With Amber Dean. "Unfixing Imaginings of the City: Art Gentrification, & Cultures of Surveillance" in Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, & Action, 4 (2)
Hamilton, so frequently imagined as “the city that once worked,” is now imagined as “the city in need of fixing.” The current drive “to fix” the downtown core in particular results in narrow imaginings that endorse a "cleansing" and uniformity aimed at displacing some of the city's most marginalized members. In this article, we examine an art exhibit that, through its deployment of images of surveillance, raises questions about the role of artists and the arts in gentrification at the local level, and leaves us asking: how do we go about unfixing the fixed images of the city, particularly of those who are imagined to live the lives of those fixed images?
Phanuel Antwi is an Assistant Professor in the University of British Columbia’s English department. His research and teaching interests include critical Black studies; Canadian literature; critical gender race and sexuality studies; settler colonial studies; and material studies.
Other publications from this author include: