Toward Camden
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family’s house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city’s vacant lots withhold.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Romero, a professor of American Literature and American Studies at Sonoma State University, combines incisive political commentary, cultural criticism, and memoir in her vibrant debut, a collection of essays about her hometown of Camden, N.J. She considers the city's long history, from being a stop along the middle passage during the Atlantic slave trade to contemporary waterfront revitalization projects, as well as the effects of displacement, gentrification, urban renewal, and policing in a city beset with poverty, blight, and violence. In "Demolition Futures," she visits her childhood home and reflects on the changing landscape, wondering what it would "mean to dwell at a different meaning of Camden's unthinkable, its vacant lands." In "Halfway Houses," she visits the Walt Whitman House and considers the life and work of Eleanor Ray, a woman who lived next door and curated it. Along the way, Romero references a slew of artists, including photographer Camilo Jose Vergara and writer Fred Moten, tactfully blending a sharp critical eye with a memoirist's moving touch. Elegiac yet hopeful, this meditation is full of power.
