Page 96 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

"What Are You Looking At, You White People?" . 81

Malls, of course, have been extensively theorized as spaces designed
specifically to facilitate people's consumer fantasy lives (Bauman 1993;
Goss 1993; Halton 1992), much in the same way that department stores
have been viewed as spaces whose intention (and effect) is to loosen
everyday concerns and responsibilities (with sometimes disastrous re-
sults) (Leach 1984). In a detailed analysis of the 1991 film Scenes from a
Mall, Russell Belk and Wendy Bryce (1993) show in often painful detail
the way in which one couple's emotional lives are enmeshed with the
world of consumption. Although concerned with a fictional pair named
Nick and Deborah, Belk and Bryce show through their painstaking,
step-by-step discussion the ways in which consumption is put to work in
specific lives. The bittersweet role of consumption fantasies in those
lives figures prominently. While Belk and Bryce are far from being en-
thusiastic about the degree to which Nick and Deborah seem to be living
their lives exclusively through consumer channels, they avoid character-
izing the two as empty automatons who cannot help themselves. En-
meshed in the spectacle of the mall, the two nevertheless seem to be liv-
ing through moments of passion. The overriding tendency, however
(especially among postmodern theories), is to certify mall experiences as
essentially surfacey, empty, alienating, fragmented. That is, the fantasies
on offer at the mall are fake (as any fantasy must be!) and draw people
into a cycle wherein they continually take on and cast off commodities
that might fill out their fractured identities.
Despite the mass-produced flavor of the girls' romantic fantasies, it
seems specious to dismiss them as merely the trappings of postmodern
consumerdom. For one, they indulge in these fantasies specifically within
the space of the mall, a space that is for them a protective place very dif-
ferent from their neighborhood. Coming as they do from an area where
plenty of girls have children by their early teens, fantasies about romance
take on a different quality than they might otherwise. Given the pro-
found constraints these girls faced outside the mall, their physical and
emotional freedom inside that space was revelatory: rather than hustling
me away from a man because he might rape little girls, it is Natalia who,
upon seeing my gaze resting upon a man, encourages me to imagine that
we might fall in love.

Christmas
Ella had sworn up and down that she was not going to do anything for Christ-
mas but had broken down and prepared a Christmas dinner of pork shoulder,
succotash, cornbread, greens, and sweet potato pie. There was a little Christ-
mas tree set up in the front room, covered with tinsel garlands, lights, and a few