UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Appropriating
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Appropriating (Sub)Urban Space: Inhabited Counter-Narratives as Resistant Spatial Intervention in Contemporary American and German Culture A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Lacey Nicole Smith Committee in charge: Professor Maurizia Boscagli, Chair Professor Colin Gardner Professor Jocelyn Holland December 2018 The dissertation of Lacey Nicole Smith is approved. ____________________________________________ Jocelyn Holland ____________________________________________ Colin Gardner ____________________________________________ Maurizia Boscagli, Committee Chair September 2018 Appropriating (Sub)Urban Space: Inhabited Counter-Narratives as Resistant Spatial Intervention in Contemporary American and German Culture Copyright © 2018 by Lacey Nicole Smith iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is dedicated to the three pillars that got me through this process: Matthew Loewen, Jeffrey Bellomi, and Summer Myers. There are also a few people I would like to acknowledge for their assistance in helping me complete this work, including all of the members of my dissertation committee – Maurizia Boscagli, Colin Gardner, and Jocelyn Holland – as well as Dick Hebdige, Mark Leiderman, Thomas Mazanec, Sara Weld, Kira Lanier, Matt Parker, Kate and Don Loewen, and countless others who helped provide all manner of research or moral support during this process, including all of my friends and my family. A portion of Chapter One was adapted into an essay entitled “‘A nice home at the end of the cul-de-sac’: Hawkins as Infected Postmodern Suburbia.” The essay appeared in the anthology Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism, and Innocence in the Series, which was published by McFarland and Company in June 2018 and edited by Kevin J. Wetmore. iv VITA OF LACEY NICOLE SMITH September 2018 [FINISH] EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in International Studies, Dickinson College, May 2008 Master of Arts in Comparative Literature, University of Colorado, Boulder, May 2012 Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2018 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2015-2018: Teaching Assistant, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara 2012-2015: Teaching Assistant, Department of German, University of California, Santa Barbara 2010-2012: Teaching Assistant, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder PUBLICATIONS “‘A nice home at the end of the cul-de-sac’: Hawkins as Infected Postmodern Suburbia,” adapted from “Chapter One: Infected Suburb, Perfected Suburbia” of the dissertation and published in “Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism, and Innocence in the Series” by McFarland and Company, June 2018. AWARDS Outstanding Teaching Assistant, Department of Comparative Literature, 2016 Max Kade Fellowship, 2014 FIELDS OF STUDY Major Fields: Spatial Studies, Urban Studies Studies in Germanic Studies with Professors Jocelyn Holland and Sven Spieker Studies in American Suburban Studies with Professor Dick Hebdige Studies in Public Art with Professor Colin Gardner v ABSTRACT Appropriating (Sub)Urban Space: Inhabited Counter-Narratives as Resistant Spatial Intervention in Contemporary American and German Culture by Lacey Nicole Smith This project is concerned with the concept of urban and suburban space as explored through mediated narratives in film, television, literature, art, and other visual or narrative media. Adopting spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of differential space and the right to the city, this project asserts that the hegemonic dominance of capitalist, neoliberal, and bourgeois ideologies in American and German culture extends to both the material and psychic production of space in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Concentrating on the way American urban and suburban spaces have been portrayed in the media, as well as how artists from a variety of media have critiqued or responded to hegemonic mediated narratives through narratives that center the experience of inhabitance, this project addresses the way space can be appropriated and mutated to potentiate the emergence of differential space, understood as space which differs from the hegemonic norms dictated by the dominated built environment. Using close readings of texts indicative of the kind of inhabited everyday resistance Lefebvre identifies as necessary for venturing the right to the city to all who inhabit space, this project considers the concept of spatial vi appropriation along multiple planes of resistant spatial intervention. In the process, it articulates an interartistic, transnational, and interdisciplinary methodology for approaching broad spatial questions like that of the planetary right to the city and the way collective practices of spatial appropriation to potentiate the emergence of differential space. The theoretical framework borrows from Lefebvre as well as the likes of theorists like David Harvey, Dolores Hayden, Lynn Mie Itagaki, Tobias Morawski, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson. Primary texts investigated in the project include Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the music of Vince Staples, David Wagner’s Mauer Park, Tanja Dücker’s Spielzone, the photo series Berlin Wonder Land, Stih & Schnock’s Orte des Erinnerns, the squatting actions of Refugee Tent Action in Kreuzberg, Berlin, the citizen campaign to maintain Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, and music videos by Emus Primus featuring Berlin’s ubiquitous graffitial images. The purposes of these and other investigations throughout the project is the illuminate how a collective, planetary form of spatial appropriation might be coupled with individual acts of spatial intervention to slowly mutate the built environment and create counter-narratives about urban and suburban space that potentiate the emergence of a space more conducive to the needs of all who inhabit. vii CONTENTS A Note on Terminology and Conventions...…………………………………………ix Introduction: Towards Differential Space …………………………………………..1 1 Infected Suburb, Perfected Suburbia: The Suburbia Simulacrum and Counter-Narratives of Contamination ...……..……………………………………………………………25 2 From Canfield Green to Ramona Park: Vince Staples’ Norf Long Beach and Inhabited Urban Authorship ……….…………………………………………………………101 3 Claiming the New Berlin: A Case Study in Collective Spatial Appropriation as Right to the City …………………………………………………………………174 Conclusion: Towards a Differential Spatial Studies ...……………………………..254 viii A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND CONVENTIONS Throughout this work, I have capitalized the term Black wherever it denotes a racial identity, following the convention that a term should be capitalized when referring to “a culture, ethnicity, or group of people” and where Black is understood as a politicized identity representing people of the African diaspora. (Lori L. Tharps, “The Case for Black with a Capital B,” The New York Times, 18 November 2014). I have opted not to capitalize white both because the term does not have the same political import as Black when used as an identity designation and also in defiance of white supremacists, who capitalize the term precisely to politicize white identity. I have avoided substituting the term African American for Black in recognition of the fact that not all Black people living in the United States identify as African or American. Similarly, I follow the convention of using -x to de-gender terms like Latino (Latinx) and Chicano (Chicanx). Moreover, to avoid perpetuating the same rhetoric of anti-urban racial bias this project critiques, I have preferred the term “people/person of color” or variations thereof (inhabitants of color, populations of color) wherever possible when referring to groups of non-white people that include more than one ethnic or racial identity, rather than using terms like “minorities” or “non-white,” though I do use the latter term when referring specifically to the way white populations group all people of color together along racial lines. Where any of these terms appear in cited quotations, I have tended to leave them intact. For similar reasons, I avoid using the term “ghetto” when referring to impoverished urban neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by people of color, instead using “ghettoized” or “ghettoized neighborhood” so as to highlight that it is the intentional actions of state and economic actors (such as redlining, racially restrictive real estate covenants, and other forms ix of segregation) that force certain ethnic and racial populations into restrictive parcels of space. Finally, whenever the N-word appears, including in quotes made by a Black person, I have opted to use asterisks to censor the term out of respect for the convention that white people should never speak this term or put it in print. The asterisks are intended not to censor the original speaker so much as to censor myself as a white academic who is utilizing the speaker’s sentiment in my own work. I recognize that many of these terms are fraught and that conventions about preferred terminology may change over time -- I welcome any criticism aimed at making the language in this work more humanizing and inclusive. x Introduction Towards Differential Space Henri Lefebvre opens “The Right to the City” (1968) with the observation that urban society has