Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (2011), as well as the novel Moth; or how I came to be with you again (2013) and Horror Vacui: Poems (2006).
Heise applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel, and reported the following:
Page ninety-nine takes one to the book’s second chapter that analyzes the recent transformations of Manhattan’s Chinatown and the corresponding transformations of the neighborhood’s crime literature. There one finds the following:Visit Thomas Heise's website and follow him on Twitter.The reductive idea that cities change and that change just kind of happens obscures the questions of who or what causes them to change and who benefits from the changes. These are profoundly political questions that go to the heart of issues over power and representation that lay bare the truth that nothing about the redevelopment and gentrification of neighborhoods is natural. The urban ecosystem is itself, of course, not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a highly gendered and racialized capitalistic structure maintained in place by political and legal choices that have been made by humans and can be remade by them.The “page 99 test” captures one of The Gentrification Plot’s central arguments about urban political economy. I argue that the two main drivers of the post-1990s transformation of New York City was the punitive “broken windows” policing implemented by the Giuliani Administration and the neoliberal real-estate development policies that followed under Bloomberg once formerly “unruly” areas of the city, such as Chinatown, were pacified for investment. Page ninety-nine is one of the places in the book where I restate that claim. The remainder of the page begins to dive into the Museum of Chinese in America’s oral histories of crime and gentrification in which residents reflect on buildings that have been central to Chinatown’s history. The chapter then turns to how Chinese-American crime writers have sought to preserve the old Chinatown textually as its fades from memory with the relentless gentrification of the neighborhood in the early 2000s.
One of those choices is the kind of policing that is implemented, another the kind of development that is permitted.
The argument on page ninety-nine is framed by the foundational question that I try to answer in The Gentrification Plot. That’s the question of what contemporary crime novelists write about when there seemingly isn’t much crime to write about anymore. What story do they tell when the narrative of the city as a site of decay and danger has been replaced by a boosterish narrative of postindustrial urban revitalization. The answer to that question is what I call “the gentrification plot,” crime fiction’s new stories of urban displacement, community erosion, and cultural erasure, stories traceable in one form or another to the socioeconomic transformations of the city. The Gentrification Plot is about changes to a genre, but it understands these changes as inseparable from the material changes to the city. Each of its chapters is dedicated to a city neighborhood—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant—that has been of historical importance to New York’s diverse communities. It is at the neighborhood level that abstract economic processes become visible. It’s there that we espy the layered histories of a city, its demographic turnover, its modes of production becoming outmoded, the nuts-and-bolts factory that shuts down and reopens as live-work condos or a hive of WeWorkers clicking away at desks rented by the hour. To see neoliberal urbanism in action, look at the neighborhood. That’s where contemporary crime writers look.
--Marshal Zeringue
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