Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America DianneHarris. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Abstract

Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America Dianne Harris. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.Situated between the tradition of scholarship on the history of domestic architecture and the more recent focus on race in suburbia, Dianne Harris's Little White Houses uncovers the ways in which the suburban house constructed race, specifically whiteness, in postwar America. By drawing on a range of sources from suburban homes themselves, to their representations in magazines, promotional literature, and even television, Harris seeks to develop a sense of the ways in which suburbs were constructed-physically, linguistically, and visually-as places for middle class whites and the power of the suburban aesthetic to essentially confer whiteness on previously marginalized ethnic and immigrant groups. That suburbs were largely white is a given. Sources from FHA (Federal Housing Administration) policies to magazine images made sure that both suburbia and its representations were populated almost exclusively by conspicuously white people, but Harris, while beginning from this reality and the now commonplace notion that domestic space influences identity formation, explores the ways that suburban homeownership linked whiteness, affluence, citizenship, and security, offering a means for some immigrant groups to transition into a new categorization of white American, while excluding others completely.While scholars have considered the why of suburbia's whiteness, Harris takes up the interesting and important question of how the suburbs were white. She turns her critical eye on the spatial rhetoric of the house, its many forms of representation, the consumer goods of suburban life, and the yard all to discern racial, ethnic, and class messages. In doing so, she details the lexicon of whiteness including words such as clean, informal, orderly, and private, as opposed to the terminology of urban immigrant and working class quarters as dirty, dilapidated, and crowded. Little White Houses thus complements the newer work of Becky Nicolades, Andrew Weise as well as the classics in the field, including Elaine Tyler May who have looked at suburbia as a space for the maintenance of difference and distance.Harris's is a broad study focusing on nationally circulating imagery and generic examples of suburban homes and lots. This is fitting given that, as the author recognizes, the images of housing were remarkably consistent across magazine genres-including men's, women's, shelter, general interest, and science and technology-as well as on television. …