Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture

摘要

Rupa Huq's book Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the cultural significance and complexity of suburbia. Huq provocatively demonstrates that suburbs are a valuable source of popular cultural material. In meticulous detail she catalogues a selection of Anglo-American representations in novels, music, film and television that have contributed to Western imaginings of suburbia. With artful description, Huq animates lines of music and scenes from films and television shows to reveal elements of suburban lifestyles. Such a textual approach allows for a thoughtful examination of suburbia as a socio-cultural category. Invariably such a treatment cannot be comprehensive, and therefore raises selection, comparison and conceptual-bridging challenges. In cataloguing suburban culture medium by medium, there is a real danger of overwhelming the reader with descriptive detail that contextualizes and sets the scene, but does so at the expense of analytical significance.