a repository of the past” (277). In a similar
vein, Greenpoint, where he has lived “for more than three decades” (making him, a middle-
class white man in the creative industries, a first-wave gentrifier) has been rendered uncanny
by haunting emotion and memory: “I felt as if I were in a primitive imitation of a landscape
almost recalled, in a spell of déjà vu, a neighborhood with near-semblance to a known place”
(137).
Confronted by this strangeness, Quirk tries to maintain ironic distance. Williamsburg,
once “a Wild West pioneer town,” is now “tapas place here, vintage boutique there” (14). The
Greenmarket in McCarren Park is a “little swath of hell” (234). Yet his commitment to irony,
bound up in his dedication to what he credits as authentic and real, is precisely his weakness.
Believing that “hard-won, cumulative knowledge of what was real and what wasn’t was one
of the [. . .] only good things about being alive” (183) and that “the only realities I’ve
acknowledged are perception and experience” (297), he fails to see that his experience, and
the narrative that records it, depend on ghostly, intangible elements whose “reality” is
debatable. Likewise, he refuses to accept that he is a gentrifier, likely one of the “‘pioneers”
who rented an affordable apartment, or purchased a relatively inexpensive house, or even
ventured into “loft living” in the 1970s, thus kick-starting gentrification in the
neighborhood;41 that he is implicated in the changes at which he sneers, and that
gentrification trades on the romance of memory and hauntings for its supposed authenticity.
(According to the authors of Gentrifier [2017], this is a common enough problem with real
gentrifiers and middle-class critics of gentrification.)42
The first-person realist mode allows Quirk to look outwards, to comment ironically on
people and places, to view everyone else as other. Though he feels the neighborhood’s
uncanniness, he refuses to acknowledge his own essential otherness in the eyes of other
characters, preferring to promulgate the centrality of his world view: the imbrication of the
narrative with this view is precisely the point. Quirk’s detachment is revealed as a symptom
of what DeSena, a scholar of Greenpoint’s gentrification, calls “parallel play” – individual
activities that take place in proximity to different groups but which nonetheless remain
focused on one’s own concerns.43 For Quirk, parallel play inspires some appalling
objectification: in a doughnut shop he indulges in a description of Polish women (Greenpoint
being a neighborhood with a large, long-established Polish population): “They dressed for
Mass and grocery shopping alike in slippery little cleavagey minidresses, sheer hose, and
stilettos. They smelled of some pheromonal perfume” (40). A clumsy attempt at seduction
results in a beating from a Polish man called Boleslaw, with whom he ends up sharing a
police cell. Rather than apologize, Quirk pontificates on irony, “a gel that colors things a
certain way” (45). Reflecting on the unexpected consequences of his failed flirtation, he tells
Boleslaw that “[c]haracter lies in irony. That’s where the real story is” (44).
He is right, though not in the way he thinks. Irony consists not in the humorous
thwarting of one’s desires but in how one’s self-perception is never identical to one’s
reception by others. Quirk’s solid sense of identity is always ghosted by his elusive otherness
in the eyes of the people he encounters. An additional irony, as we have seen, is that despite
his claim to have “sidestepped lyricism” in favour of irony (298), the spectral images he
employs render his narrative much more lyrical than he supposes, deconstructing his assumed
oppositions between material and astral realms, self and other. With this crucial point in
mind, the split lip and the black eye administered by Boleslaw perfectly encapsulate how the
two realms Quirk attempts to keep separate inevitably coalesce: the result of heightened
emotion, they are material markers of his folly as well as a spectral marking of his otherness.
In ways relevant to its depiction of a Brooklyn neighborhood undergoing haphazard
gentrification, The Astral demonstrates the supplementarity of these realms through a
narrative voice which keeps missing the point. Quirk is correct that “anything can be
anything else if you juxtapose them on the page” (297) but again, not the way he imagines.
Rather than being a “source of power” for the male writer – and in a more confessional
moment Quirk admits that his writing is “a form of egomania” (298) – the juxtapositions
between ghostly and material in The Astral reveal a structure of feeling which mediates
between established socioeconomic formations and a subjectivity partially shaped by those
formations, but also by memories, emotions and the spirituality Quirk purports to reject. Such
juxtapositions reveal the limitations of Quirk’s realist narrative, which are also the limitations
of his view of gentrification. He is not an immutable figure, observing the changes around
him; he is as much caught up in the play of material and affective transformation as anyone
else, a ghostly figure haunting the margins of other people’s lives.
