Abstract
Spoken word performance addressing gentrification and eviction encodes and embodies increasingly abstract and bureaucratically obfuscated processes of racialized dispossession in U.S. cities. Developing tropes across three works about housing precarity are read as poets’ attempts to identify the antagonists behind the digital wall of finance capital. Whereas the interactions of housing-insecure people with and within the housing market generate socially devalued identities, spoken word’s emphasis on “authenticity” requires poets to stand up as and for themselves as they wish to be (seen). In so doing, poets attempt to connect with audiences in real time to locate or reconstitute a stance as agents, however provisionally.
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Notes
- 1.
These data come from the Eviction Lab, an online clearing house of housing data run by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). Desmond’s team acknowledges that their data are incomplete. Although respected long-time housing activists like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project take issue with the Eviction Lab’s methodology—critiques that are valid and important—I am citing Desmond here because his work has brought the rates of eviction into the mainstream U.S. media.
- 2.
Jobs with Justice Education Fund and Private Equity Stakeholder Project 2021. https://www.jwj.org/our-work/research/taxpayer-subsidized-evictions.
- 3.
Mapping the extent of the financialization of rental housing in the U.S. is beyond the scope of this project. However, the Jobs with Justice Education Fund and Private Equity Stakeholder Project provide insight into the magnitude of the situation. In January 2021, they found that just “nineteen corporate landlords that rent apartments, each having more than 50,000 units, control nearly 1.2 million apartments together; while the top 5 corporate landlords renting single family homes control more than 200,000 housing units. These large corporate landlords are more likely than smaller landlords to evict their tenants, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Board of Atlanta. These giant players have all prospered, not only from the fire-sale prices at which these properties were acquired, but from rents that have increased faster than inflation over the last decade, taking an ever-greater cut of workers’ paychecks” (Jobs with Justice 6).
- 4.
- 5.
Much of the activism around housing insecurity in the U.S. is aimed at passing legislation requiring the state to provide legal counsel to tenants in housing court.
- 6.
Somers-Willett includes the rules for slam competitions in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (2009),141–48.
- 7.
See Somers-Willett (2014).
- 8.
- 9.
Atkinson is amplifying geographer Mark Davidson’s argument that the attempts of geographers and economists to “count” the number of people who are literally displaced from “abstract and commodified space” during processes of gentrification obfuscates “the social relations bound up in (urban) space and, importantly, the vital role these play in the attempt to create place and dwell” (Mark Davidson 2009, 232).
- 10.
In one of the available video recordings of this poem, this section incorporates a reference to the toxic residue left in the wake of Katrina: “Feels like a slow burn that only melts all your skin off ten years after the fact / Like colonization with a velvet glove.” A Scribe Called Quess, “Gentrification in 5 Parts: A Play on the Senses,” YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvL2nYZrb2I.
- 11.
American Federation of Teachers, Introduction to “The Track Record of the New Orleans Schools after Katrina,” https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/no_intro.pdf; Gary Sernovitz (2018).
- 12.
For a comprehensive overview of the active role of government in racial segregation in the United States, see Richard Rothstein (2017).
- 13.
The title of the poem is an address, with the abbreviation “Pl.” for “Place.”
- 14.
Stretch, Cynthia. Forthcoming. “Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S. Fiction. In American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire, eds. Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez. Leiden: Brill.
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Stretch, C. (2021). At Home on the Stage: Toward an Affective Geography of Gentrification and Eviction in U.S. Cities. In: Rys, M., Philipsen, B. (eds) Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_7
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