'The city is dying ... The suburbs are growing ... The country shrinks': spatial Maoism and Suburban Press

Abstract

Historians have typically presented the early 1970s underground paper Suburban Press, a major stylistic influence on the emergence of punk, as a British application of Situationist ideas and aesthetics. However, in this narrative, the role of Mao Zedong and Maoism in the underground press, and punk, gets reduced to their mimetic capacity to shock. This paper will reconsider Suburban Press within the context of Croydon's underground scene, to rescue an alternative narrative in which Mao and Maoism occupy a sincere and not only satirical position. It argues that the 'suburban' in the title of Suburban Press had three distinct meanings: the middle-class left-wing politics of the young radicals' parents; working-class areas like New Addington, analogous to the French banlieue ; and the complex process of (sub)urbanisation typified by Croydon's changing town centre. This paper thereby hints at a new history of the 'spatial turn' in which the influence of Maoism upon its key theorists – e. g., Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Doreen Massey – is recognised. It concludes by suggesting some implications for recent references to spatiality in leftwing politics in Britain, outlining a 'spatial Maoism' to add to the 'two lines of global Maoism' recently described by Colleen Lye.