Visitation Street: Left Behind Ghosts
Ellen Freudenheim describes Red Hook as “[g]ritty, artsy and slightly disaffected,” but also
as one of “Brooklyn’s hipper neighborhoods.” 44 It has a unique geography which produces
distinct hauntings. Notwithstanding Harry Quirk’s view, it has stronger claims to the title “the
End of the World” than Greenpoint. (Quirk himself calls it “a self-contained little time
capsule of waterfront Brooklyn life” [288].) Rudely separated from the rest of the borough by
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the only Brooklyn neighborhood without a subway
station, Red Hook is a peninsula sticking out into the Upper Bay. Overlooked by Governors’
Island, but with the finest view of the Statue of Liberty in Brooklyn, Red Hook is full of
uncomfortable juxtapositions, the starkest being the colossal IKEA store built on the site of
the former Red Hook graving dock in 2008. As the maritime industry that defined the
neighborhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has fallen into desuetude and
gentrification has accelerated – beginning in the 1970s with the purchase of cheap row houses
by artists – traces of the industrial past remain in idle dockyards and the names and decor of
local businesses.45 These include Hope and Anchor; Red Hook Bait and Tackle, a hipster bar
at a former meeting place for fishermen; and Sunny’s Bar, which dates from the 1890s and
has walls adorned with maritime-themed memorabilia.
Writers, Ivy Pochoda included, have found the metaphorical pull of Red Hook’s
geography and history irresistible. In Gabriel Cohen’s thriller Red Hook (2002), detective
Jack Leightner’s investigations in immigrant, traditionally working-class neighborhoods on
the verge of gentrification recall his own troubled past. With the line between cop and
criminal blurred, Jack’s reflections on the diminution of organized crime and the loss of the
old mobsters’ “waterfront kingdoms” become, ironically, nostalgic yearnings for a
disappearing sense of face-to-face community as gentrification proceeds and populations
disperse.46 Reggie Nadelson’s thriller of the same name focuses specifically on
gentrification’s contradictions. Detective Artie Cohen observes: “[y]ou could see Red Hook
was changing: fancy little signs that hung out front of warehouses proclaimed that artists and
film people had moved in,” and yet in a local bar “Red Hook looked ancient, suspended in
time.” Both the dockyard past and the future uses of warehouse space haunt the investigation,
and the novel is full of references to death, ghosts and real estate developers’ exploitation of
both, their “fighting over [the] industrial bones of New York.”47 In Siri Hustvedt’s The
Blazing World (2014) artist Harriet Burden flees Manhattan, a place of fakery and rampant
capitalism, for Red Hook, which has an “edginess” to match Burden’s willed marginality.
She lives in a “fashionably raw” warehouse building; frequents Sunny’s Bar, which she
considers “real”; and starts a community of “human strays,” eccentrics and marginalized
souls who congregate in her apartment.48 From these examples, it is evident that Red Hook’s
end-of-the-world location and industrial heritage serve as metaphors for a wide range of
issues: psychological trauma, nostalgia, authenticity and escape from egregious capitalism.
Pochoda’s Red Hook is “a neighborhood below sea level and sinking” (17), haunted
both by “the vanished world of dockworkers and longshoremen” (9) and its future
disappearance below the water. The drowning of a teenager, the tragic event connecting the
diverse characters whose points of view construct the narrative, predicts Red Hook’s final
sinking and thus becomes synecdochal of its vulnerability. Though the titular street is
fictional, it is inspired by the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Richards Street, a
church featured several times in the story, spiritually shadowing earthly pursuits: hip-hop
rebounds off its walls at the annual summer party (97); local legend says the bar of the
Dockyard is fashioned from a tree that fell in the churchyard (58). Shopkeeper Fadi renames
his business “The Daily Visitation” (187) in an urge to foster a sense of community cohesion.
Such examples hint at the enduring symbolic connections between spiritual and material,
tangible and intangible in Visitation Street. I argue, in fact, that the characters’ willingness to
accept the multiple visitations that shape their lives and their urban spaces, and the novel’s
presumption that ghosts exist, inspire a more sophisticated critique of material circumstances,
the class and ethnic divisions constitutive of community formations than The Astral.
