ABSTRACT
A significant theme in contemporary thought has been a concern with distinctive tensions between processes of cultural globalisation on the one hand and local enclaves of innovation and opposition on the other (see for example Lash and Urry 1994). These tensions are usually held to have become particularly marked in the urban culture of later modernity as the optimism of the modernist imagination has turned sour. It is, however, surprising that the character of suburban culture has usually been ignored. It seems as if suburban inhabitants’ acquiescence in the anonymity of everyday life cannot easily be accommodated in the new geographies of cultural change (see, for, example Bird et al. 1993). In this chapter I shall make a small gesture to redress this neglect by picking up the relatively neglected theme of authenticity in suburbia. Basically, my argument will be that in important ways the contradictions of collective identity in suburban settings have generated recurrent themes of a concern with authenticity in the appropriation of mass cultural forms. I will begin, and return towards the end of the chapter, by suggesting some general reasons for why this should be so: in a central section I will point to some aspects of a quest for authentic experience in recent British suburban life.
