Sue Landers's Franklinstein Makes Poems Crucial to Cultural Preservation

At Jacket2, Davy Knittle writes about Sue Landers's Franklinstein, or the Making of a Modern Neighborhood (Roof Books, 2016), "a preservationist project that details where bodies have come into or avoided contact in shared presents and across time in the Northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown," where Landers grew up. Knittle notes that the cultural preservation practice Landers employs is a queering of the present; and he invokes historian Dolores Hayden’s 1995 The Power of Place as well as work by queer theorist Carolyn Dinshaw. An excerpt from this piece:

...The present of cities is always crowded. The cultural preservation for which Hayden advocates draws into that crowded present a subset of the marginalized narratives that have previously touched its built environment. Landers’s poems display how a queer experience of the selectively adhesive relationship between present and past is part of American cities and the practice of living in them. In Landers’s Germantown, doing the sort of cultural preservation that Hayden describes, a preservation focused on histories that are less visible in the built environment, is a process of looking for queer uses of space and time. If most urban cultural histories are not going to be preserved in the built environment, what Hayden advocates is in Dinshaw’s terms an eroding of the now, an expansion of the versions of the past that touch the present.

The subtitle of Franklinstein, “or, the Making of a Modern American Neighborhood,” echoes Stein’s The Making of Americans and suggests an accounting of how the neighborhood came to be, as it might inform narratives of the genesis of other neighborhoods. But there is no preserved record of all of the parts of that making, so Landers engages in the process of writing the book because it is the only context in which she can make her Germantowns touch. The poems are crucial to the preservation of those experiences and practices. But the book also offers a second sort of making — the creation or invention of Germantown from its lapsed and conflicting histories, a reparative Germantown that might reshape the version that exists in the present, and in the future. A central tenant of historic preservation is that “the urban past should be connected to the urban future.”[9] For many urban pasts, the primary site of that connectivity must be in forms other than buildings — in murals, in monuments, in exhibitions, in performance, in poems. In Franklinstein’s archive of Germantown, Landers populates an urban past against a narrative of disinvestment, against the narrative that there is nothing (left) to preserve...

Read the full review of Sue Landers's newest book at Jacket2.