Pochoda’s formal choices inform this critique. In keeping with the underlying musical
metaphor, the narrative is symphonic, in contrast to the monologic construction of The Astral.
Red Hook is composed of many voices, both living and dead, allowing for diverse
perspectives and a frequent circling back to key events consistent with the novel’s
temporality, its overlapping of past, present and future. Most importantly, the form denies
any character protagonist status; nobody can claim absolute centrality because stories are
always filtered through alternative perspectives. Pursuing the connotations of the title further,
one might contend that each person spends time as a visitor in other people’s stories.
“Visitation” thus connotes both communality – the everyday movements and interactions that
shape a neighborhood – and a spectral sense of otherness or essential unknowability. It is
fitting, then, that June, the girl who drowns in the first chapter, serves as the connecting
character. Hers is an absent-presence that inspires unforeseen links between people, based not
only on the possibility of collective culpability for her death, but also on the traumatic
memories her loss awakens in others.
These traumas are numerous. Cree, the teenager who sees June and her friend Val
head out into the bay on their raft, mourns his father Marcus, shot during the “now dormant
drug wars.” Tending to his father’s old fishing boat, Cree believes: “a captain always returns
to his ship” (9). At the same time, his mother Gloria, one of a line of women in the family
who make “extra cash communicating with the dead” (66), seeks Marcus’ spirit near the
bench where he caught the stray bullet. Musician Jonathan Sprouse, who finds Val under the
pier (26), transplants his guilt about his mother’s drowning onto the teenage girl (54). A
mysterious stranger called Ren, a gifted graffiti artist who helps Cree renovate Marcus’s boat,
has a dark secret for which he must atone. And June’s decision to speak through Monique’s
thoughts (156) is at first interpreted by Monique as a punishment for her snubbing June and
Val on the night of their disappearance, and later as a gift of mediation between the girls.
Underlying these traumas is the collective loss of former industries and residential spaces, a
loss which is, however, partial, fragmentary and haphazard, resulting in a palimpsestic
neighborhood of layers: “the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the
cobblestones [. . .] The new bars cannibalizing the old ones [. . .] The living walking on top of
the dead—the waterfront dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead—everyone still there. A
neighborhood of ghosts” (166). Visitation Street strips back the layers, revealing that
straightforward narratives of before and after are factitious, that “[t]here’s a difference
between dead and forgotten” (129) but also that while “[w]e all like to reach back into the
past,” there is “[n]o use in getting stuck” (144).
The apposite word above is “cannibalizing.” Pochoda’s novel contains many
examples of gentrification’s incorporative drive, its active deployment of the ghostly: “coiled
ropes and collapsed lobster traps” in The Dockyard; recently arrived hipsters “try[ing] on the
tough postures of the old waterfront” (19, 20); the harvest megamarket housed in a
nineteenth-century warehouse (110); the mermaid figurehead (166); “the strange junk the
newcomers seem to relish—busted taxidermy, Christmas lights, nautical refuse” (304). Such
objects are specters, and so demand that one recognize “what is disorderly within an
apparently straightforward temporal framework.” That is, they disrupt a nostalgic narrative of
befores and afters because, as Wolfreys says: “what returns is never simply a repetition that
recalls an anterior origin or presence, but is always an iterable supplement: repetition with a
difference.”49 Simultaneously de- and re-contextualized, the mermaid (to pursue this example
again) constitutes “habitation without proper inhabiting.” The use of this relic evokes its
displacement while destabilizing the spatiotemporal logic that has actively sought to displace
it, memorialize it, and fetishize its original, authentic status. To re-place it in the gentrified
bar is therefore to call into question any notion of origin/ality: thus “[the] house will always
be haunted rather than inhabited by the meaning of the original.” The mermaid is, in
Derrida’s Freudian terms, constructively melancholic in refusing the “triumphant phase of
mourning work” heralding the successful consignment of the relic to the past.50 Instead, the
object continues to shape the present and future. Even regarded as kitsch (as by some new
residents they surely are), nautical relics continue to disrupt. They are still fetishized for their
supposed oldness, quaintness or sentimentality, and yet their ghostliness anticipates any irony
attributed to them. Kitsch, after all, is also connected to nostalgia.
