Scripting Urbanity through Intertextuality and Consumerism in N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became: "I'm Really Going to Have to Watch Some Better Movies about New York". Issue 5 (20th October 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sulimma, Maria
• Is Part Of: Critique. Volume 63:Issue 5(2022)
• Page Start: 571
• Page End: 586
• Publication Date: 2022-10-20
• Subjects: Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Letterkunde; Engels; Electronic journals; 809.304
• DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1865866
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0011-1619

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Released at an unintentionally timely moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit its setting, New York City, the novel The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (2020) serves this article as a case study to demonstrate how fiction develops urban scripts for the ways we live in and imagine cities. The article focuses on its intertextual storytelling practices that seek to rescript previous literary and media histories of urban living, as well as the science fiction and horror genres to create more inclusive futures for readers of color and marginalized populations of cities under threat from gentrification. Engaging with themes from science fiction, in the works of H. P. Lovecraft or Nnedi Okorafor, as well as poems by Walt Whitman or Langston Hughes, the article argues that the novel rescripts urban multitudes, and imagines gentrification as a systemic, supernatural but also corporate evil in Lovecraftian form. In doing so, the novel makes the often-overlooked racial dimensions of gentrification more understandable to its readers and links these socioeconomic processes of displacement and privatization to storytelling.