Maria Sulimma is Tenure Track Professor of North American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg. Her research interests span (feminist) media studies, urban studies, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and co-editor of City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures. (with Barbara Buchenau and Jens Martin Gurr; Ohio State University Press, 2023). Her recent work is on storytelling and gentrification.

Following Anna Tsing’s method that “big histories are always best told through insistent, if humble, details” (2015, 111), this project examines how contemporary literature represents leisure as a key site through which urban transformation becomes visible. I argue that stories about gentrification rarely come in the form of what could be called gentrification narratives but rather occur in marginal passages that serve characterization or world-building purposes and complicate narrative practices related to tellability or narrative events. While gentrification is often analyzed through housing markets, displacement, and redevelopment, this talk shifts attention to seemingly trivial practices of consumption and recreation such as coffee drinking, gardening, or walking a dog to depict complex, systematic urban change. The seemingly trivial, the talk suggests, often reveals the deepest struggles over space, access, and urban futures.