Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angelesdoor Eric Avila
culture (135) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)American Crossroads (13)
Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This vividly detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for Southern California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new "white identity" in popular culture with provocative discussions of Hollywood and film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and L.A.'s renowned freeways. These institutions not only mirrored this new culture of suburban whiteness and helped shape it, but also, as Avila argues, reveal the profound relationship between the increasingly fragmented urban landscape of Los Angeles and the rise of a new political outlook that rejected the tenets of New Deal liberalism and anticipated the emergence of the New Right. Avila examines disparate manifestations of popular culture in architecture, art, music, and more to illustrate the unfolding urban dynamics of postwar Los Angeles. He also synthesizes important currents of new research in urban history, cultural studies, and critical race theory, weaving a textured narrative about the interplay of space, cultural representation, and identity amid the westward shift of capital and culture in postwar America. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)979.4History and Geography North America Great Basin and West Coast U.S. CaliforniaLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |
Discussing housing, Avila writes, “By allowing a greater degree of control over zoning and land-use policies, municipal incorporation allowed the residents of Lakewood to create racially homogenous communities by excluding those populations who tended to rely on rental housing and county services” (pg. 44). He continues, “If suburbanization, at least in its postwar manifestation, implied a racialized process that privileged an inclusive white identity, then the suburbanization of downtown Los Angeles underscored the saliency of race in the midcentury transformation of urban life” (pg. 62). Turning to film, Avila writes, “If cinema replicated the varied experiences of modern urban life, its subsequent industrialization in 1920s Hollywood demonstrated how mass production and mass consumption defined a distinctly twentieth-century brand of American modernity” (pg. 70). While film noir represented the racialized threat of urban landscapes, “science fiction cinema, with its discursive emphasis on invasion, infestation, and infiltration, encompassed a set of images and words that found more consequential forms of expression in official assessments of urban property values” (pg. 97). Avila concludes of Disneyland, “Placing his theme park in a suburban location, removed from the inner-city concentration of racialized poverty, Disney used racial representations to underscore the sense of whiteness that took shape among the suburban periphery of the metropolis. Thus, the same processes that exacerbated Coney Island’s plight bolstered Disneyland’s popularity” (pg. 137).
Avila writes, “The history of public cultural practices such as parades, museums, and expositions illuminates a larger pattern of representing otherness in the American public sphere. In a racialized democracy such as the United States, racial signifiers have been used to convey certain cultural ideals, including, if not especially, progress” (pg. 201). Further, “Within the cultural system that took shape according to decentralized patterns of urban growth, therefore, highway construction virtually necessitated the creation of places like Disneyland and Dodger Stadium, which ostensibly anchored a highly mobile and transient population to a set of nodal points along the fluid space of the new freeways” (pg. 223). ( )