Level Up

Abstract

The city is the stage not only for its own development but for the development of the self. The creative, entrepreneurial self operates as a telos of modernity to be achieved through innate creativity, planning, and design. This chapter evaluates the parameters and methods of reproduction for the creative, entrepreneurial subject within the context of development through a close reading of Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW. The novel tracks protagonists who contend with the normative assumptions of being gendered, neoliberal subjects. They feel coerced into seeing the self as proceeding through planned stages and are either haunted by their inability to take the “next step” in life (career, motherhood, house, etc.) or trapped by their successful performances as “model” subjects. The novel explores these affects in the context of the gentrifying, immigrant neighborhood of Willesden in London, in which the politics of home ownership saturate interpersonal intimacies. I show that aesthetics and rhetoric urban development are mirrored in the contemporary notions of social mobility through self-improvement, which creates a frustrating and delimited horizon especially for women and people of color. Instead, the novel explores the “cruel optimism” of the planned self and the profound dislocations in contemporary identity.