Brooklyn Gentrification and the Act of Settling in Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles

Bibliographic Data

ID20248447
AuthorsCarl White (0000-0003-3338-6010, University of Leeds, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume10
Issue1
Pages26
Publication date2021-02-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h10010026
OpenAlexW138546647
LanguageEN
References cited16

Contemporary Brooklyn fictions, as a genre, are centrally concerned with gentrification and authenticity. This article situates literary Brooklyn and these concerns in relation to the United States at the national level. Thinking about Brooklyn’s gentrification demands one to be necessarily cognizant of the borough as a social, cultural, economic, and psychological space within the context of the US as a colonial nation-state. I argue that Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016), whose titular characters are enactors of both Brooklyn gentrification and a romanticized act of settlement in a fictional new nation-state, exemplifies this link between gentrification at the local level and a search for authenticity at the national level. Through a reading of the novel, I argue that Brooklyn gentrification is intimately bound with US settler colonialism, which in The Mandibles is sustained by the novel’s representations of finance and the whiteness of its narrative focalization

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Gentrification · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Public Spaces through Art · Urban Planning and Governance · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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