In a similar way to Another Brooklyn, as we shall see, Visitation Street employs such
ghostly traces not as romantic metaphors for vanished, authentic community but to question
narratives of origin and authenticity exploited in gentrification. In so doing, it demonstrates
gentrification’s messiness and provisionality, the ways in which to gentrify is to provoke
unexpected juxtapositions rather than smooth regenerations. Sometimes the effects,
particularly when gentrifiers prize kitsch, or gritty versions of authenticity, are amusing: Fadi
observes that “it’s getting harder to keep up with the trends. The hipsters now brown-bag Colt
45 down by the pier while old-timers from the projects cart cases of Pilsner Urquell to their
barbecues” (30). More often, the effects are profoundly discomfiting. As urban change
happens against the backdrop of tragic events, the main function of the ghostly elements in
the story is to highlight the social and material hierarchies and divisions disavowed but
required by gentrification.
Indeed, for all the ghosts on show, for all the voices from beyond the grave that
contribute to Red Hook’s music, the uncanniest visitations are feelings of displacement and
difference arising when characters are made to reflect on their wider communal relationships.
An early example acts as a premonition: as Val and June head for the water, singing, “the
brick warehouses and the basin throw the song back, distorting their voices so they sound
unfamiliar to themselves” (12). Later, Cree thinks about his involvement with Val and his
targeting as a police suspect, realising that his childhood Red Hook “has become unfamiliar”;
he feels suddenly “exposed, [. . .] marked” (75), knowing that now he will “become part of
every neighborhood shakedown” (73). He later expands on his feeling of unfamiliarity and
otherness: “now that Cree’s looking for Val, the place seems to have expanded. The gap
between the front and the back of the neighborhood has widened. For the first time, Cree
feels conspicuous on the waterside’s streets” (145). The very streets seem to reflect
socioeconomic and racial differences thrown into relief by June’s loss and the network of
unexpected interactions it has excited, and by the changing uses of Red Hook’s buildings. In
Fadi’s newsletter, what he initially regards as “neighborhood dialogue” descends into gossip
and scaremongering, accusations against black and Hispanic youths (108).
In the accentuating of these divisions lies the wisdom of Ren’s assertion: “Ghosts
aren’t the dead. They’re those the dead left behind” (252). The living are spectral in the sense
of their otherness, their marking as different in others’ eyes by material circumstances.
Understanding this is key to appreciating that gentrification’s aestheticization and
incorporation of ghostly artefacts represents an attempt to elide power relations and divisions
that nonetheless remain. As Ren, once again, astutely observes: “Looks like the same old
decrepitness to me. Poor’s still poor” (115). In the same conversation with Fadi, he ridicules
the imminent arrival of the cruise ship, Queen Mary: “shit’s pretending to be reborn. Cruise
ships? Is this shit for real?” (114). Rhetorical question or otherwise, the answer is “no.” The
Queen Mary is a deeply ambiguous symbol. With a name that anchors it in the colonial past,
its “hulking mass” connotes Red Hook’s supposed progress, the glamorous supersession of
the industrial past, but it is bound to occupy the same dockland spaces. As it arrives in the
harbor, “hundreds of dots of light” signify the bright, gentrified future, and yet most of the
ship is “lost to the fog and dark” (277). Already it has become “a vapory phantom” (283),
haunting the neighborhood even as it makes a facile promise for the future – one of many
visitations reminding the residents of inequities and divisions. It departs having “brought
little business and no real change” (302).
Visitation Street, then, uses ghosts to critique what Samuel Cohen describes as the
“beautiful American mistake of trying to claim the future – to integrate or to gentrify, to leave
things behind,” which “tries to deny contingency.”51 The novel exposes that denial, and in its
multi-perspectival form allows readers to know the complex communities of contingency,
connection and difference that construct the neighborhood, to understand that Red Hook is,
and always will be, both “on the verge” and “struggling against itself” (282). Though the
voices of the community might seem discordant, one must listen to them all for concordance
to emerge: the novel ends with this realisation, Fadi “listening for the melody of the local
noise, the grinding, rattling, slamming and silence. […] The voices over his shoulder [. . .]
finding their own harmony to lift this place up and carry it along” (304).
Another Brooklyn: Future Ghosts
Urban memory runs short, and it is hard to overstate how rough Bushwick was.52
The renovators—that’s a politer word for them—they’re a set of ghosts from the future haunting this
ghetto present.53
Bushwick, founded by the Dutch in 1661, was home throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to settlers from England, France, Scandinavia, Germany, and later
Russia and Poland. During the 1930s and 40s it housed a large number of Italian Americans.
