Dystopic Suburbias: Towards a New(?) Racial Aesthetics of Dissent

• In Event: The Politics and Racial Aesthetics of Public Space

Abstract

This paper analyzes what I define as a new racial aesthetics of dissent in contemporary suburbia. I contextualize and examine two differing forms of environmental justice activism to illustrate the ways in which a type of respectability politics coexists with a more overt resistance to a white aesthetic and politics of suburbia. This examination of how and why diverging types of dissent develop around similar issues in a suburb of New York draws attention to a shifting racial and political landscape of American suburbia.
The larger book project from which this paper draws looks at suburbia as contested racialized space. Since the end of the 19th century and early 20th century when the “first suburbs” were developed, and certainly as a result of the post-war suburban sprawl, these sites have signified class ascendancy and the achievement of the “American Dream.” And as Karen Brodkin and others have explained, mid-century suburbs were manufactured to produce a new middle class, to which white ethnics had access and from which people of color were excluded. In the contemporary, however, with the large influx of people of color, contestations over notions of “belonging,” the aesthetics of private and public suburban spaces, and resource allocation are classed and raced in different ways. A focus on how activists have developed different ways of challenging environmental racism helps us to better understand the complex and, at times, contradictory vocabulary and aesthetic practices being developed in the contemporary.

Author

• Ana Aparicio, Northwestern University