Remaking the Anglophilic city: Visual spectacles in suburbia

Abstract:   In the late 1990s, the residents of the Christchurch suburb of Halswell began to extensively engage in the practice of adorning their homes with Christmas lights. While the lights attract many visitors from other parts of the city, many Christchurch people are highly critical of them on grounds of taste. An exploration of the diverse attitudes toward this cultural practice demonstrates the complex ways in which local urban identities are articulated. While the Christmas lights reproduce processes of suburban social conformity and normativity, they also constitute a more postmodern site in which the established heritage meanings of Christchurch based on notions of Englishness are disrupted.