This book is the first anthology to explore the connection between race and the suburbs in American cinema from the end of World War II to the present. It builds upon the explosion of interest in the suburbs in film, television, and fiction in the last fifteen years, concentrating exclusively on the relationship of race to the built environment. Suburb films began as a cycle in response to both America's changing urban geography and the re-segregation of its domestic spaces in the postwar era, which excluded African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx from the suburbs while buttressing whiteness. By defying traditional categories and chronologies in cinema studies, the contributors explore the myriad ways suburban spaces and racialized bodies in film mediate each other.Race and the Suburbs in American Film is a stimulating resource for considering the manner in which race is foundational to architecture and urban geography, which is reflected, promoted, and challenged in cinematic representations.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Passing Through: The Black Maid in the Cinematic Suburbs, 1948–1949
John David Rhodes

2.Take a Giant Step: Racialized Spatial Ruptures in the Northern Cinematic Suburbs
Merrill Schleier

3. "Where Have You Been?": Bill Gunn's Suburban Nightmares
Ellen C. Scott

4. The House They Live In: Charles Burnett, Indie Hollywood, and the Politics of Black Suburbia
Joshua Glick

5. "Guess Who Doesn't Belong Here?": The Interracial Couple in Suburban Cinema
Timotheus Vermeulen

6. Alienated Subjects: Suburban Failure and Aspiration in Asian American Film
Helen Heran Jun

7. Inhabiting the Suburban Film: Arab American Narratives of Spatial Insecurity
Amy Lynn Corbin

8. Living in Liberty City: Triangulating Space and Identity in Barry Jenkins'sMoonlight (2016)
Paula J. Massood

9. Geographies of Racism: American Suburbs as Palimpsest Spaces inGet Out (2017)
Elizabeth A. Patton

10. The Limits and Possibilities of Suburban Iconoclasm:Suburbicon and99 Homes
Nathan Holmes

11. "A Perfectly Normal Life?": Suburban Space, Automobility, and Ideological Whiteness inLove, Simon
Angel Daniel Matos

Contributors
Index