The decades after the Second World War during which Another Brooklyn is set saw Italian
Americans migrating to Queens and a large influx of African Americans and Puerto Ricans.
They also saw economic difficulties and a severe deterioration in housing, as new
construction for incomers failed to match the demolition of old, unsafe buildings. As a result:
“[t]he neighborhood felt first overcrowded, as families moved in together when apartments
were demolished; then vacant and desolate, as ever more lots became empty.”54 In the 1970s
and 80s Bushwick gained its reputation for deprivation and crime.
Gentrification came relatively late to Bushwick – since “about 2005,” according to
Ellen Freudenheim. In boosterish language, Freudenheim says that “unpretty, crime- and
poverty-plagued Bushwick has gained unimaginable momentum in Brooklyn’s fast-growing
creative culture.” She locates its unique character in the redeployment and aestheticization of
industrial buildings: “There’s gritty industry here, but even the Tortilleria Chinantla taco
factory is decorated with a huge mural. Artists’ workspaces are wrought out of rough
industrial buildings.” Rhetorically, Freudenheim’s account of Bushwick’s gentrification is
consistent with countless others. Creative types at the forefront of regeneration are viewed as
pioneers; Bushwick is described as “on the contemporary frontiers of art and music.”55
“Grittiness” is employed in a manner which has since the 1990s signified “a direct experience
of life in the way that we have come to expect of authenticity.”56 Such perceived authenticity
serves as justification for the gentrifiers’ choice of location rather than as a marker of
material deprivation. Freudenheim makes minatory references to new real-estate
developments, leading to residents’ concerns about “the ethical and human issues of
displacement of older, poorer residents as moneyed newcomers roll in.” Also typical, and
crucial, is the elision in Freudenheim’s expression of these concerns: the failure to
acknowledge the longer process, the historical and economic continuities between these
creative, “collectivist” immigrants and the nascent supergentrification threatening to
transform the neighborhood once again. In this disavowal lies the truth of Freudenheim’s
claim that “[u]rban memory runs short.”57
Against the contemporary backdrop of Bushwick’s gentrification, Woodson’s Another
Brooklyn demands to be read as the reinstatement of long memory. A female coming-of-age
story in the tradition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl,
Brownstones (1959), the repeated assertion – “This is memory” (16, 53, 78, 169) – proclaims
the novel’s status as a form of memory. Memory is an act of representation not coterminous
with events themselves, and subject to the same slippages over time as any other type of
representation. This is why Woodson’s novel constantly shifts in time and space, its short,
poetic paragraphs and elliptical, italicized dialogue allowing the narrator, August, to travel
between the Tennessee of her childhood, the Bushwick of her adolescence and her adult life
outside Brooklyn, to recall and modify her memories as she narrates. Events, she realises,
simply happen; it is their mental revisiting that gives them affective power. Reflecting on her
mother’s death, August states: “I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the
memory” (1). Memory in Another Brooklyn is a process that shapes the narrative according to
its complex, liquid temporality and in this respect it functions as haunting, as repetition with
difference. According to Derrida memory, like a specter, is “[a] question of repetition,” and
“a specter is always a revenant [. . .] it begins by coming back.” More than this, “[t]he
memory is the future” because of the inevitability of its return beyond the present moment, in
revised form. And in a sense highly significant for the arguments presented here about
gentrification, “the specter is the future” because it reminds people of things they do not wish
to see return.58
Understanding the temporality of spectral memory is key to reading Woodson’s
depiction of neighborhood changes in Bushwick. As Derrida argues, the specter’s very non-
presence, or absent-presence “demands that one take its times and its history into
consideration, the singularity of its temporality or of its historicity.”59 The singularity of
Woodson’s treatment proceeds from the novel’s prefatory dedication: “For Bushwick (1970-
1990). In Memory.” The last phrase is deliberately ambiguous: the personalized Bushwick of
the author’s adolescence, literally and figuratively bracketed off from other possible versions,
exists in memory (in the pages of the book) but is also being honored as if deceased. And yet,
as the author knows, Bushwick breaks the bounds of the dedication; first, by continuing to
exist in reality after 1990, and secondly in the sense that even the fictionalized version cannot
be considered lost. The novel testifies to this truth and thus undermines its own dedication.
