Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, University of California Press, Berkeley CA and London UK, 2012, 192 pages, $27.95, £19.95 hardback, $21.95, £14.95 paper, ISBN 9780520264779 (hardback), 9780520280069 (paper).

See Gerry Kearns's most recent Society & Space contributions: Governing Vitalities and the Security State, The Butler Affair and the Geopolitics of Identity, and Closed Space and Political Practice: Frederick Jackson Turner and Halford Mackinder

In Gentrification, Sarah Schulman praises novelist and activist Edmund White as “typical of community-based figures […]. He has always been out. He is self-aware. He has a history with activist organizing, while maintaining his individuality as an artist. He thinks in terms of the community, recognizes its trends and changes. He is available and accountable to the community, and as a consequence has had those kinds of difficult moments that accountable people experience […]. Most significantly, he believes in a gay male sexual culture that is not the same as heterosexual culture” (page 121). Schulman is a community-based writer. She has always been out. She has a history with the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She writes novels and plays that range from the social realism of People in Trouble (1990) to the inter-textual science fiction of The Mere Future (2009a). Many of her works engage in some way with lesbian life and activism in New York’s Lower East Side. Like White, Schulman takes her distance from straight culture, suggesting in one interview that queer lives have “no known form. Straight people [have] conventional narrative: romance, marriage, motherhood–but we have formal invention” (Conrad, 2013).

Schulman also makes herself accountable in much the way she describes White as doing, and the present book bears witness to those engagements. When Schulman decided to accept an invitation to give a keynote address to a gay and lesbian conference at Tel Aviv University, friends advised her to read about the boycott campaign (Kearns, 2013). She then wrote about the awkward and painful ways she re-examined her uncritical support for the actions of the state of Israel, about “coming to terms with Israel as an example of how a person can face her own supremacy ideology” (Schulman, 2012: 29-30). That account was intended as a chapter for the present book but one reviewer for the University of California Press was hostile to it, even “put[ting] quotation marks around statements that did not appear in my text and misrepresent[ing] my ideas” (ibid, page 30). Cut adrift, that chapter grew into a book of its own, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. In January 2013, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of New York City refused to host a discussion of that book. Schulman responded as a community-based writer might, expressing dismay “that after all my work in the community, I could be refused a platform to present a queer book” (Osborne, 2013a). Schulman has described what happened next:

“[f]ortunately, Tom Léger—a brilliant activist and the publisher at Topside Press—immediately put up a petition that automatically sent an email to Glennda Testone, the director of the Center, for each person that signed. Within two days she received a thousand emails” (Conrad, 2013).

Within a month the two-year ban on the Center hosting meetings with a Palestinian theme was rescinded and Schulman read from her book and answered questions about the boycott (Osborne, 2013b).

Schulman comprehends her community through a politics of place and of sexuality. In a brilliant reading of three of Schulman’s novels (1986a; 1990; 1995) through the lens of the historical imagination of Walter Benjamin, Diane Chisholm (2005) describes this intersection of place and sexuality as a lesbian bohemia. Chisholm reads Schulman as offering an account of the contradictory relations between lesbian bohemia and the dialectics of urbanism under capitalist relations. Gentrification of the Mind certainly takes this theme further, but it does so in ways that make it clear that the Lower East Side of New York City is very much a place and not only a space. There is a profound historical geography to the ways of living that Schulman articulates, celebrates, worries over, and mourns.

It is important to Schulman (1986b) that the Lower East Side has a history of socialist, feminist, peace, and Jewish activism, sometimes all in the same person. Some of these activists lived openly as lesbians. Cities provide opportunities for people to live more radical lives because of the tolerance that can attend living closely with difference. This promise of promiscuity is precisely what middle-class men feared about cities, and its absence was a large part of the lure of the suburbs. Men might commute to the cities, but their wives and children should lead privatized lives in the stratified space of dormitory towns. Schulman notes how after the Second World War, the GI bill funded and racist prejudice allowed the selective suburbanization of the white working class, leaving the inner city for the very poor and people of colour. This suburbanization set the scene for lesbian bohemia. In the first place, cities now provided a plethora of cheap residences alongside what they had always given, access to great art and a diversity of experience. Secondly, the familial domesticity of the suburbs put a premium on reproduction and heterosexuality. The homophobia of American families that resulted (Schulman, 2009b) drove many young people away from home towards the indifference of the city.

