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.

"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