This session presents new work on contemporary US cities in transition. It explores literary representations as reinterpretations and redefinitions of cities. In the session, these representations can be of cities as a whole – contained in ideas of the cities’ overall personalities or inherent natures. Equally, they can be of specific portions or aspects of those cities, notably here their localized racial geographies.

This panel is timely in investigating links between US urban histories and broader discourses of globalization: capital-driven hyper-gentrification; the world’s appetite for petrochemicals; the migration of industries between continents. More than a decade ago, Wai Chee Dimock, Laurence Buell, Susan Stanford Friedman and others announced the status of American literature as world literature. Work on literature and globalization by the likes of Philip Leonard (2013), Svend Erik Larsen (2017) and Paul Giles (2018) has since productively linked globalization’s post-Cold-War moment with trans-continental shifts in technology, national sovereignty and movements of people and animals. Still under-investigated, though, is the ongoing state of being globalized in specific imaginative geographies of post-1970 US cities.

In this session, the growing field of literary urban studies helps interweave discussions of individual cities’ cultural and geographic specifics with the global dimensions and shifts proposed for attention in work on “weak networks” of literature and globalization. Literary urban studies moves beyond the “small set of privileged and virtually unchallenged ‘first’ cities” (Finch, Ameel and Salmela 2017: 4) which have dominated critical discussions of urbanity, while most city-dwellers do not live in alpha metropolises like London, Paris, New York or Tokyo. Its profound interdisciplinarity with fields like urban history and geography, planning, and studies of the built environment is profound, yet it also returns insistently, as here, to the nature and content of the literary. From classic works by the likes of William Labov, Gerald Suttles and Carlo Rotella, to recent studies, for example by Jens Martin Gurr (2011), Anna Cottrell (2017) and Patricia Pye (2017), research in literary urban studies explores specific urban phenomena including sensory qualities, complexity, decay, temporal environments such as that of a decade, and the neighborhood. This session is proposed in cooperation with the lively and prolific current work of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS).

Each paper presented here addresses one US city as a case study: multiple fictions built on the personality or idea of St Louis; detective fiction of Houston; Latinx life writing of San Francisco. Each somehow links the 1970s and the 2020s. The papers thus complement and speak directly to one another. The session brings together papers by scholars at different career- stages based on different continents.

Delia Byrnes, in “Detecting Black Infrastructures in Attica Locke’s Jay Porter Novels” investigates detective fiction interrogating Houston’s racialized urban geographies. Locke’s Houston is an ultra-contemporary city (as a globalized energy frontier) also lodged in an extended historical span (extending the plantation regime). Infrastructures of Houston, largest US city without zoning laws, are those of highways fueled by the oil that made Houston a phenomenal success in the later twentieth century, leading to the ongoing construction of suburban tracts – some with names alluding to the Antebellum era – at increasing distance from the old Downtown. Locke calls Houston “a city that has a curious habit of razing its own history,” frequently annihilating Black neighborhoods and communities. Byrnes’s approaches to literary Houston operate via a synthesis of theories of African-American detective fiction with work on Black Geographies by scholars including Katherine McKitterick, Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright. A hidden core or skeleton of this Southern magnet city is excavated by Byrnes.

Whereas Houston boomed in the twentieth century, St Louis experienced dramatic and accelerating decline. Jason Finch’s paper “The Representational Challenges of a Declined City: Prose Fictions of St Louis, 1985 – 2017” thematizes the after-effects of perceived decline against the background of depopulation, rising crime rates, crises in housing provision, heavily racialized policing and an exodus of industrial employers, all apparent in St Louis since 1930. A large corpus of St Louis novels produced between the 1980s and the 2010s nuances St Louis’s status as, potentially, a loser city which still has appeal. City personality is reached using techniques from literary urban studies and the author’s own notion of Deep Locational Criticism. Do such fictions give back to St Louis and comparable cities a “right to the city,” allowing them to be themselves, not secondary in American stories dominated by the coastal metropolises? Perhaps they instead block any achievement of fully “placed” status.

Cynthia Garcia, finally, addresses a city more culturally overdetermined than either Houston or St Louis, namely San Francisco. Avoiding typical filmic and literary images of the first Californian metropolis, she examines the idea of the barrio specifically there, in San Francisco. More than in either Byrnes’s paper or Finch’s, a single neighborhood in the city is in focus, namely the Mission District. Garcia juxtaposes this area’s dynamic Pan-Latinx past with the present struggles of those able to remain over a timespan during which the Mission District has become a site of hyper-gentrification. Her primary texts are diverse, consisting of a work of semi-autobiographical prose by Arturo Islas dating from 1973 and a 2016 collection of poetry and prose by Cathy Arellano. In considering how community could exist both within and beyond a physical neighborhood such as the Mission District, Garcia expands the interests of the session towards dialogues between the urban material and imaginary.

This session will launch a richly informed discussion of the highs and lows of cities in an overall American urban poetics itself constructed around winners and losers. The varied make-up of the panel, including two scholars based in the US and one based in Europe, and the alternative modes of considering the material outlined in this description of the session, with contribute equally well to this discussion. We hope to meet in Seattle at the MLA and thus bring our discussions of three core American regional hubs into alignment with a fourth, in the Pacific Northwest.