Gentry! Fication Or the Scene of the Crime

Poetry. African & African American Studies. GENTRY!FICATION: OR THE SCENE OF THE CRIME is a labyrinth full of folk tale and sign, definitions and the black subjects who violate them. In a time where many cities across the nation are undergoing massive shifts in who peoples them, particularly in sites once considered abandoned and without value, this book is weapon of memory a stew of din meant to haunt shallow notions of what has remained or been allowed to remain in geographies.

Poet and graphic designer Chaun Webster draws from an interest in the work of sign in graffiti, the layering of collage, and the visuality of text. These methods are used in Webster's work to investigate race—specifically the instability of blackness and black subjectivities, geography, memory, and the body. Correspondingly much of these investigations engage the question of absence, how to archive what is missing from the landscape particularly as a number of communities watch in real time, neighborhoods once populated with familiar presences, dissolve in the vernacular of redevelopment and its attendant colonial logic.