A review by halschrieve
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman

4.0

Schulman puts forward a work that is part memoir, part impressionistic history, and part theory. One of the best things about this work is how it contextualizes a lot of AIDS history and complicates the heroic narrative of groups like Act Up by demonstrating how complicated and fraught the interactions between different activists and writers has been. She prints exchanges with Edmund White and Larry Kramer which demonstrate how so much of this history is subjective and contested and dramatic. Schulman's strength is that she is deeply empathetic and deeply interested in the lives and ethics of other people, and she is very committed to making things legible to others so she can expand the conversations she has to include as many people as possible. She puts forward a model of understanding the gentrification of the LES as related to the high turnover of housing after the deaths of people with AIDS, which I think is a valuable thing to think about, though of course there are other reasons (policy, zoning) that led to the possibility of the hypergentrification of Manhattan. Schulman's main oversight, in my opinion, is failing to indict earlier generations of artists as participating in gentrification in a way that made the very dramatic later turnover of neighborhoods possible. She attempts a kind of project of talk therapy to gentrifiers (?) which I think in the end is a futile one, though it's fiercely optimistic about human ability to recognize each other and understand what has happened to us.