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.

摘要

小说《我们成为的城市》在 COVID-19 大流行袭击纽约市时无意中及时发布作者 NK Jemisin（2020 年）将本文作为案例研究，展示小说如何根据我们在城市中的生活方式和对城市的想象来发展城市剧本。这篇文章着重于其互文叙事实践，这些实践试图重写以往关于城市生活的文学和媒体历史，以及科幻小说和恐怖小说类型，以为有色人种读者和受到中产阶级化威胁的城市边缘化人群创造更具包容性的未来。这篇文章结合了 HP Lovecraft 或 Nnedi Okorafor 的作品中的科幻小说主题，以及沃尔特惠特曼或兰斯顿休斯的诗歌，认为这部小说重写了城市人群，并将中产阶级化想象为一种系统的、超自然的但也是企业的罪恶以洛夫克拉夫特的形式。在这样做，