White, C orcid.org/0000-0003-3338-6010 (2021) Brooklyn Gentrification and the Act of Settling in Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles. Humanities, 10 (1). 26. ISSN 2076-0787
Abstract
Contemporary Brooklyn fictions, as a genre, are centrally concerned with gentrification and authenticity. This article situates literary Brooklyn and these concerns in relation to the United States at the national level. Thinking about Brooklyn’s gentrification demands one to be necessarily cognizant of the borough as a social, cultural, economic, and psychological space within the context of the US as a colonial nation-state. I argue that Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016), whose titular characters are enactors of both Brooklyn gentrification and a romanticized act of settlement in a fictional new nation-state, exemplifies this link between gentrification at the local level and a search for authenticity at the national level. Through a reading of the novel, I argue that Brooklyn gentrification is intimately bound with US settler colonialism, which in The Mandibles is sustained by the novel’s representations of finance and the whiteness of its narrative focalization.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 by the author Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Brooklyn; gentrification; settler colonialism; American literature; whiteness; financial fiction; Lionel Shriver; The Mandibles |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 05 Feb 2021 14:18 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:34 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/h10010026 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:170791 |