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.