Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

Introduction

The neighborhood of Harlem, in northern Manhattan, is the most famous historically Black neighborhood in the United States, and perhaps the world. Like the rest of New York City, it has experienced a rapidly paced, sweeping gentrification that seemed improbable a few decades ago, given its reputation as an impoverished, dangerous ghetto. Harlem’s gentrification is hotly contested through political mobilization and discursively through communal “intramural dialogue” (Spillers, 2003) taking place constantly in political debates, in daily interactions, and in local media and cultural life. That dialogue is closely entwined with long-time debates extending at least from the period of American Reconstruction about capitalism and self-determination, the class politics of Black communities, respectability politics, and the meanings and uses of Black collective memory and creativity. For some, the displacements of gentrification are proof that the American model of market-based, elite-driven redevelopment is fundamentally anti-Black and needs to be challenged with strategies of spatial de-commodification and community control, while others view it as a challenge of Black political and economic efficacy to exercise control over development processes. Harlem’s gentrification creates a heightened sense of crisis and confusion around these entrenched controversies, at least in part because the complexities of race and class solidarity within the Black community can make it hard to parse the communal benefits and losses associated with the community’s transformation.

This article examines the complex conduct of this intramural dialogue about Harlem’s gentrification as it is carried out on the recent Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. In his ethnography of the class relations of Harlem’s gentrification, Jackson (2001) notes that media representations of Blackness and Harlem are integral to ongoing intramural dialogue about collective identity, solidarity, and the inequities of gentrification. Harlemites negotiate race and class relations boundaries performatively, using cues from media such as Black Entertainment Television, or hip-hop videos to contextualize their race and class understandings. How they shaped understandings of race and class relations is complex. Performative cues of race and class could sharpen class boundaries, but people also used them in projects of racial solidarity, invoking certain images and products to question and undermine problematic racialized depictions of Harlem and Black people.

When it debuted on Netflix in 2016, Luke Cage consciously offered compelling celebrations of Black community, Black masculinity, and of Harlem’s role as a cradle of Black creative genius. Many commentators noted the strongly allegorical, didactic qualities of the series; indeed, the generally popular series was also criticized for being “preachy” (Bastién, 2018b). Yet, in rewatching the series, what emerges clearly is how the series critiques the contradictory, violent reality of gentrification. The development of a critique of gentrification is tied to the broader ways that the series creators and writers, most of them African American, interrogate their own role as creators of a virtual Harlem that will influence the marketing and desirability of the real one. The result is a superhero story, focused on Black American experience, that is also an allegory about the real and false choices and opportunities of a gentrified neighborhood. It is, at least in part, a conversation between the show’s creators and viewers that offers guidance to parse the multiple dimensions of authentic Blackness, Black history, and community, specifically as they are deployed to make claims for political legitimacy and market value.

The World of Harlem and Harlemworld

The politics of memory and culture are especially fraught in Harlem, the ur-neighborhood of African American experience, and indeed the global Black diaspora. As a major point of arrival for Black Americans during the Great Migration, as well as for Caribbean, Latin American, and African migrants throughout the 20th century, it was the epicenter of the literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. In most American cities, spaces historically defined as African American history are viewed as fungible and problematically linked to poverty and decline, but Harlem is a racialized neighborhood that is also indelibly and proudly linked to Black survival and flourishing.

