The Country Book

Picturesque aesthetics and an increased focus on men’s domestic life shaped the rapid growth of the suburbs in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most consequential reconfigurations of American understandings of national space. This suburban development had its own popular literary genre in the period, the country book. Although the country book is now largely forgotten and many of its more prominent examples have lapsed into obscurity, canonical writers such as Herman Melville wrote in the genre, and Thoreau’s Walden can also be understood in the context of this genre. The country book’s vision of the suburbs as a site of picturesque male domesticity that allowed for both privacy and homosocial intimacy countered a dominant vision of urban masculinity as public, individualistic, and competitive. Although the country book in general offers an idealized vision of male suburban life, individual texts also often feature deferrals, debility, and even death that threaten both male privacy and intimacy. The country book promoted the imaginative investments in suburban development at the same time that it hinted at the contradictions at the heart of middle-class masculine identity that foreclosed on that dream. In this way, as with the park movement texts discussed in Chapter 3, the country books that supported mid-nineteenth-century suburban development expressed both the social aspirations and fears of bourgeois men.

“The Slums of the Future”

The chapter examines Americans’ persistent uneasiness with suburbia and the ways the state, urban planners, and consumer ideologues aspired to fabricate a homogeneous “middle class,” implicitly White world. The persistent rhetorical anxieties over suburban life routinely have fixed on the unsettling effects of social and material homogenization without interrogating the ways such measures of “sameness” were simultaneously exaggerated and desirable to many suburbanites. The African American effort to secure a foothold in suburban communities, despite redlining, reveals the ways suburban life challenged unspoken Whiteness and exposed the diversity at the heart of suburban homogeneity.

Suburban Cowboy

This essay analyzes the political and cultural significance of confrontations between country music fans and punk rockers in the suburban community of Costa Mesa, California, in the early 1980s. During this time, Orange County was defined by paradox. On one hand, the region proved historically influential to leading conservative politics and the rise of Ronald Reagan, and bore a legacy of a country music and cowboy culture that well complemented such conservatism. And yet, the area also served as the breeding ground where right-wing politics and suburbanism’s sonic resistance, hardcore punk rock, took root. More than a simple culture clash, the conflict between country music fans and punk rockers represented a moment when two uniquely suburban and Southern California sounds collided at a significant point of transition in American politics and culture, and at heart revealed a conflict over the merits of suburban life. This struggle over space was one in which country music fans emerged victorious, as their efforts to violently quash the local punk scene worked in conjunction with city leaders who forcibly closed the region’s leading punk venue, the Cuckoo’s Nest, in 1981 and revealed a solidarity between country music fans, local police, and local politicians.

Critical Analysis of Identity Crisis in Hanif Kurieshi's Novel “The Buddha of Suburbia”

This paper critically analyzes the dilemma of identity crisis and its impact on immigrants concerning the Hanif Kurieggidentity crisis into its texts because of the rule of colonial power and its impacts on the colonized. Under the impact of this colonial power, the crisis of identity has been originated in western countries on social, economic, political, religious, and cultural grounds. Postcolonial theoretical ideas i.e, hybridity, mimicry, assimilation, and ambivalence by Homi K. Bhabha are applied into the text of this research paper to examine the dilemma of identity crisis more clearly. Karim Amir, the protagonist of the novel faces an identity crisis in tormenting and perturbing the social order of England. Such a tormenting and disturbing condition of England is a threat both to Karim and immigrants. The quest for an identity for Karim Amir is very complicated and alarming which sets a dilemma for the whole world to look at this global issue seriously. The Whites think about immigrants as they are the lower creature of God due to differences in skin color, religion, ethnicity, and culture. On the contrary, the immigrant trying to imitate the cultural values, language, habits, and manners of the white men to assimilate with them but in consequence, this mimicry never fetched the desired effects and simply, the outcome is ambivalent for them. Although they always try to assimilate with the British culture, yet they feel hesitant either to adopt Western culture or the culture of their homeland. The Buddha of Suburbia (1989) depicts the darker side of suburban life as well as the congested life of London city with references to other characters too.

