Abstract
As vividly illustrated by Richard Nixon’s 1959 “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the suburb has become the physical manifestation of the American Dream and a demonstration of exceptionalism for the rest of the world. Some immigrants and ethnic groups traditionally excluded from the American community see suburbia as a means to achieving their American Dream. This chapter traces this dynamic in American / Pastoral by Philip Roth, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen. By rejecting the notion of a monolithic American character, these stories reaffirm the potential for ethics in suburbia, positioning it as a space for not only cosmopolitan contact, but also the conflicts and interrupts essential to subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
New York Times columnist William Safire, who attended the exhibit as an employee of the company that built Splitnik, recalls that the house was “not on the official tour,” but was added as a stop when Nixon’s handlers, sensing a rhetorical loss for the Vice President, were offered the chance to take Khrushchev to what they claimed was “the typical American house.”
- 2.
Throughout the debate, both Nixon and Khrushchev were keenly aware of their audience, not just those immediately present, but also those who would watch the argument on television. “We should hear you more on our televisions,” Nixon even told Khrushchev, “You should hear us more on yours.” (Perlstein 90).
- 3.
Mark Clapson and Ray Hutchison, editors of Suburbanization in Global Society, lament the difficulty of examining the individual suburbs because “the Anglo-suburban idea of the good life has been appropriated for urban design in countries that were once British and European countries” (4).
- 4.
See Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell, Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America; Tavernise and Gebeloff, “Immigrants Make Paths to Suburbia, Not Cities.”
- 5.
In the introduction to their essay collection The American Dream in the 21st Century, Sandra L. Hanson and John Kenneth White describe the wide range of definitions of the Dream, from “being able to get a high school education” to freedom to be “like Huck Finn; escape to the unknown; follow your dreams” (9, 8).
- 6.
Several observers have noted the connection between suburbia and the American Dream. See Teaford, The American Suburb; Baxandall and Ewan, Picture Windows; Beauregard, How American Became Suburban; Hayden’s introduction to Building Suburbia.
- 7.
See Keating, The Suburban Racial Dilemma; Johnson, Black Power in the Suburbs; Loewen, “Dreaming in Black and White.”
- 8.
See Suro, Wilson, and Singer, “Immigration and Poverty in America’s Suburbs”; Frey, “The New Great Migration” and “Melting Pot Cities and Suburbs.”
- 9.
A recent collection of essays, edited by Harold Bloom, surveys the literary history of American Dream narratives. J.A. Leo Lemay identifies Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as “the definitive formulation of the American Dream,” whose rags-to-riches story “is often commonly supposed to be the progenitor of the Horatio Alger success story of nineteenth-century American popular literature” (23).
- 10.
This tension is hardly reserved to Roth’s suburban stories. For example, the 2008 novel Indignation describes the fears of Newark resident Marcus Messner, who cannot shake the fear that he will be sent to war and will die in Korea.
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George, J. (2016). Chapter 4: Assimilation and Appropriation: Contest and Collaboration in Global Suburbia. In: Postmodern Suburban Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41006-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41006-7_5
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