Race and the Suburbs in American Film

Merrill Schleier is Professor Emeritus of Art and Architectural History and Film Studies at the University of the Pacific. They are the author of Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Passing Through: The Black Maid in the Cinematic Suburbs, 1948–1949John David Rhodes2. Take a Giant Step: Racialized Spatial Ruptures in the Northern Cinematic SuburbsMerrill Schleier3. "Where Have You Been?": Bill Gunn's Suburban NightmaresEllen C. Scott4. The House They Live In: Charles Burnett, Indie Hollywood, and the Politics of Black SuburbiaJoshua Glick5. "Guess Who Doesn't Belong Here?": The Interracial Couple in Suburban CinemaTimotheus Vermeulen6. Alienated Subjects: Suburban Failure and Aspiration in Asian American FilmHelen Heran Jun7. Inhabiting the Suburban Film: Arab American Narratives of Spatial InsecurityAmy Lynn Corbin8. Living in Liberty City: Triangulating Space and Identity in Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016)Paula J. Massood9. Geographies of Racism: American Suburbs as Palimpsest Spaces in Get Out (2017)Elizabeth A. Patton10. The Limits and Possibilities of Suburban Iconoclasm: Suburbicon and 99 HomesNathan Holmes11. "A Perfectly Normal Life?": Suburban Space, Automobility, and Ideological Whiteness in Love, SimonAngel Daniel MatosContributorsIndex

"In Race and the Suburbs, marginalized groups and individuals are empowered with agency both in their capacity as participants and producers of film because their presence, actions, and creative endeavors invert and subvert the imagined white epitome of suburbia in American film." — Journal of Popular Culture"A fascinating look at how suburban films have treated race, from their long-lived fixation on whiteness to an opening up to diverse perspectives and experiences. Through creative analysis of cinematic elements and the business of film, the volume's authors probe the many ways racialized people inhabited the cinematic suburb, and encourage us to reimagine the suburban film genre itself." — Becky M. Nicolaides, author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965"Centering films and figures often left out of the popular canon of suburban cinema saturated by images white families fenced in by even whiter picket fences, Race and the Suburbs in American Film broadens the archive of suburban film and its racial tropes beyond blanket exclusion. From attending to the black maids statically framed in mid-century film and black filmmakers' efforts decades later to capture black suburban experience as homeowners, to tales of suburban dysfunction, isolation, and indivisibility highlighted in films centering Asian and Arab American experiences, the essays in this collection powerfully retrieve the more complex story of race's presence in the suburbs punctuating American cinema." — Adrienne Brown, author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race