The fight to maintain it as a Black neighborhood as gentrification progresses is complicated by its layered history and complex geography of class and ethnicity. Jackson elaborates the contentions related to place identity and history that shape disputes across class and increasingly race, as more White people move into the neighborhood. Everyday behaviors and performative gestures that define the Black community have as much to do with class relations between middle-class and working-class Black residents, as they do with encroaching White gentrifiers. In Jackson’s account, middle-class Blackness and the presumed role of middle-class Blacks as exercising moral and political leadership for working-class people are as contested as White encroachment. Harlem’s gentrification is facilitated in part by marketing it to middle-class professional African Americans and to foreign-born Black and Latinx immigrants, who find the refurbished spaces of Harlem attractive. As middle-class people of color begin to settle there, this also signals to diversity-minded middle-class Whites that Harlem is becoming “safe” and more desirable. In addition, much of Harlem’s redevelopment—most controversially the sweeping overhaul of the storied 125th street commercial corridor that swept out local businesses and street vendors to make room for corporate retail—was negotiated and supported by Harlem’s political and institutional elites. Community development corporations affiliated with established religious institutions, and veteran politicians who saw themselves as bringing housing and amenities that would benefit Harlem’s Black middle class created conditions for widespread displacement of Harlem’s poor and working class (Goldstein, 2017; Gorrild et al., 2008). Thus, Harlem natives must constantly dispute that Black-led market rate gentrification is “inclusive,” by emphasizing their different class needs and moral claims. The feeling of class betrayal of the poor and working class by the aspirational middle class is complicated to process in intramural dialogues because the Black middle class is so central to political and institutional life, and to Black representationality (Boyd, 2005). Celebration of the successful is a collectively understood way to undo White supremacist depictions that fix on Black poverty and cultural deficiency. This presumed representationality of the Black middle class in Harlem and elsewhere extends all the way back to post-Emancipation debates about how to “uplift the race.” Indeed, the Harlem Renaissance was in part a class project by a Black intelligentsia to mold historical experience and rural folk culture into a Black modernist cultural movement (Favor, 1999). In works like Ellison’s Invisible Man, for example, we can see these fraught class dynamics being excavated as the nameless Black narrator is hounded not only by violent White supremacy but also by Harlem’s lumpen proletariat mob.

The race and class contestations of Harlem’s gentrification inform the complex multilayered feedback loops associated with its cultural meanings, which saturate both everyday discourses of place in the neighborhood and wider representational discourse. The title of Jackson’s books Harlemworld refers to the mimetic quality of Harlem as a touchstone of Black experience. In the 1997 hit album “Harlem World” by the rapper Mase, Harlem is invoked as a place belonging to artists at their pinnacle. Harlem as a place of Black success is a trope that is exploited by Harlem’s gentrifiers, who use it to promote market rate housing for a Black middle-class incoming gentry, and by gentrification resisters, who use this history to challenge the closing of the neighborhood’s opportunities to working-class strivers. Yet, this latter group confronts the limits of Harlem’s representationality, which is tightly wound up the shared, often unexamined homilies of Black pride and uplift that empower a “respectable” Black middle class to represent them.

Although Luke Cage is often discussed as a show that is about the Black experience generally, the show has an extraordinary amount to say about the cultural politics of gentrification in Harlem. Filmed in Harlem, and helmed by a Black showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker, with a mostly Black team of writers, the show often centers the urgent questions associated with its gentrification: Who profits? What will be lost? These questions arise as the superhero Luke Cage comes to terms with his super abilities and confronts the adversaries who themselves are obsessed with profiting from Harlem. The next section discusses the origins of the Luke Cage character and how the show’s Harlem has been reimagined. The second part of the article turns to an analysis of the ways the show’s writers use character mirroring and contrast to bring out a subtle, textured account of the market-based violence of gentrification, linking stereotypical superhero violence to market processes and the aspirational rage of Luke, and his antagonist, Mariah Dillard.

Luke Cage as Harlem’s Hero

Luke Cage as “Power Man” debuted in 1972 as a character that spoke to both the blaxploitation aesthetic and the radical Black power movement of the era. Luke Cage reflected the popularity of the Blaxploitation genre as well as the cautious “middle way” liberalism of his White creators. His origin story is highlighted by both White supremacy—he is framed and jailed, and then transformed through an experiment that goes awry because of a murderous White jailer—and Black exceptionalism, as while imprisoned, Luke refuses to be radicalized by his fellow inmates (Bealer, 2017). He is both a marginalized, misunderstood protagonist and someone who can be understood as sympathetic and in tune with prevalent American values.

Cage from the beginning was a representation of a proletarian Black man experiencing White supremacy. Black Panther, whose character was introduced several years before Luke Cage, imagines a Black hero who lives outside the influence of racism, but Luke Cage symbolizes Black racial formation in America (Nama, 2011).

Originally portrayed with an afro, metal tiara, and bright yellow shirt, and with over the top “ghetto” slang, Luke was popular through the blaxploitation era but eventually was canceled by Marvel in the early 1990s. He remained a popular cult character among comics aficionados and was reimagined and successfully revived in the early 2000s (Riesman, 2016). Influenced by the popularity of the 2000 film Shaft, starring the sharply dressed, understated Samuel L. Jackson, “new” Luke is soft spoken and mature, with a goatee and shaved head and stylish street clothes.

