Suburban America Research Articles

“No Way Out”: The Gothic Concept of Home in Shirley Jackson’s Horror Fiction

The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This trope, which covertly explores feminine anxieties such as domestic confinement and familial oppression, recurs multiple times in Shirley Jackson’s “house trilogy” as well, namely The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However, as noted by many critics, while Female Gothic narratives usually conclude with the protagonist’s successful escape and her marriage to the male hero, in Jackson’s fiction, there is “no way out”. Her protagonists remain confined within the domestic space. This essay explores Jackson’s reappropriation of the haunted house trope as a symbol of the paranoia experienced by women in 1950s suburban America. The analysis begins by outlining the theme in traditional Female Gothic fiction, followed by an account of the sociohistorical context in which Jackson operated, without dismissing the significancy of her personal life experiences as well. Jackson’s “house trilogy” will then be examined, paying particular attention to the ways in which the haunted house formula is subverted to function not as an escape narrative, but as a metaphor for modern women’s inescapable confinement.

EXPLORING WOMEN’S PORTRAYAL AND NARRATIVE ENTANGLEMENT IN DAVID LYNCH’S ‘BLUE VELVET’ (1986): POSTMODERN CINEMATIC ANALYSIS

This study conducted a concise postmodern cinematic analysis of ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986), directed by David Lynch, focusing on the portrayal of women and their narrative roles. ‘Blue Velvet’ exemplifies postmodern cinema through its subversion of conventional storytelling and exploration of dark undercurrents in suburban America. The analysis delved into the multifaceted depiction of women, examining how Lynch employs the “male gaze” through camera work and narrative structure, reinforcing patriarchal power dynamics. By scrutinizing key scenes, we revealed women often depicted for male viewer gratification. This study provided a new viewpoint on ‘Blue Velvet,’ shedding light on its challenge to cinematic norms and highlighting the interplay of gender, power, and narrative in a postmodern context.

Inclusive assimilation: middle-class Asian parenting in suburban America

ABSTRACT Previous studies find that Asian American parents enforce a strict academics-centered success frame upon their children. However, there is limited research on the actual standards of successful childrearing from the perspective of parents. Drawing on in-depth interviews with middle-class parents of Chinese and Indian descent in New Jersey (N = 44) conducted between December 2020 and January 2022, I contest the conception of a unidirectional parental assimilation process that presumes White middle-class families to be the default destination for assimilation. I argue that middle-class Asian American parenting can be better understood as an ‘inclusive assimilation’ process. Parents not only aim for a well-rounded education for their children as touted by White parents but, similarly to Black and Hispanic families, also embrace racial socialization efforts in their parenting, partly in response to the rise in anti-Asian violence observed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Horse Is a Horse

A Horse Is a Horse

Veterans in Ruins: The Soldier’s Impossible Homecoming in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

The notion of homecoming is the focal point of Tim O’Brien’s short story “Speaking of Courage,” which presents an irreconcilable scission between the present and the soldier’s past self and life, before the war. This cleavage is mainly embodied in the landscape of the story: the city that was once familiar seems remote after his homecoming. The way in which the protagonist looks at his hometown while driving around the lake that constitutes its center point allows the gradual (re)appearance of Vietnam landscapes and events in the descriptions, until memories from the past and visions of the present superimpose completely—thereby blurring the boundaries between war and peace, between suburban America and Vietnam battlegrounds. The bedimming of differences between the structural polarities of the “here” and the “elsewhere” enables the emergence of paradoxical esthetics based on the notions of conflation and reversal, which thwart the prospect of ever returning home by rendering the very notion of return nonsensical and unachievable. Through writing, O’Brien thus puts into question the very possibility and completeness of the soldier’s homecoming by collapsing together different spatiotemporal realities.

Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Lawrence‐Zúñiga, Denise. Protecting suburban America: gentrification, advocacy and the historic imaginary. xi, 195 pp., illus., bibliogr. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. £85.00 (cloth)

Lawrence‐Zúñiga, Denise. Protecting suburban America: gentrification, advocacy and the historic imaginary. xi, 195 pp., illus., bibliogr. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. £85.00 (cloth)

Addressing Emotional Health while Protecting Status: Asian American and White Parents in Suburban America

The emotional dimensions of parenting among upper-middle-class parents have not been fully theorized or measured. In this article I employ 60 in-depth interviews with professional white, Chinese, and Indian parents living in the same well-off suburban town to show how parents think about and attend to their teenage children’s emotional well-being. I find that attending to children’s emotional well-being sometimes competes with attending to achievement in ways not predicted by previous theories of class and parenting. Further, within the upper middle class, immigrant Asian and U.S.-born white parents employ different cultural repertoires to address their children’s emotional well-being, bolstering their own group status as they do so. The findings suggest that scholars of class influences on parenting should pay greater attention to affective dimensions, including how parents address concerns about emotional well-being, and how strategies vary by ethnicity, generation, and other lines of difference.

Re-planning an edge city: Tysons in the post-suburban era

While suburban sprawl has continued almost unabated in the US, recent evidence suggests that urban qualities are gaining foothold in suburban America. The prevalent explanation for the growing appeal of urban qualities emphasizes the preference of the young and talented workforce for urban-like environments together with the environmental benefits of compact, denser, and transit-oriented development. This paper examines the case of an archetypal edge city, Tysons (previously, Tysons Corner), which is being transformed into a ‘real’ city. It contends that while Tysons has remained attractive for businesses, local decision-makers, planners, developers, and property owners anticipated its prospective decline in attractiveness and prepared a long-term plan in order to secure its competitive edge. To support this argument, this paper analyzes two recent comprehensive plans, accompanying planning documents, newspapers and magazines, and interviews with local decision-makers, planners, and stakeholders. Similar to the transformation of inner cities through regeneration and gentrification, edge-city de-sprawling/retrofitting should not be interpreted solely from a demand-driven standpoint; instead, retrofitting is a means to buttress longstanding performances of capital investments within the built environment.

Review: Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America by Victor Gruen and Anette Baldauf, eds.

Review: <i>Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America</i> by Victor Gruen and Anette Baldauf, eds.

Muslim Identity on the Suburban Frontier: The American-Jewish Context of Maryam Jameelah’s Conversion to Islam

