Concerning Violence: "Toward Camden" with Mercy Romero

This year, our theme is: “The Language of Violence and Resistance in a Transnational Perspective.”

Join us in a short group reading and discussion of Dr. Mercy Romero's book Toward Camden (2021), where we will discuss the methodology behind her study of the African-American and Puerto Rican neighborhood where she grew up and its exploration of organized abandonment and the politics of forgetting.

There will be catered lunch provided, as well as copies of her book for those who RSVP.

We hope you'll join us!

Mercy Romero is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Sonoma State University.

Synopsis of Toward Camden

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.

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Concerning Violence Research Group is funded by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) and the Stanford Humanities Center. Contact: jjlugar [at] stanford.edu (jjlugar[at]stanford[dot]edu)