Far from participating in the triumphant mourning phase, the story constitutes a dynamic,
melancholic haunting, something that “acts without (physically) existing.”60 Clearly this is
important to the protagonist, making sense of her life through her reflections on the death of
her parents, her friendships with Sylvia, Angela and Gigi, and her identity as a black woman.
But it also sheds light on the novel’s title, and how the title adumbrates Woodson’s subtle
critique of gentrification.
The phrase “another Brooklyn” assumes, through the dedication, multiple
connotations. Filtered through August’s lyrical perspective, in which past, present and future
intermingle and haunt each other, the senses of these other Brooklyns are entangled in female
experience and mother-daughter relationships. When August first meets her friends, she
wants to believe that they are “standing steady” and that “no ghost mothers existed in their
pasts” (35). What she soon discovers is that they share maternal hauntings, though not always
from the past. Angela refuses to talk about her home life, and her mother is eventually found
dead on the roof of a project building (130); Sylvia is cowed into schoolgirl obedience by her
mother’s strictness and bourgeois ambition (105); Gigi’s mother is a mysterious woman “in
white patent leather go-go boots” who one day appears to whisk Gigi off to an audition (107).
Despite August’s claims that she and her friends “came by way of our mothers’ memories”
(55) and that she and her brother live “inside our backstories” (93), it becomes evident that
the girls live just as much inside their futures. Though they are “little girls in Mary Janes and
lace-up sneakers,” when they practise “walking in Gigi’s mother shoes” (71) August and her
friends are haunted by future womanhood, even as the image connects August to her absent
mother and her Tennessee childhood. Similarly, Sister Loretta, who comes to teach the
Qur’an, has a body that holds “promises of curves, of the soft and deep spaces I was just
beginning to understand” (90).
Just as dreams of womanhood inflect the girls’ adolescent friendship, so images of
better future lives haunt the days of the neighborhood residents: “Everywhere we looked, we
saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than
this place. As though there was another Brooklyn” (77). This alternative Brooklyn, which
overlaps with the post-1990 place ostensibly circumscribed by the novel’s dedication, also
co-exists with the darker borough of “longer nails and sharper blades” (61), where a soldier is
found dead of an overdose under Gigi’s stairwell (59), where the shoe repair man on Gates
Avenue tries to “steal glances at your legs and bare feet” (71) – the world of desperation, men
and potential violence. As August grows up and educates herself with the books at home, as
her friends go in different directions, she longs to leave this Brooklyn for “something more
complicated, bigger than this” (146). Her teenage dream is to study law, like Sylvia’s father.
Oppressive though Sylvia’s family life is, its bourgeois affluence – the French
etiquette teacher (100) and the “fresh baked bread” (104) – is significant. August describes
the house as “delicate and foreign” (104), referring both to the family’s Haitian origins and to
the strangeness of the socioeconomic disparities on display. That these material differences
are also ideological ones is made clear in the father’s references to “the Negro problem in
America” (102); in the mother’s withering looks which say to August, Gigi and Angela,
“Dreams are not for people who look like you” (103); and in the arrogance of Sylvia’s older
sister, who admonishes: “Don’t try to act like a dusty, dirty black American” (105). With
their paintings of Haitian and Biafran revolutionary leaders and their sense of superiority,
Sylvia’s family value their separateness from American society despite the father’s push for
his daughters to attend American universities and become doctors and lawyers. This is the
way they envisage “dreaming themselves out” of Bushwick.
Even as Woodson depicts “white flight” in the 1970s, the Italian, German and Irish
families August knows only by “their moving vans” (83), she shows, through contrasts
between Sylvia and her friends, the diversity of black experience in Bushwick in a pre-
gentrification era. In material terms, Sylvia’s family lives a gentrified existence. This is
important precisely because it undermines certain axiomatic assumptions about the history of
gentrification: that middle-class white people moved out to the suburbs and that poor black
people remained in impoverished inner cities. Though in the broadest terms this is true (as
Ray Suarez and Walter Thabit show), Woodson’s insistence on remembering the minutiae of
black lives in their socioeconomic and cultural variety reveals that the gentrification process
was not teleological, that it was complex, fragmentary and tentative. Moreover, Another
Brooklyn exposes the racist generalizations underlying white flight and exploited by banks
and real estate speculators – the fallacious “tipping point” theory, the parading of black
families up and down streets to frighten white people into selling.61 August observes: “We
knew the songs the boys sang Ungawa, Black Power. Destroy! were just songs, not meant to
chase white people out of our neighborhood” (83). Such local details serve as correctives to
the dominant discourse by emphasizing lived, felt and remembered experience.
