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Aimee Pozorski - Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification in American Literature, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2027

Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification in American Literature

Housing Trauma and the City

Av Aimee Pozorski

Del i serien Reading Trauma and Memory

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Beskrivning
Through a close reading of the figures of America’s disenfranchised and most vulnerable—the homeless, sex workers, drug addicts, and veterans—Aimee Pozorski argues that the contemporary American literary tradition has long testified to the traumatic effects of gentrification in the 20th and 21st centuries. The classic slogan from the 1960s, “sex, drugs, & rock n roll” was itself a specifically chosen critique of society. Retroactively, however, our literature tells us that sex work, sexually transmitted disease, and drug addiction are not the “sex” and “drugs” we come to associate with freedom of Woodstock. Rather, they are signs of human lives overlooked and unaccounted for, and now connotate danger and death more than freedom itself. Pozorski argues that where political and journalistic discourse falls short in showing the distinctions, the literary language of American texts function to defamiliarize the problem and shock readers into action. Taking a new approach to trauma studies and cultural criticism, Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification seeks to give a face to the faceless in our everyday lives and demands that we reassess our treatment of—and attitudes toward—suffering in the American city.
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Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English and Coordinator of the Racial Justice Certificate at Central Connecticut State University.

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Aimee Pozorski has written an encompassing, illuminating and passionate eye opener for readers enthralled by first- and second-hand memories of the tie-dyed sixties celebrated on t-shirts and by countless tribute bands or by the nostalgic, pastoral interstate-inspired dreams that fueled "white flight" to hastily erected suburbs a decade earlier. Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification shows in detail how the novelists, poets, playwrights, autobiographers, and ethnographers whose work Pozorski discusses expose and explain what Pozorski describes as "uncovered significant knowledge gaps" about displacement, addiction, and inequality in the U.S. during the decades beginning with and following the Great Depression and the Great Migration. Along with several of the texts Pozorski examines, Sex, Drugs and Gentrification calls upon readers to bear "counterwitness" to numerous depredations of governments and private capital in afflicting millions of our fellow Americans. By demonstrating how literary studies offer a vital form of muckraking, Pozorski's work seems destined to join a sub-canon that includes works like Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, Langston Hughes's "Ballad of the Landlord," and Michael Harrington's The Other America.

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