Coker described Luke Cage as a show about “a Black man with superpowers,” not a Black superhero. As in the original comics, Cage’s super strength and bullet proof skin are forced on him by White supremacy, after he is framed, imprisoned, and brutally experimented upon. In the series, this backstory becomes an allegory of the kinds of traumas produced by White supremacy. Cage wears a hoodie that often ends up riddled with bullets, a reference to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Luke actor Mike Colter noted, in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s slaying, a show about a bulletproof Black man felt deeply meaningful to viewers (Ostroff, 2016). Colter’s Luke Cage is thoughtful and slightly countrified, and his main instincts are protective (Derry, 2017). No longer imagined as a Harlem native, Cage is a courtly, Georgia-bred former police officer with a preacher father. He frequently beats down his antagonists, but he never attacks first, and his signature move is to use his bulletproof body protectively, wrapping people in his arms to shield them from gunfire.

Marvel’s Harlem

Marvel’s Harlem is a “world in a world.” Its controversies and social formations mirror the real Harlem, but they are heightened and played against each other to develop a Black-centered superhero morality tale. The struggles for New York’s future leverage a long-standing superhero trope that places the fate of a troubled city (often resembling New York City) at the moral center of the encounter between good and evil. Luke is sometimes depicted as a Christ-like figure, using “interconnected persuasion” (Derry, 2017), to protect Harlem by knitting its people together in opposition to the villains that prey on it. Although Luke is not a Harlem native in the series, the importance of Harlem to him and he to it recurs throughout the series. His outsider-ness accentuates the universality of Harlem as a crossroads of the Black experience. At one point, Luke describes how Harlem was where he went “to figure some things out” as a fugitive after his violent transformation, and where he learned to survive.

The threats to Harlem that Luke confronts are elaborated as a political economy specific to the Marvel Universe, which quotes and elaborates the real life financialization of the city. The destructive “Battle of New York” in the first Avengers movie is mentioned in several series, as elites use the city’s destruction to rebuild the city for the rich. This little bit of world building is a trenchant commentary on the violent banality of New York’s seemingly unstoppable hypergentrification: A swirling transdimensional wormhole opened above Manhattan, vomiting legions of destructive warrior reptiles and, in the aftermath, there are . . . more condos. Neighborhoods like Harlem are places left behind by the attack. The poor struggle to survive the trauma of the city’s destruction and its aftermath, and villains have immense power over the poor and vulnerable (McSweeney, 2018).

The Marvel invocation of Harlem’s community introduces another layer of representationality accumulating on top of more than a century of contestation over the neighborhood’s place in Black history and aspiration. Critics of gentrification often use the term Disney-fication to describe the aesthetic flattening, commodification, and cultural appropriation that the process feeds on, and Marvel is a property of the Disney corporation. Luke Cage’s Harlem is literally a Disney-fied representation, beholden to the well-understood corporate processes of aesthetic production attached to both Marvel and Disney products. Yet, the rapturous public reception of the Luke Cage series, that presaged the success of the Black Panther movie, reflects a dearth of content that provides “fan service” to Black audiences (Carrington, 2019). By providing fully conceived Black-centered worlds, conceived through creative teams that are largely Black led, these works speak to the grievances of the Black fan, forced to consume depictions of their lives constructed through the White gaze, and to constantly “read between the lines” to find meanings that speak to them. Luke Cage makes gestures to a broad multiracial audience, but at every level, it is meant to satisfy the hunger of Black audiences for content that reflects their lives.

While watching, one often perceives the preoccupations of a team who are conscious of their visible role as Black creatives creating a Disney Harlem that will represent and shape the possibilities of the real one. Consider the series’ re-creation of the real Harlem’s Apollo Theater as the fictional “Harlem’s Paradise,” a nightclub owned first by the gangster Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes, and later by his cousin “Black” Mariah Dillard. As Harlem’s prize real estate commodity, and the site of clandestine plots to control its future, the Paradise is a metaphor for the real-life battles around the Apollo Theater, the flagship property in the 125th Street redevelopment corridor that has been cyclically involved in the controversies of Harlem’s aspirational redevelopment since the 1990s. Like the Apollo, the Paradise is the crown jewel of Harlem’s cultural life. It is portrayed as a joyful, seductive playground for the young and beautiful, but the balcony office overlooking the dance floor is the main site for the violent machinations of the villains. A recurring shot of Cornell, then Mariah, and finally Luke himself sitting stonily in the club’s balcony as Harlem’s people dance below is the main visual metaphor to establish who is ascendant in the show’s fictional power structure.

