ERIC AVILA, PhD (UCLA, History)
Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space and American Culture After World War II
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014
12:00PM-1:30PM | Prospect House Presidential Dining Room
The Princeton Mellon Forum for Research on the Urban Environment welcomes Eric Avila (History, UCLA) to discuss how his scholarly interest in racial identity, urban space and cultural expression have shaped his research and writing thus far, and sketches the contours of his next research project--a broad investigation of postwar American culture, reinterpreted through the rise of the postwar urban region and its attendant disparities of race, class and gender. In Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs, Avila proposes a new interpretation of postwar American culture, moving away from standard Cold War narratives to explore how the structural transformation of urban life after World War II—highway construction, suburbanization, urban renewal, slum clearance, deindustrialization and white flight—engendered new discourses of identity, new imaginings of community, and new expressions of social conflict.
This event will take place at the Prospect House Presidential Dining Room. Lunch will be served.
Sponsored by the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities.
