“But I’m a woodworker:” confronting aesthetics of innocence with incommensurability in the gentrifying Hudson Valley

Keywords: gentrification, innocence, abolition
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

In April 2021, The New York Times named Hudson, NY as the top “metro-area” recieving COVID-19 related relocations in the United States. Hudson – an historic, diverse (post)industrial port city with just under 6000 people on the Hudson River – is in the middle of a protracted gentrification and displacement crisis. Underlying this current wave of pandemic migration is over 30 years of economic transition toward luxury arts and design retail tourism, made possible by an urban renewal strategy of historic preservation initiated in 1965, and spurred frequently by deadly crises in New York City. Drawing on municipal urban planning records, print media archives, local oral histories, and 6-years of scholar activist practice in Hudson, this paper identifies the settler moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012) imbedded in the aesthetic drivers of gentrification in Hudson and the Hudson Valley, including consumers’ desire for “authentic” connections to community, labor, landscape, and history available in the small cities and agrarian settings of the region. I argue that situating these contemporary crises within the long histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism along the Hudson River illuminates the need for abolitionist and decolonial organizing strategies informed by "incommensurability" (ibid). Citing multi-racial, working-class-led organizing work at the intersections of housing justice, food justice, and prison abolition in the Hudson Valley, I offer examples of abolitionist strategies that work toward unsettling innocence.