Black, Kate (Kate Grace), author.

Big mall : shopping for meaning / Kate Black.

First edition.

Toronto : Coach House Books, [2024]
©2024

173 pages ; 21 cm

"A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, what makes life worth living? In less than a century, the shopping mall has morphed from a blueprint for a socialist utopia to something else entirely: a home to disaffected mallrats and depressed zoo animals, a sensory overload and consumerist trap. Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids. It’s the site of a notoriously lethal rave for teenagers, a fatal rollercoaster accident, and more than one gun-range suicide; it’s where oil field workers reap the social mobility of a boom-and-bust economy, the impossibly large structure where teens attempt to invent themselves in dark Hollister sales racks and weird horny escapades in the indoor waterpark. It’s a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend. Can malls tell us something important about who we are? Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming-of-age in North America’s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. Ultimately, a close look at the mall reveals clues to how a good life in these times is possible."-- Provided by publisher.

155245472X (softcover)
9781552454725 (softcover)

West Edmonton Mall (Edmonton, Alta.)
West Edmonton Mall (Edmonton, Alb.)
Shopping malls Social aspects.
Shopping Psychological aspects.
Galeries marchandes Aspect social.
Magasinage Aspect psychologique.

Location: Library main 319632
Call No.: 319632
Copy: 1
Status: Available