Muslim Identity on the Suburban Frontier: The American-Jewish Context of Maryam Jameelah’s Conversion to Islam Abraham Rubin (bio) In 1989, nearly thirty years after she left the United States, Maryam Jameelah (1934–2012), published the first part of a two-volume memoir that recounted the unlikely story of a middle-class American Jew from Westchester, New York who moved to Pakistan and embraced the cause of conservative Islam. The first volume, entitled Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945–1962): The Story of One Western Convert’s Quest for Truth, consisted of some two dozen letters that Jameelah—formerly Margaret Marcus, or Peggy as she was known to her family and friends—had supposedly written between the ages of eleven and twenty-eight. Taken together, the letters tell the story of the first three decades of a life marked by social isolation, mental anguish, and cultural displacement, which were overcome through Jameelah’s turn to Islam. This epistolary memoir traces the author’s singular path from a troubled childhood and youth in suburban America to Lahore, Pakistan, where she found her true home.1 Although Jameelah cuts a highly idiosyncratic figure in the landscape of American-Jewish history, her religious identity is very much a product of the postwar era. Her relevance to the American-Jewish experience consists in the fact that her conversion to Islam was a response to the same religious, cultural, and social challenges faced by other members of her generation. In the memoir, Jameelah’s conversion to Islam parallels and competes with other, more common paths toward the reclamation of an ethnic Jewish identity. Jameelah presents her conversion as an alternative to other contemporary Jewish political and cultural movements, such as Orthodox and Zionist groups, which she joined in her youth. Revealed in her memoir is an intricate and ongoing dialogue with alternative American-Jewish identities that emerged in the wake of World War II. The apocryphal letters recount Peggy’s discontent with the Marcus family’s assimilated, all-American lifestyle and her different attempts to fill the spiritual void left by their religious indifference. Before converting to Islam Peggy develops an interest in Orthodox Judaism. She tries joining the Young Women’s Jewish Association in New York, and attends the meetings of a [End Page 125] Zionist organization as well as a youth group at an Orthodox synagogue in Mamaroneck. After her brief flirtation with Judaism, Peggy experiments with the Baha’i faith, but abandons it soon after. Summarizing her unsuccessful quest for religious and communal belonging, she writes: Although I had just entered my nineteenth year, it seemed to me as if my life had already come to an end. I was discouraged, exhausted, depressed and in despair at having met with nothing but one rebuff after another whenever I tried to find my place in society. I was simply adrift at sea, not knowing what to do next or where to go. Neither reformed Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, Ethical Culture or Baha’i could console me in my plight.2 In her late teens and early twenties, Peggy undergoes intensive psychological treatment, and meets a slew of analysts at her parents’ behest. She is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spends 1957 to 1959 in mental institutions.3 Upon her release, Peggy returns to live with her parents, but their already strained relationship soon reaches a breaking point, when Peggy vociferously attacks her parents for their support of Israel. After this argument Herbert Marcus asks his daughter to leave the house and demands that she begin supporting herself. Once she leaves her parents’ home Peggy officially converts to Islam and begins corresponding with leading Muslim intellectuals around the world. Her correspondents include the Pakistani cleric Maulana Maududi and Said Ramadan, father of Tariq Ramadan and son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.4 Sensing a kindred spirit in Jameelah, Maududi invites her to live with him and his family in Pakistan. Lacking any viable options in the United States Jameelah accepts his offer and moves to Lahore in 1961.5 In 1963, after her release from another stint in a mental institution, Jameelah marries one of...

Making the Great Outdoors Better:

The credit-rich late-twentieth and early-twenty first centuries allowed for the rise of a broad spectrum of new consumer habits. In suburban America, homeowners realized their individual dreams and newly enabled profligate tastes in lavish professional and do-it-yourself (DIY) remodelling projects. Chief among their architectural and interior design modifications is the so-called ‘outdoor kitchen,’ installed in over a million American households and projected to become a stock feature of all upscale housing by 2015. In definition, it is an amorphous, wall-less room with individually determined dimensions, appliances and functionalities sited in what one owner-designer identifies as the previously underutilised space of the backyard. Currently free of restricting code or traditions, the outdoor kitchen is determined by and gives form to diverse but intersecting discourses of Do-It-Yourself home projects, home spas and meditative spaces, the yearning for resorts left unvisited in the wake of 9/11, changing gender relations, televised food programs that fuse celebrity and the act of cooking, the ‘obesity epidemic’ and the elevation of food itself from mere nutrition to a source of novelty and entertainment. Thus the outdoor kitchen is a new arena of socio-domestic performance, the built environment of the contemporary ‘American Dream.’

Realismo, táctica y espectáculo. Crítica de lo cotidiano en la suburbia de Venturi y Scott Brown

