Hedgemony? Suburban space in The Buddha of Suburbia

Abstract

It is hard to find anyone with a good word to say about suburbia. The image of suburbs as homogenous and conformist is pervasive, not only in popular culture but also in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, where the suburb tends to feature negatively, if it features at all. Instead, attention has been focused on ‘the city’, which in practice usually means the inner city, and which, following Charles Jencks, David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, has become central to the analysis of postmodernity. The belief that we must turn to the city in order to examine the distinctive conditions of contemporary life seems to be borne out by the number of British novelists who have taken cosmopolitan, fragmented, urban space as their subject, from the psychogeographies of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, to the metafictional treatments of London in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989), to recent work by Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000) and Monica Ali (Brick Lane, 2003).