Other neighbourhoods, other worlds: Gentrification and contemporary speculative fictions

Abstract

This article analyses three novels which employ speculative fictional elements to explore gentrification: Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad (2009), K. Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020). Although these novels are set in western cities – London and New York – Peacock argues that their speculative conventions reflect a conception of the city as ‘planetary’, as what Hyun Bang Shin describes ‘as unbounded space, understood as being constituted through its relationships, including flows and networks, with other places’. These novels use the trope of alternate worlds partly as metaphor for the clash of different views of authenticity in gentrifying spaces; partly as metaphor for diversity, migration and the alienation of global extraterritoriality; but also partly as a means of decentralizing the western city or to propose multiple, competing centralities at all spatial levels – domestic, neighbourhood, civic and beyond. In so doing they offer, in divergent ways, critiques of and symbolic alternatives to neo-liberal gentrification.