Urban Removal: Post-war U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literatures and Geographies of Struggle

Abstract

This dissertation argues that dispossession — understood as expropriation, enclosure, and/or displacement — functions as a racialized process that has operated flexibly in major U.S. cities since World War II. It treats novels as sites for creatively engaging the period of U.S. Urban Renewal from the 1940s to the 1980s, a salient geohistorical conjuncture in which race and housing were “renewed” and contested. It analyzes novels alongside histories of urban development, and place-based social movements to bring into view contestations about what counts as proper housing and who belongs in a city. Spotlighting four cities and four differently racialized groups, each chapter functions as a case study that allows for dissection of a particular history of racialized dispossession and the struggle against it. Treating novels and urban histories together, it accounts for liberatory geographies and imbricated histories of dispossessed groups in the U.S. city.