Gentrifier
About This Book
Anne Elizabeth Moore is a white writer and artist who, in 2016, received a free house from a Detroit arts organization. The gift came with the spirit of Virginia Woolf's argument about women needing money and private space to write, and it placed her in Banglatown, a Bangladeshi neighborhood inside a city whose population is mostly Black. The book looks at the moral knots involved in owning and selling property in such a setting, and it approaches them with careful analysis and a light, joking touch. Moore settles into the bungalow with her cats, tends a garden, and forms friendships with the neighborhood's young people. Through these daily ties she sees how a city can come apart and how a community can hold together. When the troubled past of the house comes to light, her own life is thrown off balance by the fallout of the housing crisis and by government corruption. The memoir is also about art, gender, work, and survival. Moore extends Woolf's ideas by asking what changes when the writer is queer, lives with chronic illness as Moore does, or is a South Asian immigrant like many of her neighbors. She also admits that jokes were her main way of coping. Part investigation, part comedy about a difficult city, and part love letter to girlhood, the book examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness. It asks whether anyone can truly win when violence and profit are bound up with success.
ISBN: 9781646220700
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