Big Mall
Shopping for Meaning
A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living?
Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. 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.
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.
"Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a mall, the book itself has a lot of everything, a sublime mix of memoir, history, and cultural criticism. Kate Black is a learned Virgil in the consumerist Inferno, always avoiding the obvious and leading us to surprising connections—oil, suicide, Reddit, squatters, dolphins. Whether malls fill you with nostalgia or horror, this book will change your relationship to the world we've constructed around us.” – Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens
"Before there was Instagram, there was the mall. But what happens when a seasonless, tacky, fantasyland is all you knew growing up? How does one embrace a genuinely fake experience? Or to be more precise, a fake but genuine experience? Kate Black’s Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, one thing’s for sure: after reading this book, you’ll never look at a mall in the same way again." – Ziya Tong, Science broadcaster & author of The Reality Bubble
Reviews
"[A] keen appraisal of malls’ social import." – Publishers Weekly
"With Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning author Kate Black attempts to demystify the history of Canada’s most famous consumerist landmark by taking a magnifying glass to West Edmonton Mall specifically, but also to the concept of shopping malls more generally." – Logan Macnair, The British Columbia Review
“An examination of adolescence and death and consumption and spectacle, Big Mall ponders why the mall makes us feel good, and bad. Much of the book is introspective; some of it looks outward at the cultural forces that spread this particular facet of American commerce across the globe…Finishing the slim book feels like stumbling out of the air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, blinking, into harsh and warm sun.” – Maura Judkis, Washington Post
"Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning is ... one part academic examination of consumerism viewed through the experience of the shopping mall and one part personal fascination with one of the world’s biggest retail and entertainment centres." – Justin Bell, Edmonton Journal