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Windows on the World: the Aesthetics of Difference in Neoliberal New York

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Windows on the World: the Aesthetics of Difference in Neoliberal New York City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Windows on the World: The Aesthetics of Difference in Neoliberal New York Nicholas Gamso Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1318 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Windows on the World: The Aesthetics of Difference in Neoliberal New York by Nicholas Gamso A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii c. 2016 Nicholas Gamso All Rights Reserved iii Windows on the World: The Aesthetics of Difference in Neoliberal New York by Nicholas Gamso This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________________________ ____________ Prof. Kandice Chuh, Chair of Examining Committee Date _______________________________________________ ____________ Prof. Mario DiGangi, Executive Officer, English Program Date Examining Committee Prof. Eric Lott, English, CUNY GC Prof. Peter Hitchcock, English, CUNY GC Prof. Claire Bishop, Art History, CUNY GC Prof. May Joseph, Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute iv Abstract Windows on the World: The Aesthetics of Difference in Neoliberal New York by Nicholas Gamso Advisor: Professor Kandice Chuh This dissertation seeks to refine critical methods for interpreting global cities and their cultures, charting an aesthetic history of neoliberal New York — from the 1929 regional plan to the present. Surveying a range of literature, art criticism, and planning discourse, I argue that the global has served as the dominant motif of spatial production and political power during this watershed era. I trace this argument through analyses of midcentury planning’s global spatial imaginings, gentrification and imperial metaphor, transnational encounter in World literature, and the city’s contemporary waste and recourse imaginaries. While I follow the Marxist account of the New York’s neoliberalization, I depart at the point of methodology by taking difference as a critical prism for interpreting urban space and conceiving political options. I make this case in light of writings by the urban ecologist Jane Jacobs, for whom differentiated experience served to problematize the certitudes of consensual planning, and follow it through analyses of objects and the publics they generate. I address the production and reception of works by Kara Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Al Diaz; filmmakers Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki; and writers Teju Cole, Edwidge Danticat, and Joseph O’Neill. v Acknowledgements Kandice Chuh, who directed this dissertation, has shown me extraordinary personal and intellectual support and generosity. In addition to providing structure for the daily struggle to write, she has for several years sustained with me challenging and surprising conversation. I cannot express enough my gratitude. Eric Lott, Peter Hitchcock, May Joseph, and Claire Bishop are a marvelously erudite and garrulous committee. They take me seriously and have given me lots of their time. Their mentorship has been transformative. Claire has been a particularly strident and generous reader. Several other instructors have been instrumental to the many projects that culminated in this dissertation. These include Ammiel Alcalay, Meena Alexander, Arjun Appadurai at NYU, Ashley Dawson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Marnia Lazreg, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Neil Smith, who was the first to introduce me to the writings of Henri Lefebvre and whose cheerful vitriol haunts still my encounters and wanderings on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn. Mario DiGangi, Carrie Hintz, Hildegard Hoeller, Alan Vardy, and especially Duncan Farherty have been exceedingly helpful at the Graduate Center, as have Anne Ellis, Louise Lennihan, and Rachel Sponzo. Gloria Fisk, Amy Wan, Glenn Berger, Steve Kruger, and Kim Smith at Queens College, Aisha Williams at Medgar Evers College, and Tom Peele at City College have been invaluable supporters. Nancy Silverman has proven an especially committed ally and a friend. I owe thanks to the staffs of the Center for the Humanities and the Advanced Research Collaborative, which provided financial support, to the New York Public Library and the Chicago Film Archives, and to the organizers of panels at the American Comparative Literature Association and the American Studies Association. Several classmates read drafts of this work. Especially the comments of