Diefendorf, Jeffry “I Love That City, But Which City?”
< Harris Abstract
“Little White Houses: Critical Race Theory and the Interpretation of Ordinary Dwellings in the United States, 1945-60. Proceedings from the Warren Center for American Studies Conference on Reconceptualizing the History of the Built Environment in North America”
ABSTRACT: Architectural and landscape historians have seldom addressed race in their studies of the domestic realm. Class and gender frequently appear as key concerns in social histories of housing, yet race remains largely excluded as a factor for consideration. Planning and urban historians have for some time considered race as a key subject for study, but have ignored the individual dwelling unit. The house and garden have not, for the most part, received critical examination in terms of the contours of racial formation in the United States. “Reconsiderations” of race in those histories then (as this session’s title suggests), can hardly be addressed, since a substantial corpus of scholarship—that is to say, the first “considerations”—have yet to evolve. In this paper, I examine the value that race theory, and the more recently developed subfield known as the critical study of whiteness, hold for historians of housing, focusing particularly on the immediate postwar era (1945-60). Although a growing number of recent studies have begun to uncover the histories of suburbs that were explicitly designed for consumers identified as “non-white,” most postwar suburbs were created for a generically conceived and exclusively “white” audience. As such, the home became a framework for the establishment and confirmation of “white” identities, and scholarship in the critical studies of whiteness therefore establishes an important theoretical platform from which analysis of such environments may begin and from which new understandings of the built environment may evolve.