Beginning with a return, as the adult August, now an anthropologist of death rituals,
haunts her own past by visiting Brooklyn for her father’s funeral (4), the fragmentary, lyrical
narrative style, jumping in time and memory, expresses formally Woodson’s critique of
gentrification. By returning to its pre-history and emphasizing historical contingencies
and varied lived experiences of urban neighborhoods, Woodson challenges any sense of
gentrification’s inevitability or completeness, what Moskowitz calls its “ability to erase
collective memory” and any assumption that it is, in Sarah Schulman’s terms, “normal,
neutral, and value free.”62 At the time in which the story is set, gentrification is but a future
potential, one of many possibilities haunting the story’s margins like August’s mother,
Tennessee, and law school. In the novel’s specific temporality, gentrification becomes a
memory of the future, just another Brooklyn among many yet to emerge.
Paths Not Taken
Jonathan Lethem began this essay and I finish it with an “autobiographical gesture,” to use
Gordon’s term, that involves him. 63 Gordon argues that hauntings, margins, shadows and
other renegade images demand different methodologies; any analysis can, indeed must
entertain the fictive, affective and the autobiographical to appreciate the complexity of social
relations, to find different ways of looking, as I hope this essay has. In 2009, I interviewed
Lethem at his Brooklyn studio. After our conversation, the author walked me through the
neighborhoods that inspired him: Court Street and Smith Street; the Gowanus Canal, where
we stopped to look for guns; the former House of Detention; the Gowanus Houses, where we
found an uncanny object – a gold packing trunk, gleaming in the May sunshine. Lethem’s
theme was Brooklyn’s unsmoothed character: ancient Italian barbershops stubbornly clinging
on as other properties on the block became boutiques, independent cafés or artisanal bakeries;
sections of Smith Street where Spanish could still be heard despite Smith having long ago
ceased to be predominantly Hispanic; renovated brownstones overlooking housing projects.
Everywhere was evidence that attempts fully to displace the past had led only to strange
juxtapositions, chunks of memory, ghosts. This walk inspired my subsequent research on
Brooklyn, including this article.
Lethem and I took one route around Brooklyn, but there were many paths we might
have taken. In its intensity and density, the city multiplies both lived and missed experiences:
indeed, as Caygill writes, “experience of the City includes the lost choices and the missed
encounters.”64 Every path taken is shadowed by every theoretical alternative. Haunted at
every turn by things not done, people not met, lives not lived, individuals in Brooklyn fictions
learn that the realm of actual experience coexists and is partially constituted by a realm of
“unactualized possibles,” to use Nigel Thrift’s evocative term, a radical otherness that
shadows and informs identities.65 As we have seen, Harry Quirk is unable to recognise his
own otherness or his implication in the play of materiality and affect that drives changes in
Brooklyn. Committed to the realm of the actual and to his centrality as protagonist in a realist
narrative, Harry refuses fully to credit the (im)possible, the world of affect and ghosts,
despite the ghostly slippages in his own narration. Characters in the other novels – Cree, Ren
and Monique in Visitation Street, August in Another Brooklyn – become attuned to their
structures of feeling and to alternative narratives and histories. As we have seen, the
specificities of form are crucial. If the restricted first-person of The Astral is apt for a critique
of Quirk’s selfish gaze and his denial of his subject position, then Visitation Street’s
polyphony echoes the interconnections between disparate groups in a culturally and
economically diverse neighborhood, and Another Brooklyn’s elliptical, poetic, fragmentary
narrative shows the fragility of self, particularly from a position on the margins of messy
neighborhood change.