Briana Brickley, Chris Eng, Melissa Pruksachart, and Frances Tran improved it immeasurably. The support also of my friends from the Postcolonial Studies Group at the Graduate Center—Ashna Ali, Tracey Riley, vi and Ian Foster — has proven vital. A number of other friends and colleagues have been great sources of love and kindness throughout the writing of this dissertation. Without naming their every contribution to the state of my mental health or the quality of this manuscript (for a number of them contributed to both), I list them here: Bryce Renninger, Greg Stuart, Maria Stracke, Mike Granger, Alex Werner-Colan, Anahi Douglas, Kristin Moriah, Margaret Galvan, Maura McGee, Kristina Huang, and Jonah Mitropolis; Lucia Stavros, Madeleine Kuhns, Jen Larson, Laura Burns, Katherine Champagne, Nicole Charky, Paul Nappier, Nellie Sires, Austin Radcliffe, and Line El Dirini; and Barbara and Jim Chesney and John and Maureen Brown. This project would not have been possible without Marjorie Gamso, who died in 2011 but who remains a source of inspiration. With her friend Andrew Gurian and her companion Philip Beitchman, Marjorie offered me a window into New York’s avant-garde cultures and their practices of recuperation and irony. Special thanks is deserved, also, by Jonas Gamso, who taught me how to argue; by Jeffrey Gamso, who taught me how to write; and by my mother, Marietta Morrissey — my most consummate advisor, creditor, defender, and therapist — who taught me how to make a life out of this work and to do so with grace and a clear head. This project is dedicated to her. Last of all, a word of gratitude and affection to Spot, whose every keen is the very ontology of friendship: good dog. vii Contents Prologue: Kara Walker in Williamsburg 1 Introduction: The Aesthetics of Difference 8 Times Square Reds, Global City Blues City-As-School (In)difference and Totality To Turn the World on its Head Aesthetics and Subjectivization In Brief (chapter descriptions) 1. World of Maps: Jane Jacobs in the Global City 59 International Aeriality The Unraveling City The Long Neoliberal Turn How Does Neoliberalism Look? Difference in a Common World Neighbors 2. Same Old Shit: Basquiat Against the Aesthetic Consensus 103 The Radiant Child Art, Gentrification, and the Frontier Myth Urban Cultures and Imperial Temporalities Aesthetics and the Neoliberal Paradigm Dissensus and Difference The Writing on the Wall 3. Too Much with Us: The Over-Exposure of World Literature 150 An Incessant Loudness Cosmopolitics and Encounter Lost and Safe On Exile and Community 4. The Production of Nature, Revisited: On Cities, Ruins, Cinema 185 Representational Matter(s) Subjects of Ruin A Note on Ecology and Postmodernism Cinema and Distended Aesthetics Conclusion: The Global University 220 Bibliography 234 viii “The ‘meaning’ of life is not to be found in anything other than life itself.” Henri Lefebvre 1 Prologue KARA WALKER IN WILLIAMSBURG The skeleton of Williamsburg's Domino Sugar Refining Plant looms over the East River, shrouded in an orange net. It will be converted to condos and an office park later this year. From the windows of an adjacent building reads the plea “Save Domino.” One of the most celebrated installations in recent memory — A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby — occupied the site during the Summer of 2014, but has since been cleared away. At the center of the installation was a massive polystyrene structure, a sphinx, to which the artist Kara Walker affixed some thirty tons of sugar. It stood thirty-five feet tall. The face of this sphinx, the eponymous “Sugar Baby,” was carved by Walker into a solemn death mask that was also a caricature — an enslaved woman with a broad nose and big lips, a scarf tied in a knot on her head, her eyes empty. The sphinx’s body was striking in its detail, her breasts and buttocks and vulva exposed before the public. Each day, hundreds of spectators had taken pictures, some laughing and aping, some in quiet contemplation, some whose faces were blank or ruddy with sweat and who made no expression at all. Around the sphinx, Walker had assembled fifteen figures, hard candy cast in the shape of enslaved boys carrying buckets in their arms, bales on their backs. During visiting hours, the space was lit by the summer’s hot, late- afternoon sun, which, in a surprise unremarked upon in most reviews of the piece, cascaded through the high windows of the factory’s western wall, illuminating the crystalline figures and precipitating their slow dissolution. Three were melted and ruined beyond recognition before the sphinx — itself eroded, yellowed, its skeleton showing
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