Literature and Race in Los Angeles

Literature and Race in Los Angeles
Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2001-03-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521805353

This is a study of the treatment of the city, specifically LA, in contemporary writing.

Black Los Angeles

Black Los Angeles
Author: Darnell M. Hunt
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2010-04-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814737358

Naráyana’s best-seller gives its reader much more than “Friendly Advice.” In one handy collection—closely related to the world-famous Pañcatantra or Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom —numerous animal fables are interwoven with human stories, all designed to instruct wayward princes. Tales of canny procuresses compete with those of cunning crows and tigers. An intrusive ass is simply thrashed by his master, but the meddlesome monkey ends up with his testicles crushed. One prince manages to enjoy himself with a merchant’s wife with her husband’s consent, while another is kicked out of paradise by a painted image. This volume also contains the compact version of King Víkrama’s Adventures, thirty-two popular tales about a generous emperor, told by thirty-two statuettes adorning his lion-throne. Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Politics in Black and White

Politics in Black and White
Author: Raphael Sonenshein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691025483

This book reaches deep into the past of the city of Los Angeles and carries through to the dramatic events that have recently received global attention - the Rodney King beating and the uprising in South Central L.A. Tracing the evolution of an extraordinary biracial coalition in Los Angeles behind African-American Mayor Tom Bradley, Raphael Sonenshein shows how "crossover" politics and racial violence coexist in the paradoxical world of urban America. In this first book-length examination of the politics of the second largest (and possibly the most) diverse city in the United States, Sonenshein reveals the surprising durability of the political linkage between Blacks and white liberals, particularly Jews. This coalition also offered a major role to the business community, and expanded to include Latinos and Asian-Americans. The author combines interviews, original voting analyses, and a wide array of archival sources to explore coalition patterns at the elite and mass levels. While challenging the prevailing pessimism about biracial coalitions in general, he also compares their relative successes in Los Angeles to their disheartening failures in New York City. What emerges is a probing look at a crucial issue of politics in the United States: can whites, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and other minorities find common ground?

Policing Los Angeles

Policing Los Angeles
Author: Max Felker-Kantor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469646846

When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.

Fit to be Citizens?

Fit to be Citizens?
Author: Natalia Molina
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520246485

Shows how science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Examining the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, this book illustrates the ways health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and define racial groups.

In the Not Quite Dark

In the Not Quite Dark
Author: Dana Johnson
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2016-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1619028506

Following her prize–winning collection Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnson returns with a collection of bold stories set mostly in downtown Los Angeles that examine large issues –love, class, race – and how they influence and define our most intimate moments. In "The Liberace Museum," a mixed–race couple leave the South toward the destination of Vegas, crossing miles of road and history to the promised land of consumption; in "Rogues," a young man on break from college lands in his brother's Inland Empire neighborhood during a rash of unexplained robberies; in "She Deserves Everything She Gets," a woman listens to the strict advice given to her spoiled niece about going away to college, reflecting on her own experience and the night she lost her best friend; and in the collection's title story, a man setting down roots in downtown L.A. is haunted by the specter of both gentrification and a young female tourist, whose body was found in the water tower of a neighboring building. With deep insight into character, intimate relationships, and the modern search for personal freedom, In the Not Quite Dark is powerful new work that feels both urgent and timeless.

South Central Is Home

South Central Is Home
Author: Abigail Rosas
Publisher: Stanford Studies in Comparativ
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804799812

South Central Los Angeles is often characterized as an African American community beset by poverty and economic neglect. But this depiction obscures the significant Latina/o population that has called South Central home since the 1970s. More significantly, it conceals the efforts African American and Latina/o residents have made together in shaping their community. As residents have faced increasing challenges from diminished government social services, economic disinvestment, immigration enforcement, and police surveillance, they have come together in their struggle for belonging and justice. South Central Is Home investigates the development of relational community formation and highlights how communities of color like South Central experience racism and discrimination--and how in the best of situations, they are energized to improve their conditions together. Tracking the demographic shifts in South Central from 1945 to the present, Abigail Rosas shows how financial institutions, War on Poverty programs like Headstart for school children, and community health centers emerged as crucial sites where neighbors engaged one another over what was best for their community. Through this work, Rosas illuminates the promise of community building, offering findings indispensable to our understandings of race, community, and place in U.S. society.

The Border and the Line

The Border and the Line
Author: Dean J. Franco
Publisher: Stanford Studies in Comparativ
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781503607774

Los Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.--and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers--this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.

Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles

Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles
Author: Stephanie Lewthwaite
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2009-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780816526338

Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers set their sights on the growing Mexican community in Los Angeles. Experimenting with a variety of policies on health, housing, education, and labor, these reformersÑsettlement workers, educationalists, Americanizers, government officials, and employersÑattempted to transform the Mexican community with a variety of distinct and often competing agendas. In Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, Stephanie Lewthwaite presents evidence from a myriad of sources that these varied agendas of reform consistently supported the creation of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences across Los Angeles. Reformers simultaneously promoted acculturation and racialization, creating a Òlandscape of differenceÓ that significantly shaped the place and status of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the Progressive era through the New Deal. The book journeys across the urban, suburban, and rural spaces of Greater Los Angeles as it moves through time and examines the ruralÐurban migration of Mexicans on both a local and a transnational scale. Part 1 traverses the world of Progressive reform in urban Los Angeles, exploring the link between the regionÕs territorial and industrial expansion, early campaigns for social and housing reform, and the emergence of a first-generation Mexican immigrant population. Part 2 documents the shift from official Americanization and assimilation toward nativism and exclusion. Here Lewthwaite examines competing cultures of reform and the challenges to assimilation from Mexican nationalists and American nativists. Part 3 analyzes reform during the New Deal, which spawned the active resistance of second-generation Mexican Americans. Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles achieves a full, broad, and nuanced account of the variousÑand often contradictoryÑefforts to reform the Mexican population of Los Angeles. With a transnational approach grounded in historical context, this book will appeal to students of history, cultural studies, and literary studies

Black and Brown in Los Angeles

Black and Brown in Los Angeles
Author: Josh Kun
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520275608

Black and Brown in Los Angeles is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and interactions between Latinas/os and African Americans in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, the book delivers supporting evidence that Los Angeles is a key place to study racial politics while also providing the basis for broader discussions of multiethnic America. Students, faculty, and interested readers will gain an understanding of the different forms of cultural borrowing and exchange that have shaped a terrain through which African Americans and Latinas/os cross paths, intersect, move in parallel tracks, and engage with a whole range of aspects of urban living. Tensions and shared intimacies are recurrent themes that emerge as the contributors seek to integrate artistic and cultural constructs with politics and economics in their goal of extending simple paradigms of conflict, cooperation, or coalition. The book features essays by historians, economists, and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, alongside contributions by photographers and journalists working in Los Angeles.