Fictions are “unactualized possibles” actualized in the process of reading. They are
“knowable communities” which render both substantial and insubstantial equally knowable,
thereby revealing their interdependence.66 In this specific sense they are ghostly, and the
novels explored here demonstrate the operability of the ghostly within gentrification and
capital. Texts emerge in specific historical situations and modes of production, of course. Just
as gentrification is adept at incorporating specters in the service of constructed authenticities,
so the fictional possibilities on offer are in part products of their material circumstances. As
Thrift states: “Events must take place within networks of power which have been constructed
precisely in order to ensure iterability.” Nonetheless, “the event does not end with these bare
facts”: there is always a surplus, a surprise, another way of looking.67 Brooklyn ghost stories
surprise by making spectral things – memory, belief, emotion, music – visible and knowable.
In so doing, they suggest that gentrification, though it seems inexorable, merely testifies to
communities constantly evolving. Other Brooklyns will always be possible.
1NOTES
Lethem in Steven Zeitchik, “A Brooklyn of the Soul,” Publishers Weekly 250.37 (2013), 37.2 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008),17, 8.3 Kate Christensen, The Astral (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 108. Subsequently by page number in the text.4 Ivy Pochoda, Visitation Street (London: Sceptre, 2014), 19. Subsequently by page number in the text.5 Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn (New York: Amistad, 2016), 21. Subsequently by page number in the text.6 Gordon, 8.7 Ibid, 18.8 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131.9 Gordon, 19.10 Elizabeth Gumport offers one of the few recent critiques of gentrification novels, but she chastises a range of disparate novels for the same perceived ideological weaknesses. “Gentrified Fiction,” N+1, 2 November, 2009, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/book-review/gentrified-fiction/11 Sharon Zukin, Naked Cities: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2912 Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 24, 429.13 Kitty Burns Florey, Solos (New York: Berkley, 2004), 51, 2, 200, 23.14 Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 23. 15 Zukin, xii.16 Pete Hamill, “Introduction,” The Brooklyn Reader: Thirty Writers Celebrate America’s Favourite Borough, ed. Andrea Wyatt Sexton and Alice Leccese Powers (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), xii.17 Judith DeSena, “Gentrification in Everyday Life in Brooklyn,” The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City, ed. Judith N. DeSena and Timothy Shortell (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 67.18 Zukin, xii; Edward Helmore, “Bullet-Hole Decor: the Brooklyn Bar on the Frontline of theGentrification Wars,” The Guardian, July 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/26/bullet-hole-summerhill-bar-brooklyn-gentrification-crown-heights 19 Lethem, 431.20 Zukin, 20.21 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), 37.22 Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxiii.23 Ibid, 9.24 Maria Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1,2.25 Maria Del Pilar Blanco, Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 20.26 Adrián E. Arancibia, Spirits in a Material World: Representations of Gentrification in U.S. Urban Centers (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, UC San Diego, 2012), 16.27 Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn’,” Textual Practice 16 (2002): 532.28 Derrida, 161.29 Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 3.30 Luckhurst, 535.31 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 7, 8.32 Del Pilar Blanco, 13.33 Luckhurst, 536.34 David Pinder, “Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City,” Ecumene 8 (2001): 9, 15.35 Del Pilar Blanco and Pereen, 16.36 Gordon, 19.37 Ellen Freudenheim, The Brooklyn Experience (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 159.
38 Daniel Handler, “The Pitfalls and Pleasures of the Current Realist Novel,” New York Times Book Review, July 31, 2011: 14.39 Derrida, 45.40 Kenneth T. Jackson and John B. Manbeck, The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn. 2nd Edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 145.41 Judith N. DeSena, The Gentrification and Inequality in Brooklyn: The New Kids on the Block (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 32.42 John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch and Marc Lamont Hill, Gentrifier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 17.43 DeSena, 2009, 1.44 Freudenheim, 184.45 Jackson and Manbeck, 189.46 Gabriel Cohen, Red Hook (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 220.47 Reggie Nadelson, Red Hook (London: Arrow Books, 2006), 93, 112.48 Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (London: Sceptre, 2014), 83, 40, 22.49 Wolfreys, 5, 19.50 Derrida 18, 21, 52.51 Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 184.52 Freudenheim, 94.53 Lethem, 136.54 Jackson and Manbeck, 48.55 Freudenheim, 92.56 Zukin, 53.57 Freudenheim, 93, 92.58 Derrida, 11, 37, 39.59 Ibid, 101.60 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 18.61 Walter Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 1.62 Peter Moskowitz, How To Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood (New York: Nation Books, 2017), 176; Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 51.63 Gordon, 41.64 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), 119.65 Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 14.66 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), 165.67 Thrift, 114.