Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles

I argue that de

I argue that despite popular culture's capacity to incorporate diverse and often contradictory meanings within its fold, the cultural forms explored in the following chapters privileged a particular way of seeing the city and its people. This way of seeing became the basis for a new political subjectivity that prized an inclusive white identity among a heterogeneous suburban public. In making this argument, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight contributes to the critical study of whiteness (viii)

More than providing a physical setting for the formation of such identities, space-its organization, construction, destruction, and representation plays an active role in shaping social consciousness. This book adopts the recent spatial turn within the humanities and social sciences, often linked to the emergence of postmodern theory, to illuminate the racial turn that [viv] dawned upon American society and culture in the decades following World War II. In the age of urban renewal, highway construction, and suburbanization, the spatial reorganization of the American city gave rise to a new
racial awareness that, for better or for worse, still grips our collective imagination.
Ultimately, this study emphasizes the suburban character of postwar popular culture. (viv-vv)

Extolling the virtues of consumerism, patriarchy, patriotism, and small-town midwestern whiteness, Disneyland issued a set of cultural motifs that emphasized a retreat from the public culture of New Deal liberalism and instead asserted a privatized, suburban alternative to that culture.

The onus was thus on Walter O'Malley to clean up the image of major-league baseball, to sever the game from its historical affinity with working-class masculinity, and to make it more palatable for an expanding middle class comprising presumably stable nuclear families.

Simultaneously, however, as freeway construction exacerbated racial tensions within the postwar urban region, the very experience of driving the new freeways diminished the public's awareness of such tensions. The freeway mediated a view of the metropolis, not unlike the way in which Disneyland's structured space mediated a view of a small-town past and a suburban future.