The writers take pains to show why, historically, the Paradise-as-Apollo matters so much to Harlem life. The stage of the Paradise is where most of the show’s musical sequences take place, featuring seminal acts such as Method Man and Faith Evans, among others. Often, character dialogue gives exposition about the singers’ career and impact, along with a capsule review of the performance. These clunky moments of exposition are examples of a deliberate intramural exchange taking place between the writers and the viewer, directed toward the ongoing debate about Harlem’s place in history, as well as how to draw the line between authentic and faked Black culture. Highlighting the historic import of the show’s musical acts and placing them in a (fictional) place of communal meaning and pleasure, the show’s writers grapple with the dilemmas of their role in Harlem’s Disney-fication.

The conduct of this intramural dialogue is visible throughout Luke Cage. The show’s producers have two strategies for representing intramural dialogue about Harlem’s future. The first recurring strategy is “name checking”—verbally running down cultural figures associated with Harlem—to convey a sense of attachment to place, and a sense of urgency that Harlem is in danger of being lost. Like many shows that put Black experience at the center, the writers take certain assumptions as necessary for a shared dialogue, including the importance of historical memory, of respecting the obscure or deliberately forgotten, and the critical need for a place like Harlem as an answer to White supremacy.

A second strategy is to portray community life, and the vivid, contentious intramural dialogue of its people through depictions of a Black “vox pop” participating in the action. Superhero movies, especially those set in New York, commonly include montages of citizen reaction, or action set piece that depict the “vox populi” commenting or coming to the heroes’ aid (DiPaolo, 2018). Luke is portrayed as answerable above all to the people of Harlem, and through the Black vox pop, Luke’s predicament as a bullet proof Black man is brought out and discussed. This Black vox pop is sometimes portrayed with a touch of humor as when a paradigmatic “super fight” between Luke and an antagonist, featuring stock elements such as thrown cars and twisted streetlights, is staged as an old-fashioned neighborhood street fight, with a vocal, involved crowd encouraging and instigating, “Ooh Luke, now he’s talkin’ ’bout your Mama!” However, another climactic scene idealizes Black intramural debate, capturing a Black public sitting in attendance at a church listening while Luke and Cornell do rhetorical battle at the pulpit.

Intramural Dialogue and the Future of Harlem

The sociologist Elijah Anderson (2000) characterized moral dialogues in a Black community he studied as divided by ideas of “street” versus “decency.” Much of the moral life of the community is constructed around this purported divide, which marks how people dress, behave, as well as their life chances for education and upward mobility. In Jackson’s study of Harlem, this moral binary is also closely linked to gentrification narratives. Arriving middle-class Black professionals speak of themselves as continuing Harlem’s storied Black elite legacy and decry the area’s reputation as a place of crime and poverty. Working-class and low-income residents rhetorically reinforce the role of Harlem as a place of Black survival, whether criminal or not, and describe themselves as just as essential to its genius as the middle class.

The very first shot of Luke Cage’s pilot episode (Moment of Truth) establishes the importance of Pop’s barbershop as an outpost of decency. Luke’s Mentor “Pop” (Frankie Faison), who is murdered by Episode 3, cuts hair, and argues with customers and chess playing regulars. When anyone curses, Pop gestures to them to put a dollar in the swear jar, which is a Bustelo coffee can with a sign on it. The battered coffee can become the main signifier for the enduring presence of Pop after his murder. Pop is a former convict who uses his shop as a place to reach out to Harlem’s street toughs, bringing them into the safety of the shop and slowly showing them how to make a life:

That’s how you get ’em on your side. Sweeping up hair. Runnin’ errands.

Lettin’ ’em hang out play video games. Anything is better than what is waiting for them out in the street. They want a way out. But they have too much pride to ask for help. So you gotta jedi mind trick ’em to something better. (Moment of Truth, S1 E1)

The scene immediately after Pop’s explanation of his philosophy shows Mariah Dillard at work, “saving the youth” of Harlem in her own neoliberal fashion. Alfre Woodard as Mariah Dillard conveys an oily maternality as she narrates for news cameras her dreams for a “New Harlem Renaissance.” Walking along a line of children waiting for food at her sponsored cook out, she caresses the long hair of one teenage girl and whispers in her ear, “I’m so glad you made it.” After she turns away from the cameras, an aide offers her sanitizer that she primly massages into her hands.

