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Race and the Suburbs in American Film ed. by Merrill Schleier (review)

2023; Volume: 62; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2023.a904643

2578-4919

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Reviewed by: Race and the Suburbs in American Film ed. by Merrill Schleier Christine Sprengler (bio) Race and the Suburbs in American Film edited by Merrill Schleier. SUNY Press. 2021. 292 pages. $95.00 hardcover; $32.95 paper; also available in e-book. Race and the Suburbs in American Film, edited by Merrill Schleier, is a compelling collection of essays that analyzes the racialized underpinnings of narrative films invested in representing the suburban experience from the postwar period to the present. Arranged chronologically, it generates a rich evolutionary history of suburban development in the United States and Hollywood's role in crafting the "syntactical and semantic" components of a typical suburb film, which obfuscate the complexity and diversity of actual suburbs. The contributors to this volume deftly explore theorizations of space, the built environment, and material culture, as well as the intricacies of real estate law and its applications to track cinematic engagements with domestic worlds marred by violence, exclusion, alienation, covenants, redlining, predatory lending, and subprime mortgages. They do so through a rich selection of case studies that traverse African American, Asian American, Arab American, Latinx, and immigrant suburbs while interrogating constructions of whiteness that continue to dominate Hollywood's offerings. Race and the Suburbs in American Film is grounded in critical work in cultural geography and is heavily informed by David Delaney's argument that space is an enabling technology through which race is produced.1 Further enhanced by Barbara Fields and Karen Fields's concept of "racecraft," this book centers race in ways that extend beyond questions of representation [End Page 226] into issues of production and distribution.2 It complements preceding work by Catherine Jurca, Adrienne Brown, David R. Coon, Stephen Rowley, Amy Maria Kenyon, Robert Beuka, and Timotheus Vermeulen, to name just a few scholars who are invested in cinematic, televisual, and literary mediations of the suburbs, though with varying commitment to articulating their existence as racialized spaces.3 Schleier's collection is a welcome contribution to this field, featuring both emerging and established scholars alike. The perceptive ways in which the authors attend to the specific movements of bodies through space, the significatory power of the architectural and visual culture of suburban milieus, and the cinematography that imbricates the two constitute a real strength of this volume. As Schleier states toward the end of her well-balanced and comprehensive introduction, this book is intended as an impetus to launch further investigations into other cinematic iterations of racialized bodies in racialized spaces. Through a sampling that takes us across genres and (most) decades, that is precisely what it does in an eminently readable fashion. The first essay, a strong contribution by John David Rhodes on Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H. C. Potter, 1948) and The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949), analyzes the image of the Black domestic servant as a spatial agent and in spatial relation to the suburban home in order to explore how postwar racism manifested on-screen and beyond. Rhodes's careful attention to cinematography and the visual registers of each film results in a particularly astute reading. This is also the approach taken by Schleier, whose own essay focuses on Take a Giant Step (Philip Leacock, 1959), based on African American playwright Louis S. Peterson's 1953 semiautobiographical production featuring the Scott family's move to a white suburb. Here, Schleier mobilizes her vast knowledge of architectural history and visual culture to consider how the film's production design helps manufacture such white ideological spaces. The Black cinematic suburb as a repository of traumatic history and potential spark for curative momentum is examined through the independent horror film Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973) by Ellen C. Scott in a standout contribution to this volume. Scott analyzes how the spatial complexities of Black and Brown suburbs are inflected by temporal strata that resurrect past events but additionally make space—in the sense of room—for experimentation and discovery. In a similar vein, Joshua Glick investigates the unifying agency of the home and the ways in which historical traumas return [End Page 227] in To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990), an essay that also importantly accounts for the film...