House of Pain: Home Invasion and the Gentrification Sublime

This article proceeds from the observation that fictional residents of homes in gentrifying neighbourhoods are rarely permitted to get too comfortable. They perceive their domestic havens always to be under threat: sometimes from malevolent invaders who are all too real, sometimes from less substantial phenomena - ghosts, memories, guilt, the incipient realisation that from another point of view, the gentrifier might also be regarded as an invader. Whatever form the invader takes, and whatever its intentions, by crossing the threshold (literally or metaphorically) it "disrupts boundaries"; the spatial hierarchies and strict divisions between the domestic and the outside are collapsed; and "normative understandings of 'home' are problematised" (Fiddler 2013, 282). Peacock examines the recurrence of home invasion tropes in two contemporary gentrification novels - Brian Platzer's Bed-Stuy is Burning (2017) and Cari Luna's The Revolution of Every Day (2013) - which focus on the domestic interior as a privileged, cathected signifying space both for gentrifiers and those resisting its predations. Home invasion, enacted, threatened or even just imagined, can result in a glimpse of what Peacock calls "the gentrification sublime," through which the resident is forced to recognise that the aesthetics and ethics of the domestic are produced by and interwoven with larger structural forces.