The main purpose of this text is to address the ideas that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown proposed in defense of the American Suburb throughout the 1970s, from a new critical perspective that can make them relevant for a contemporary reader. To achieve this particular approach, I would like to shift the area of reflection from the notion of the “ symbolic”, which Venturi and Scott Brown placed at the center of their theoretical project, to the ideas of the “ quotidian” and “ everyday life” as they were theorized by thinkers like Henri Lefebvre or Michel De Certeau during the second half of the Twentieth century. Within the general theory of the everyday, the article concentrates on how the complementary notions of tactics and strategies, proposed in Michel De Certeau’s ‘ The Practice of Everyday Life”, apply to the ideas about suburbia proposed by Venturi and Scott Brown. On one hand, it seems clear that within the urban and architectural narratives of ‘ Learning from Las Vegas’, there is an implicit admission of the economic and social logic of modern American capitalism. However, on the other hand, despite the fact the book defends the aesthetic viability of the great privatization drive of the mid-century American city, it also shows a consistent positioning against the status quo and in favor of the less favored classes. This interpretative tension reproduces the two opposing notion of strategy and tactic proposed by De Certeau. The acquiescence with the spatial results of capitalism as a dominant economic and cultural system, makes the ideas proposed by Venturi and Scott Brown parts of a wider strategy. However, those same ideas appear as tactics insofar as they claim the architectures of capitalism to be unexpected residues that oppose to the spaces of the culturally dominant paradigm of the modern utopia. If we acknowledge these residues as fragments without a totalizing ideology, hence the byproduct of everyday practices in suburban America, then the defense of their legitimacy becomes a a form of resistance. In this article I question whether such taste of resistance, which was undoubtedly premeditated by Venturi and Scott Brown and became essential for the critical success of postmodern ideology in architecture, responds to an honest analysis of Las Vegas and its social context, or if it was only the result of a rather partial –and reactionary– interpretation.

A Right to Housing in the Suburbs: James v. Valtierra and the Campaign against Economic Discrimination

In the landmark 1971 case of James v. Valtierra, the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could block housing for the poor, bolstering a trend toward exclusionary zoning and economic segregation in suburban America. Scholarship on this trend has focused on the racial impacts of putatively nonracial policies, echoing activists at the time who saw economic exclusion as a disguised means of forestalling racial desegregation. This article, however, argues that a focus on racial desegregation misinterprets the campaign of affordable housing in the suburbs and obscures key claims made by affordable housing activists. It examines the history of James v. Valtierra, showing that the plaintiffs were a racially diverse group of women who already lived in the suburbs; they sought not desegregation but better housing conditions for single mothers and their families. The article suggests the importance of analyzing suburban diversity, gender, and economic discrimination in struggles for affordable housing.

The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America

The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America

Review: Protecting Suburban America: Gentrification, Advocacy, and the Historic Imaginary By Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga

Review: <i>Protecting Suburban America: Gentrification, Advocacy, and the Historic Imaginary</i> By Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga

Review: The New American Garden: The Landscape Architecture of Oehme, van Sweden

The New American Garden: The Landscape Architecture of Oehme, van Sweden National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 17 October 2015–1 May 2016 Traditional garden design in the Mid-Atlantic states was fundamentally challenged in the late twentieth century with the work of the Washington, D.C.–based firm Oehme, van Sweden and Associates, established in 1975. This photographic exhibition illuminated unconventional garden making generated by the firm's two larger-than-life cofounders, Wolfgang Oehme (1930–2011) and James van Sweden (1935–2013). The exhibition celebrated the twenty-five-year anniversary of the 1990 publication of Bold Romantic Gardens , written by Oehme and van Sweden with Susan Rademacher, former executive director of Louisville Olmsted Parks Conservatory.1 The book introduced the world to the Oehme, van Sweden signature style of planting design defined by broad painterly strokes of hardy perennials and ornamental grasses set within strong architectural frameworks. Oehme, van Sweden's design sensibility was in sharp contrast to the lawn-centric landscapes of postwar suburban America. The firm's earliest clients were wealthy nonconformists with the self-confidence to make art statements with their gardens. Its first high-profile commission came in 1977 with the Federal Reserve Board Garden in Washington, D.C. (Figure 1). Just steps from Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall, this public …

Theorizing About Poverty and Paternalism in Suburban America: The Case of Welfare Sanctions

Shifting metropolitan poverty dynamics over the past decade have resulted in a more sprawling material hardship, with the suburban poor now outnumbering central-city counterparts. The rise of suburban poverty is well documented, but the implications for welfare policy administration and client program outcomes remain understudied. This article offers a theoretical treatment of the spatial dimensions of sanction for noncompliance with program rules under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. For a variety of reasons associated with unique spatial barriers, ideological resistance, and underdeveloped social service networks, the theoretical framework predicts that suburban welfare clients, especially minority clients, are more likely to experience punitive sanction outcomes than central-city counterparts.