This is the context in which the Lower East Side became the locus of a radical experiment in urban living that makes Schulman so proud of her community. Two related forces, gentrification and AIDS, imperiled this experiment and both were fed by suburbanization. Gentrification is presented as urban regeneration. The spatial sorting that put wealthy residents in the suburbs and poor residents in the inner city was accompanied by a taxation regime that made the people of the inner city responsible for very many of the institutions and a large part of the welfare spending of the area, with the suburbs sitting pretty with little need and plenty of means. Without spatial redistribution, the city could be made to appear bankrupt, and New York City was. To address this dilemma the city authorities subsidized the construction of luxury housing so that rich people might be encouraged to settle in the city and thereby embellish its tax base. These folk, described recently by Schulman as “the children of white flight,” having been brought up in the suburbs now sought in the city the privatized homogeneity of their suburban childhood (Levine 2012). In another interview, Schulman spoke of the “dot-commers,” who “don’t understand what is to live together because they grew up in these individual houses,” and who thus make unreasonable demands upon their tenement neighbours (Arcade, Zehentner, Albelo 2012). The city deliberately allowed block-wide deterioration in order to provide developers with prime opportunities; appalling consequences ensued during the extensive interim (Wallace and Wallace, 2001).

In one respect, the AIDS epidemic was a sequela of urban neglect, but the homophobia of straight society was also a primary cause of the epidemic. In the film, Beyond Queer, Schulman describes her realization that homophobia was energizing a murderous inattention to the epidemic:

[I]t just became clear that these guys were dying because they were gay. And I had been treated so badly by my family for being gay, so badly. And I had suffered so much. And, it’s like, I knew that that’s why this was happening to them. I can’t really explain it more clearly than that. But it’s like this wall kind of melted and suddenly they needed help. And we needed it, we needed to confront this thing because it was the thing that had hurt us so much and now they were dying from it. It was the same thing. It was the abandonment of gay people by their families, or however you want to look at it. That’s what it was (Arcade, Zehentner, Albelo, 2012).

Out of such recognition and solidarity, and after five years of dying and pain, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power was created in March 1987, and Schulman gave her energy, creativity, and experience to the movement from the beginning. United in Anger (Hubbard 2012) is a film she and Jim Hubbard made about the history of ACT UP, and it should be required viewing for all students of Politics, Public Health, American History, and of Urban Geography. The film shows a diverse group of activists changing society through direct action. Much of the energy for the movement came from the unbidden neighbourliness and investment in change that distanced the city from the suburb. Schulman describes ACT UP as both rediscovering the strategy that Martin Luther King (1963) outlined in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (educate yourself, make demands that can be met, purify your movement, take direct action until your demands are met), and adding to it the tactics of working through affinity groups (Raphael 2012). Affinity groups allow people who wish to collaborate on a campaign and a set of related actions to draw from the members of the movement without committing all members. In United in Anger, Maxine Wolfe describes ACT UP as a powerful combination of “serious politics and joyful living” (Hubbard, 2012).

Because so many tenants died of AIDS, and because, unlike married couples, too few of their gay partners had any legal standing as co-tenants, the epidemic accelerated the population redistribution that is the geography of gentrification. Schulman notes that the “most gentrified” cities in the United States, New York and San Francisco, and within them the most gentrified neighbourhoods, were the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic (Gentrification, page 23). Gentrification was thus among both the causes and the consequences of the epidemic. But the suburbanization of the city transformed geographical imaginaries, how people understood cities and the politics and society that were possible in and from them. This gentrificaiton of the mind makes it more difficult to learn the lessons of AIDS, to retain the insights of ACT UP. If United in Anger is memory work, then, Gentrification of the Mind is a diagnosis of the roots of forgetting. The gentrified mind sees value as marketability, it sees society as a hierarchy based on wealth, it does not recognize complexity as unavoidable or diversity as valuable in itself, it understands social progress as the inevitable diffusion of liberal values, and it imagines that privilege is a return to individuals as just desserts for their efforts. It is, in short, the ideology that makes gentrification seem normal and inevitable.

