Shifting suburbs . . .
The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) annual conference took place recently at the University of Exeter, UK. Exeter, as readers of this blog may know, is also host to the “Cultures of the Suburbs International Research Network” – with this connection in mind, the conference organisers (of whom I’m one) had an excellent excuse to give proceedings a suburban inflection . . .
It’s three weeks now since the conference finished and the thing that I really can’t get out of my head is Becky Nicolaides’ fantastic keynote speech on the closing evening of the event. Entitled “Still Shots from LA: Reflections on Diversity and the Remaking of Suburban Life,” Becky’s lecture gave a characteristically enthralling and erudite account of the shifting conditions and experiences of life in the LA suburbs.
Based in part on research for her forthcoming book, On the Ground in Suburbia: A Chronicle of Social and Civic Transformation in Los Angeles since 1945, Becky traced the social history of the area in the post-war years. Using some terrific documentary photographs and maps, Becky drew our attention to the often-overlooked complexity and diversity of the LA suburbs. Her title was particularly apt; these “still shots” catch the city and its suburbs at a particular moment in time, risking concretising their external dimensions while simultaneously (and apparently in contradiction) inviting us to look at the specificity of each site and thereby to register its difference from all of the others, its potential mutability. What you see is what you get, but what you get might be different from what you think you see! Her aim, as she explained, was to “give you some glimpses – “still shots” if you will, in our movie lingo – of L.A. suburbia… to give you some flavor of what’s happening across acres and acres of L.A.’s sprawling landscape… and to reflect especially on how social diversification has been re-shaping suburban life…”. Becky is particular interested in the uses to which ethnic communities have put (a) the suburbs, and (b) the received view (aka caricature) of the suburbs. Her talk closed with a compelling account of the ways in which multiethnic suburban communities have identified with new “social and spatial values”, illustrated by a You Tube video by the Fung Brothers of the San Gabriel Valley (Fung Brothers 626) which I’ll leave readers to look up and enjoy . . .
The success of Becky’s talk was evidenced by the large number of delegates who turned up for the following day’s ‘Cultures of the North American Suburbs’ panel (on a Sunday morning, please note!). Several of those choosing this panel from the 6 others on offer at the same time commented that they’d been inspired to do so by Becky’s talk. There were three great papers on offer here; the first from Martin Dines (a partner in this project) presented some fascinating new work on contemporary drama from / about the suburbs including Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. Martin discussed the staging of both plays and commented on the ways in which both simultaneously use and disavow a tradition of suburban experience and representation. Martin’s talk was followed by Cheryl Cowdy’s account of the place of design, substance vs. style, and scopophilia in two Canadian novels, Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream and Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing. Finally, economist Alan Mace from the LSE offered a reading of the suburbs from the perspective of Bourdieau – or, more properly, he asked us to reflect on what such a reading might look like and do. In particular, how might such a reading bring the working-class suburbs, and working-class suburbanites, into view? And whose view is being privileged in such debates?
All fascinating stuff – exciting in its range and interdisciplinarity. If you’d like more of the same, don’t forget to register for our next Cultures of the Suburbs Symposium, Hofstra University (Long Island) 27 and 28 June. Details on this website.