The juxtaposition of two key characters as they “save the youth” at the very start of the series complicates easy dualisms such as “street versus decent.” Nothing typifies the emptiness of neoliberal “inclusion” in gentrifying neighborhoods more than the programs that multiply to “keep kids off the street” and that “bridge the gap” between affluent and poor residents (Denmead, 2019). These sponsored rituals often have as much to do with surveillance and risk profiling as they do with meaningful sociality (Cahill, 2007). In contrast, Pop’s politics of decency is tempered by an unjudgmental embrace of whoever comes in the door. Pop describes his shop as “Switzerland”—a safe, neutral space where conflicts can be settled peacefully. When three youths mentored by Pop rob Cornell’s men during a clandestine arms deal, Pop urges Luke to save them. When one boy, Chico, finally goes to Pop’s shop to try to make things right, Pop first throws him angrily against a wall and then hugs him desperately. Pops desperate embrace of a wayward Chico contrasts sharply with Mariah’s telegenic hug and discreetly applied hand sanitizer to convey which character is engaged in care that is meaningful. This early characterization of Mariah’s empty project of community renewal acquires more layers as her character evolves into a major antagonist to Luke. Her whisper to the girl becomes retrospectively even more sinister as in later episodes she is shown grooming young women to be prostitutes at her club, using that same oily sincerity she learned from her mother Mama Mabel, a brothel owner and crime boss who ruled Harlem’s underworld before her.

The contrast of an organically solidaristic, bottom-up Harlem versus an elite exceptionalist Harlem is a recurring theme, perhaps most visible in a climactic scene of Just to Get a Rep (S1 E5), as the crime boss Cornell Stokes and Luke Cage offer dueling eulogies for Pop. As young men, Cornell and Pop were partners in crime, while Luke’s relationship with Pop is long after, when Pop has become a mentor for young people in the neighborhood. The encounter of the church scene comes as Cornell has retaliated against Luke’s attacks on his drugs and gun running business by enacting a collective punishment against the people of Harlem, sending out his men to make up his losses by extorting Harlem’s small business owners. In a montage, they are shown emptying cash registers for tribute, telling shocked storeowners to blame Luke Cage.

The eulogies for Pop are given inside a packed Harlem church, and as each man stands to speak, they are shown in dialogue with the assembled mourners. The archetypal image of a mourning Black congregation embodies a model of Black intramural dialogue. Both men speak in similar terms about Pop’s and Harlem’s importance, but the framing of whom Harlem is for and how to save it have clearly distinct ethical frameworks. Cornell, speaking first evokes the artistic legacy of Harlem’s music, but speaks of himself as a protector of an endangered Harlem:

Where some people saw a war zone, Pop always saw a pasture. A breeding ground for artistry . . . greatness . . . From Billy Strayhorn . . . Teddy Riley, Big L, A$AP Rocky. All those brothers . . . came from right here. Roses from the concrete, all ’cause of people like Pop . . . I promise you with all my might . . . that even though we are being attacked from all sides by foreign interlopers . . . strangers . . . with arcane abilities I promise you. I stay true to what we have right here. ’Cause that’s what Pop woulda wanted.

In the end, Luke wins the exchange, with a speech that frames Harlem as more than its history or a collective aspiration:

Pop never forgot his people. Where some people saw hard rock kids . . . he saw precious jewels. He reminded me that diamonds are formed by pressure . . . covered in dirt. But then you polish them . . . and they shine. Pop saw the shine in everyone that walked in his barber shop . . . He listened to their problems. And he made them feel better about the world and themselves. We have to strive on a daily basis to do the same for each other . . . I don’t believe in Harlem. I believe in the people who make Harlem what it is.

Both speeches portray Harlem as a crucible for character: Cornell refers to “roses from the concrete,” and Luke refers to “rock hard kids” who are “precious jewels,” but it is Luke who calls for a thriving community achieved through mutual kindness. Cornell’s eulogy uses name checking to center “the exceptional” as a measure of Harlem’s meaning. In his conclusion, Luke explicitly rejects this idea that symbolic, aspirational Harlem should mean more than the Harlem that is defined through the relationships of its people.

Throughout the series, this bottom-up “street” Harlem is developed as a character. Its people are not passively waiting to be saved, but constantly witnessing and often intervening to help Luke in his mission. The celebration of street Harlem crescendos at the end of the first season, after Mariah frames Luke for her murder of Cornell and whips up a law-and-order campaign to hunt him down. Again on the lam, Luke finds protection as young men all over Harlem walk the streets wearing bullet-riddled hoodies to confuse the police. The dangerous hoodlums of Harlem turn the hostile gaze settled upon them into a weapon to save their hero.