Editor's Letter

Editor's Letter

Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity by Stanley I. Thangaraj

Reviewed by: Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity by Stanley I. Thangaraj Harjant S. Gill Stanley I. Thangaraj, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Based on over four years of research among the South Asian Basketball leagues in Atlanta, Stanley Thangaraj’s Desi Hoop Dreams is an insightful exploration into the processes of identity formation for young South Asian men growing up in suburban America. Basketball, and practices related to the sport, serves as a crucial site for gender development for the second generation South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi) men. Their on- and off-court performances are motivated by the desire to repudiate being stereotyped as tepid and nerdy by demonstrating their physical prowess and athletic abilities, a practice Thangaraj refers to as “manning up,” as they attempt to “fashion their own version of American masculinity” (5). In Chapter 1, Thangaraj introduces us to core members of the Atlanta Outkasts, a cohort of young South Asian men, mostly Muslim, who met playing basketball in local mosques and community centers, and are now part of Atlanta’s diverse pick-up basketball circuit. These players do not all fit seamlessly into the middle class, professional immigrants who have lived in Atlanta since 1960s and that make up the more visible diasporic community celebrated for its achievements as the respectable “model minority” (40). Yet they are confronted with the gendered stereotypes associated with Asian immigrants, including being portrayed as effeminate in popular culture for their passive obedience to the status quo and often aspiring to be just like their white counterparts (63). Instead, South Asian men most active in Atlanta’s basketball circuits belong to working class families, many of whom arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, and are still [End Page 957] striving to achieve the elusive middle class status. Basketball courts serve as space where young South Asian men simultaneously work through their feelings of inadequacy as sons of recent immigrants and their frustrations with their racialization within the popular American cultural imagination that often stereotypes them as spelling bee champions or terrorists (42). In a style reminiscent of Mira Nair’s seminal film Mississippi Masala (1991) that subverts popular conceptions of race and nationhood, Chapters 2 and 3 complicate conventional notions of race and belonging by exploring the relationships and dynamics at play when brown and black bodies occupy the same court. Thangaraj notes that South Asian players claim American-ness by “embodying black stylistics” and consuming African American cultural forms like basketball, hip-hop, and rap music (38–39). In doing so, they challenge societal expectations for South Asians to follow “a linear progression to whiteness” (63). While their on-court performance serves as a source of empowerment in resisting stereotypes, the players often stop short of reaching a broader understanding of racial dynamics at play in everyday life in the American South (39). Instead, players recast the basketball court as an exclusively South Asian space by excluding African American players from their teams and restricting their access to the court (63, 106). These chapters paint a complex picture of how the court serves as a microcosm for broader racial dynamics playing out between different working class communities who access public sporting arenas and other recreational spaces in Atlanta (54–57). Thangaraj notes that while African American players practice exclusion of South Asians by not picking them for their teams, South Asian players practice exclusion by using capital and social networks to “privatize” public gyms, blocking access to those who cannot afford to pay the reservation fees (54–57). In this sense, middle and working class South Asian communities in Atlanta are often “complicit in the displacement of (poor and working class) African Americans” (47). Ironically, while the South Asian players seem largely indifferent to African American and other communities’ histories and experiences of similar oppression, they evoke their own histories of marginalization by referencing ethnic and caste-based identities in their team names, using terms such as “Outkasts” and “Untouchables” (87). Drawing liberally on South Asian cultural forms, they deploy Hindi and Urdu epithets like “Kallu...