Schulman tracks the symptoms of the gentrified mind in culture and politics. If people gain access to culture institutions only through the accreditation of a university degree, then buying an academic badge commodifies the creative process. The newly accredited creators imagine that their access to foundations, galleries, theatres, or grants is due to their personal worth and efforts, yet, this closes culture around those with inherited status or wealth. If the political process addresses a single type of person, then, social inclusion implies assimilation and denies difference. In a gentrified politics, gay people campaign for the right not to be different, to be as similar as possible to those persons and lifestyles comprehended by the heterosexual nuclear family. A gentrified literary culture sets as the standard for acceptability, the taste and proclivities of the white, middle-class consumer. Such a culture can too easily homogenize taste making innovation less likely and radical challenge unimaginable. A gentrified literary culture distinguishes between literature and pornography, corralling lesbian and gay literature away from the curious eyes of the general reader:

“only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it’s a window” (page 28).

Schulman understands gentrification as a contingent process. The 2008 collapse in property values will calm the winds of speculation. Perhaps, she suggests, new urban experiments can begin and older ones continue in the spaces abandoned mid-speculation. Perhaps, as she encourages, we can recall Jane Jacobs who faced up to Robert Moses and the regeneration plans that would have replaced with highways a very good share of the housing on the Lower East Side. Jane Jacobs won. Perhaps we can learn about gentrification and thereby sensitize ourselves, and others, to the supremacy ideology, to the uncritical assumption of homogeneity, and to the denial of sexual and social justice that is part of being comfortable with hegemonic forms of urban modernization.

Schulman ends Gentrification with a paeon to the “pleasures of being uncomfortable” (page 154). For academics studying these issues, the frankness with which Schulman describes the difficulty of getting her study published is one source of discomfort. Another is inherent in her defence of challenging art as necessary to “convey ideas so complex that derivative narrative constructions would not do those ideas justice” (page 16). Schulman’s brilliant book demands that we consider the place of universities in the gentrification of the mind, in reproducing privilege and normalizing homogeneity of perspective. As a very special community-based activist, artist, and intellectual, Schulman’s report from the trenches is both moving and fertile. 

References

Arcade P, S Zehentner, and AM Alebol (dirs) (2012) Beyond Queer [rough cut] (Lower East Side Biography Project, http://vimeo.com/54697932).

Chisholm D (2005) Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Conrad R (2013) The defiant prose of Sarah Schulman. e-flux journal 44, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-defiant-prose-of-sarah-schulman/.

Hubbard J (dir.) (2012) United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (New York: Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman).

Kearns G (2013) The Butler affair and the geopolitics of identity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2): 191-207.

King Jr ML (1963) Letter from a Birmingham Jail. http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Levine A (2012) Sarah Schulman: Awesome. Anne Levine Show (Outermost Radio, Provincetown MA), http://www.anneatnight.com/interviews/sarahschulman.mp3

Osborne D (2013a) LGBT Center bars Sarah Schulman reading. Gay City News 13 February, http://gaycitynews.com/lgbt-center-bars-sarah-schulman-reading/.

Osborne D (2013b) Sarah Schulman reads from “Israel/ Palestine” at Center. Gay City News 13 March, http://gaycitynews.com/sarah-schulman-reads-from-israel-palestine-at-center/.

Raphael K (2012) “United in Anger: An interview with Sarah Schulman and Cyd Nova. KPFA Women’s Magazine (KPFA Radio, Berkeley CA), http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/06/18/18715737.php.

Schulman S (1986a) Girls, Visions, and Everything. Seattle: Seal Press.

Schulman S (1986b) When we were very young: A walking tour through radical Jewish women’s history on the Lower East Side 1879-1919. In: Schulman S 1994, 125-148.

Schulman S (1990) People in Trouble. New York: Dutton.

Schulman S (1994) My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years. New York: Routledge.

Schulman S (1995) Rat Bohemia. New York: Dutton.

Schulman S (2009a) The Mere Future. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Schulman S (2009b) Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences. New York: New Press.

Schulman S (2012) Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Wallace D and R Wallace (2001) A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled. New York: Verso.