Connection - Gates and Appiah's writings stressed the importance of framing literary studies within social historical ones, calling for the interpretation of literary history through a historical lens focused on race and the transatlantic slave trade. A wealth of both of these intersecting histories could be found in certain physical places that were important sites in colonial Westward expansion. To study these places was to understand both the stories of the lives and bodies that existed in such spaces as well as to understand how that cultural context informed literary works resultant of those places. I think this kind of framing is really interesting and creates a well-rounded historiography of any kind of art/literature movement. It calls to mind for me the recent gentrification of parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, and Bushwick that happened in tandem with growing artistic communities that were on average whiter and richer than the people they were displacing. The music and art created in these "scenes" was and continues to be widely impactful and artistically important, however it would be wholly irresponsible to ignore the economic and social realities in which this work is created--to posit that gentrified Brooklyn is a creative utopia, that the neighborhoods were objectively "improved," would be to ignore the displacement of huge numbers of already-marginalized people. Williamsburg and Bushwick are neighborhoods with long, important, pre-gentrification histories that have recently been the site of massive social and economic upheavals, which have resulted both in a cultural explosion and a difficult and unjust reality for longtime, working-class residents. The model of "contact zones" can be very helpful in negotiating the complex and problematic intersections of literary history and social history, without denigrating one side or the other. All modern Western art movements have happened within an imperialist, colonial framework, and should be understood (at least in part) in relation to that framework.