Empires of Hygiene and Horror

With the popular utopian novel well established by 1875, a growing number of writers entered the scene, each offering their take on the problems of the city and the promises of high-tech suburban life. Benjamin Ward Richardson, a famous physician, made an international splash with his vision of Hygeia, a City of Health, promising to deploy green spaces and leverage new building materials to create modern, happy communities. Critics and designers responded in droves, with several rejecting Richardson’s reformed urbanism as too dense, while others committed to actually building Hygeia-inspired suburbs. The first science-fiction dystopian novels were also published in these years, prophesying monstrous, swarming metropolises where human life would be devalued by rampant materialism and pervasive artificiality. Thus, the ideal future of the happy, healthy suburb received its literary foil: the megacity of inhuman density and anonymity. The cumulative message was clear: a life in gardens is the only hope.

‘If You Prick Us Do We Not Bleed?’: Marvel Comics’ Vision: Director’s Cut Re-Evaluating What It Means to Be Human

Vision: Director’s Cut (2017) is a short comic series about Vision, a lonely robot Avenger superhero who builds his own robotic family out of his desire for love and happiness. The story focuses on the Vision family as they struggle to lead a ‘normal’ suburban life under Vision’s tutelage. As beings of artificial intelligence (AI), they are subject to social ostracism and abuse by a neighbourhood that refuses to accept them as part of the human community. In doing so, Director’s Cut enters into the long-standing literary debate about humanness versus monstrousness, what it means to be a human, and who gets to dictate the definition. The storyline is a contemporary science-fiction rendition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which dramatises the dangers of trying to artificially create a human life. Both texts are in agreement that once these beings are created, because they are sentient and self-aware, then they ought to be treated with dignity, respect and equality. Director’s Cut is additionally comparable to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in exploring the act of vengeance by the traumatised outsider, and how said acts ironically prove their humanness because revenge is a motive inimitable by any other life form.

Residente’s ‘War’ and the reframing of terror

The music video ‘Guerra’/‘War’ (Pérez Joglar or Residente 2017), directed and sung by the Puerto Rican musician Residente (René Pérez Joglar), features war-scarred landscapes, fleeing refugees, overcrowded camps and eerily idyllic suburban life. The discordant realities challenge viewers’ potential apathy towards ongoing conflicts and refugee crises while the rap lyrics in Spanish, when sung by the listener, conflate the singer with suffering groups, thus placing suffering and terror centre-stage through visuals and lyrics. This article proposes that Residente begins his music video with a narrative of terror, currently associated in popular discourses with refugees from areas in conflict, then overwhelms this narrative with one of suffering, which is subsequently followed by images of wealth, effectively reframing the terror factor through comparisons and stark contrasts. In addition to the perpetrators of terror, the viewer is confronted with refugees as the victims of terror, the hypocritical illusion of the security of suburban life and the realization that, in war, everyone loses.

July’s People: A Reversed Anticipation and Prediction of the Future Black Domination

Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, is a good example of a contemporary novel that reverses the so-called naturel division between black and white people. As a matter of fact, black nation holds power and protection, which they lacked in time of the Apartheid system because it was on the hands of their controversialists -white people. This novel seems to be a prophecy of the decline of this arbitrary system that meant the declined of white people’s privileged life that went from the sub-urban to a non‑suburban life. From Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, the reality of white people becomes upside down due to their color, origins and their presence in Africa. Therefore, they lost their position, their wealth, and at worse their power.

‘There’s No Return Route, Is There?’: Conor O’Callaghan’s After-Irish Diasporic Aesthetic

In this article, I examine Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry in the context of post- or after-Irishness and migration. The idea of a traditional Irish national literature has diminished in importance and relevance in recent years. Irish writers are now more sensitized to alternative modes of identification, unbound by the constraints of a singular concept of ‘Irishness’. This is especially significant for migrant writers, who are geographically removed from Ireland. O’Callaghan (born 1968) is himself a migrant: having lived in America, he now lives in England. Drawn from his experiences of transnational migration, O’Callaghan explores the different locales that he has known. He also feels free to write about suburban life, love, and the internet in an often quick-witted vernacular. What then is O’Callaghan’s aesthetic response to the experience of migrancy? Does O’Callaghan’s poetry exhibit an after-Irish diasporic aesthetic? Although O’Callaghan’s poetry is imbued with a diasporic multi-locatedness, both intellectual and geographical, his sense of Irish identity remains strong, and his poetry also often expresses a desire for rootedness.