The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
by Sarah Schulman
University of California Press. 180 pages, $27.95
DURING A VISIT to New York City in 2007, I was taken to a party held in a dim basement apartment off Canal Street. The party was full of veterans of act up, men and women who had fought alongside each other during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. The host was James Wentzy, a videographer for act up. Taking a moment to explore, I stepped into a side room that seemed to be Wentzy’s office, lined from floor to ceiling with videotapes. Each was a different act up demonstration or zap, and recognizable names jumped from many labels: David Feinberg, Larry Kramer, Vito Russo, David Wojnarowicz. All I could think was, What history lives in this room! But also: Have these tapes been copied onto hard drives or at least DVDs?
I open with this anecdote because Sarah Schulman’s latest book, The Gentrification of the Mind, is in large part a set of provocative arguments about what gets preserved and promoted in American culture and why. Wentzy’s work is available in part through his own documentary film, Fight Back, Fight AIDS, and in institutions like the New York Public Library. As Schulman points out, though, thousands of artists who died from AIDS are being lost to memory. Using the destruction caused by AIDS as a jumping-off point, she examines why this is the case.
Part of the answer lies in a process of “gentrification” that has impacted both the physical geography and the political culture of New York. Gentrification has two components: a “concrete replacement process” whereby artists and creative types are physically displaced, and a “gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienate[s]people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.” Using this as her conceptual lens, Schulman examines such diverse topics as the whitewashing of act up and AIDS activism history, how AIDS deaths affected the economics and cultural makeup of New York City neighborhoods, the loss of rebellious queer art and literature, and the reasons why particular people are elevated to the status of mainstream spokesmen for the LGBT community. In all cases, she attempts to show how gentrification destroys diversity and complexity, and how its practitioners falsely see themselves as part of a natural process. In fact, gentrification is socially and politically engineered. Schulman’s focus is on what gets lost—or is actively destroyed—in these transformations.
Some parts of the book work better than others. The argument in the chapter “The Gentrification of Gay Politics” hinges largely on the admittedly defensible premise that Andrew Sullivan is oblivious to his privilege. In “Recognizing That They’re Gone,” Sarah Schulman’s personal recollections of David Feinberg, Stan Leventhal, Assotto Saint, and Kathy Acker, among others, are sharp and vivid, such as this epigrammatic summation of Feinberg’s writing: “David was so angry it was funny, until it became just pure pain.” But this chapter’s “catalog of loss” reads like a series of loosely connected anecdotes without the incisive analysis found elsewhere. In the end, Schulman is hopeful that gentrification has reached its peak and will soon be on the decline, but the basis for this hope is unclear.
These aspects detract little when compared to the importance of Schulman’s celebration of “the pleasures of being uncomfortable” through self-examination. In her last chapter, “Degentrification,” she attacks “the privilege of dominance, which is the privilege not to notice how our way of living affects less powerful people.” This privilege allows gentrification to occur and to be seen as the natural order. The gentrification of the mind prevents striking back against “this vague unknowingness,” but Schulman attacks this complacency and the culture of inequality that gives rise to it.
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Philip Clark is the co-editor of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS
