Oakland, CA (USA), is currently undergoing gentrification, intensifying racialized displacement and inequality. The historically Black neighborhood of West Oakland is particularly affected, as many white elites and investors have identified it as a place to ‘rehabilitate’ older houses or industrial buildings. In this research paper, I use discourse analysis methods to analyze West Oakland real estate advertisements (written ads, photographs, and video tours of the houses) in order to ‘make strange’ colonial, racialized, and gendered narratives that have been made ‘mundane’ by modern and Eurocentric ways of knowing. I analyze discourses such as the ‘urban frontier,’ (re)development, and exoticization, using a content analysis and critical discourse analysis approach and drawing from lenses that include thinking-from-Oakland, post-development, gender, and other work on the ‘urban frontier.’ I argue that ‘urban frontier’ representations of West Oakland are used to justify economic ‘development’ and racialized displacement; portray the ‘urban pioneer’ as a benevolent masculine hero of Eurocentrism; and construct the neighborhood as an ‘authentic’ experience for the consumption of elite, white outsiders. Market and state institutions stand to profit by this selling of a particular representation of ‘home’ and ‘inhabiting.’

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Heumann, Silke
hdl.handle.net/2105/56152
Social Justice Perspectives (SJP)
International Institute of Social Studies

Amburg, Katharine van. (2020, December 18). West Oakland as an “Urban Frontier”: how real estate advertisements use colonial, racialized, and gendered narratives to “sell” gentrification-as-development. Social Justice Perspectives (SJP). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/56152