Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures PDF Download

Author: Raúl Homero Villa
Publisher: Special Issue of American Quar
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This special issue of American Quarterly focuses on Los Angeles as an emblematic site through which the scholarship of American studies can be examined. As a city shaped by eighteenth-century European colonization, nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, and twentieth-century migration, Los Angeles has come to embody both the hopes and fears of Americans looking to the future. It is a city in which the local is deployed in complex practices of identity and community formation within the broader networks of globalization that continue to define and redefine what constitutes America. The articles in this volume address the complexities of the city's social geography across time, particularly since World War II. The collection reflects an exciting variety of cultural studies perspectives and reveals the synergistic possibilities of current Los Angeles studies and American studies in general. American Quarterly includes interdisciplinary scholarship that engages key issues in American studies. Publishing essays that examine American societies and cultures in global and local contexts, the journal contributes to the understanding of the United States, its diversity, and its impact on world politics and culture.

Author: Ignacio L—pez-Calvo
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816529261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio L—pez-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction sets out to reconfigure the scope of Latino literary and cultural studies. Integrating histories of different regions and nations, the book sets the interplay of unresolved contradictions in this particular metropolitan area. The novelists studied here stem from multiple areas, including the U.S. Southwest, Guatemala, and Chile. The study also incorporates non-Latino writers who have contributed to the Latino culture of the city. The first chapter examines Latino cultural production from an ecocritical perspective on urban interethnic relations. Chapter 2 concentrates on the representation of daily life in the barrio and the marginalization of Latino urban youth. The third chapter explores the space of women and how female characters expand their area of operations from the domestic space to the public space of both the barrio and the city. A much-needed contribution to the fields of urban theory, race critical theory, Chicana/oÐLatina/o studies, and Los Angeles writing and film, L—pez-Calvo offers multiple theoretical perspectivesÑincluding urban theory, ecocriticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studiesÑ contextualized with notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism.

Author: David Halle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226313700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Capturing much of what is new and vibrant in urban studies today, "New York and Los Angeles" should prove to be valuable reading for scholars in that field, as well as in sociology, political science and government.

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0712666230
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Recounts the story of Los Angeles. He tells a tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States.

Author: Jenny Banh
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498528546
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The Anthropology of Los Angeles: Place and Agency in an Urban Setting questions the production and representations of L.A. by revealing the gray spaces between the real and imagined city. Contributors to this urban ethnography document hidden histories that connect daily actors within cultural systems to global social formations. This diverse collection is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, race studies, gender studies, food studies, Latin American studies, and Asian studies.

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844675688
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker) No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs L.A.’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

Author: Min Hyoung Song
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures. Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.

Author: Michael Maltzan
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
ISBN: 9783775728461
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, American architect Michael Maltzan traces the transformations that have taken place in the city of Los Angeles from the early nineties to the current state of a modern metropolis and its relationship with its changing surroundings. In a series of conversations on real estate speculation and future urban development, issues such as identity, infrastructure, landscape, resources, site density, urban experience, political structure, commerce, and community are introduced to supplement traditional models of urban development. This is meant to facilitate defining how the "City of Angels" has to respond to turn of the tide in the identity of the metropolitan region, one that has recently become much more complex. Contributors to the volume are Iwan Baan, Catherine Opie, Sarah Whiting, Charles Waldheim, Matthew Coolidge, Geoff Manaugh, Mirko Zardini, Edward Soja, James Flanigan, Charles Jencks, and Qingyun Ma.

Author: UNESCO
Publisher: UNESCO Publishing
ISBN: 9231001701
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Report presents a series of analyses and recommendations for fostering the role of culture for sustainable development. Drawing on a global survey implemented with nine regional partners and insights from scholars, NGOs and urban thinkers, the report offers a global overview of urban heritage safeguarding, conservation and management, as well as the promotion of cultural and creative industries, highlighting their role as resources for sustainable urban development. Report is intended as a policy framework document to support governments in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Urban Development and the New Urban Agenda.