Creating an environment of multilayered conversation and debate, Coker and the writers of Luke Cage excavate the dilemmas of making a good community and a good life in a gentrified Harlem. The next sections examine recurring intramural themes—Black masculinity and economic stability, and the pursuit of upward mobility by comparing the character trajectories of two opposed figures: Luke Cage, and his main antagonist, Mariah Stokes. Luke Cage’s character arc through the series is defined not just by his struggles to be a superhero but by his struggles to “be a man,” emotionally and economically. The tragic character arc of Mariah Stokes is defined by a desperate struggle for respectable wealth and control over Harlem’s future. When these themes emerge, they are always complicated by Harlem’s rapid gentrification, a context that makes every choice by a character into a painful, uncertain enterprise.

Violence and Value: Who Will Thrive?

Gentrification as a process inflicts multiple kinds of violence. There is the widely felt symbolic violence as beloved spaces and a collective identity are erased or re-branded for consumption (Dávila, 2004). Yet, minority residents experience violence most directly through programs of heightened policing and neighborhood surveillance. Aggressive policing in gentrifying neighborhoods has multiple uses. It is used by political actors to broadcast to developers that an area is “open for business” and it reassures incoming gentrifiers that their safety is a priority (Beck, 2020; Stein, 2019). Zealous policing enforces a spatial order in which the poor and the young are defined as a threat to public order (Anderson, 2013; Cahill et al., 2019). In addition, market arrangements become more palpably violent, as rental housing becomes scarcer, and landlord harassment and aggressive eviction litigation more common (Marcuse, 1985; Opillard, 2015).

Luke Cage’s fictional Harlem uses the conventions of the superhero story to depict the market-based violence of gentrification. The depiction of police violence toward Black men is central, but the show constantly references the violence of market processes, and the violent affects of frustrated aspiration and fear of displacement that overshadow life in a gentrified neighborhood. Luke Cage and Mariah Dillard are mirrored characters whose characters arcs offer contrasting critiques of the violence of gentrification. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), heroes and villains are often mirror images of each other, sharing common origin stories, abilities, or challenges. The confrontation between Luke Cage and Mariah Dillard begins with two characters sharing a similar imperative: to build Harlem as a flourishing Black neighborhood. As we have seen, from the opening scenes of the first episode, the series defines its characters through their relationship to this imperative, by contrasting Pop’s work with young people to Mariah Dillard’s self-promoting “New Harlem Renaissance” initiative.

Conclusion

The academic literature on gentrification has principally focused on the violence of displacement and less time elaborating the complex experience of living in, or reluctantly leaving a beloved place that is becoming unrecognizable, and unlivable (Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020). Yet, these affects and traumas are essential to the normalized, structural “slow violence” of gentrification (Pain, 2019). The slow violence that is inflicted by erasure, stigma, and market-based violence is as potent as violent policing in displacing and disempowering its targets. Arguably, the failure of scholars to see and describe adequately the affective dimensions of displacement contributes to an increasingly de-politicized, anodyne account of gentrification as offering “positives and negatives,” with the latter regrettably most salient for the poor (Slater, 2006). When gentrification opponents find ways to articulate the violent nature of gentrification, it can be extraordinarily effective politically (Martinez, 2010).

Perched as they are at the intersection of organic Black cultural production and its commodification, Coker and his writers portray a threatened community with a nuance that transforms Luke Cage into an allegory of gentrification. Luke’s rise, and Mariah’s fall are portrayed with an ambivalence that invites more meditation and discussion about the costs of fame, and the pursuit of mobility and wealth. Can Luke be a force for good after succeeding Cornell and Mariah in the balcony office at Harlem’s Paradise? Should Mariah have flipped the Basquiat? When the show’s writers pose these questions, they are acting didactically as Black creatives, pulling back the curtain to problematize how history and culture are leveraged to add market value in gentrified Harlem. The characters in Luke Cage’s mimetic Harlem experience the paradoxical pain of living with progress that is never meant to accommodate their desires or aspirations. Even if those emotions are wound into a fantastic superhero narrative, the violent longings and losses associated with the gentrification are recognizable, speaking directly to viewers struggling to survive in Harlem, and elsewhere.