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| Suburbia: the new utopia? | Rupa Huq After years of sneery criticism, old prejudices about the suburbs are being replaced with the notion that they are a source of prideAfter years of having derision heaped on it, suddenly suburbia is all the rage.Lots of people's writing is secretly biographical and my interest in suburbia, as seen on this site and elsewhere, is no exception. I reacted against growing up in the outer west London district of Ealing (or rather in Pitshanger, a suburb of it) with a conscious fix of inner city living in my 20s, where I could walk to work but also had a nasty mugging. In my third decade as an older and wiser parent I now both live and work in the west/south-west London 'burbs from which I sprang, while simultaneously propagating the argument that these much maligned outposts are actually great places. Now it seems after years of deriding the suburbs as boring and lacking in character, people are queuing up to praise suburbia as utopia in a big way.Suburban criticism has been longstanding and voluminous over time. George Orwell's much quoted description of suburbs as "a prison with the cells all in a row ... semi-detached torture chambers" is from 1939. Only last month the Guardian's review of the reformed Spandau Ballet accused the New Romantic mainstays of being "stuck in an 80s suburban wine bar", hurling the ultimate insult their way. Sneery suburb-bashing by the commentariat is repetitive to the point of being predictable, but given recent developments it's starting to look a little old-fashioned.A new book from Paul Barker entitled Freedoms of Suburbia counteracts the usual notion of suburbia as a place of cloying claustrophobia. A new London Transport Museum exhibition also revels in the home of mock-Tudor that's more usually just mocked. Forthcoming spin-off events include Friday night DJ-led dance events in the name of suburbia – surely the very reverse of the idea of the 'burbs as drab and boring.Planners and architects have been among suburbia's biggest critics, accusing it of breeding ugly buildings and featureless uniformity, so it is significant that the Royal Academy of Arts recently hosted an event celebrating London suburbia as part of its architecture lecture series.It seems that old prejudices are being displaced by the realisation that the suburban semi is the epitome of flexible living space with scope for knocking through walls, extending outwards and upwards – modifications rendered impossible in, say, the riverside penthouses of Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, where residents are unhappily trapped in negative equity to a higher degree than their suburban counterparts.Suburban enthusiasts are not just confined to London town or blighty's shores. Last month I made my first ever trip to the US for a conference during which people from all over the world gathered to talk about the "new suburban paradigms". Its site, Hofstra University may technically be in New York, but its Long Island campus was where the Levittown model of rapidly constructed US postwar suburb was pioneered. An event called The Diverse Suburb taught me new vocabulary like "foreclosure" for "repossession". Presentation topics included data on Latinos choosing US suburbs as a point of entry rather than suburbanising outwards and even a contribution on the burgeoning popularity of churches in suburban California due to Christian heavy metal.The recession has bitten the suburbs in the US as the UK but both are demonstrating resilience. There are also differences in form and function across the pond. In the US car culture has always ruled supreme, whereas in the UK suburbs have been defined more by public transport links, particularly in London as a talk on Tuesday at the Transport Museum will illustrate.Importantly, the suburbs take many forms, from garden cities (modelled on Hampstead Garden Suburb) to stockbroker-belt pads (Betjamin's hated Metro-land) via corporation suburbia (Burnage, where Peggy Gallagher, Oasis matriarch, still lives) and plenty of other variants in between. All of the above were areas launched with much promise – homes for heroes, brave new worlds of post-slum clearance etc. But attitudes equating them with naffness and the constantly pillorying of suburbia as a whole by the commentariat are being eclipsed by a recognition of their strengths. Change may be slow but the penny seems to be dropping that the suburbs are a source of pride after all.Planning policyHousingRupa Huqguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
No individual 'fathered' modern African literature Chinua Achebe is right to reject this dubious honour, but his contribution as a writer and, crucially, editor – has been immenseAs soon as I heard about Chinua Achebe's rejection of the label "father of modern African literature", I did two Google searches. One, was for "father of modern European literature" for, surely, if modern African literature has a father, European literature could not possibly be a bastard. The second, was for "father of primitive African literature", since such a competent fatherless father (which in this case would be Achebe) would be something worth documenting. I hate to disappoint eager readers, but both searches drew a blank.I thoroughly agree with Achebe's rejection of the label, because, as he has said, "there were many of us – many, many of us". The truth is, history is made up of what we choose to accept and shaped by what we reject, and to declare Achebe alone as the "father of modern African literature" is to skew the realities of the world's second largest continent, a place of multiple languages and identities, that has been sharing and writing stories for longer than the modern English language has existed. The irony, of course, is that the attempt to place Achebe atop the African literary family tree is due to a leaning towards work published in English. Such an approach negates the contributions of work in French, in which Sembène Ousmane and Léopold Senghor were published before Achebe; work in Arabic (a language spoken right across Africa due to the influence of Islam), such as Naguib Mahfouz's huge oeuvre of more than 50 novels and countless short stories; and, of course, work in Portuguese, Somali, Dutch, Hausa, Amharic and countless other indigenous languages. Furthermore, there's a saying that's common in many parts of Africa, including Achebe's Igbo land, which was famously used by Hillary Clinton and which roughly translates as "it takes a village to raise a child". I think the saying is easily adapted for literature: it takes a people to create a literature and Chinua Achebe's rejection of the mantle of sole ancestor reflects this notion. However, the argument can be made that Achebe's role as editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, an unsalaried position he held for 10 years, from 1962 to 1972, makes him, without question, a nurturer of African literature. During his tenure, he published writers from all corners of Africa, including now-famous names such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head and Okot p'Bitek, as well as nation builders such as Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. The series, which published new work until 2003, was also a place of publication for writers such as Ben Okri, Tsitsi Dangaremba and Abdulrazak Gurnah before they became widely known. Achebe has said that he considers his work as editor of the African Writers Series to be more important than his achievements as a novelist and I can't argue with his assessment. Chinua Achebe's work has been important to my own writing practice through the exploration of his ideas on Conrad and language use: I read and write with an understanding of prejudice in spite of a positive intellectual position, and accept my existence as a hybrid of ever-expanding ancestries, who thinks and writes in many languages. However my understanding of nuance, the notion of shades, the absence of a clear defining line between right and wrong in real life, which is central to my work, is something I learned not just from Achebe, but also from Mariama Bâ, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and pirated Indian films watched in small spaces in Accra. Achebe is only one of my fathers. And speaking of nuance, I return, being a classy Ghanaian, to Google: the phrase, "father of modern African literature" it appears, is taken from a Nadine Gordimer quote when Achebe won the international Booker in 2007; what she said was: "Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature". Seen in context, what she said is very different to what the great man was asked to take on. We all reject it.Chinua AchebeFictionNii Ayikwei Parkesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Night Out With | Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin: Yes, She’ll Hire a Nanny Hanging out at the Public Theater with Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, who have written five books with each other, including “The Nanny Diaries.” feeds.nytimes.com |
TBR: Inside the List Daniel H. Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind,” returns to the list with his new book, “Drive.” feeds.nytimes.com |
Linklog: Book piracy, Penguin cannibalism, and more "I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may": an online book pirate speaks.• What kind of person decides to build a bookshelf out of vintage Penguin paperbacks?• Did data-dense books such as railway timetables look better before designers got involved?• A Single Man is Christopher Isherwood's masterpiece, according to the blurb on the back of a new edition of A Single Man. Much more interestingly, John Self agrees.• The least likely setence-opening of the day comes in a fine response by Mark Athitakis to Wayne Gooderham's Guardian blogpost on the therapeutic value of Saul Bellow: "So, just like Herzog, James Frey..."Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |