Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight

by Avila, Eric

• ISBN13: 9780520248113
• ISBN10: 0520248112
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-01
• Publisher: Ingram Publisher Services, Inc.

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Eric Avila is Associate Professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Preface	xiii
Acknowledgments	xvii
1. Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space, and the New "New Mass Culture" of Postwar America	1	(19)
2. The Nation's "White Spot": Racializing Postwar Los Angeles	20	(45)
3. The Spectacle of Urban Blight: Hollywood's Rendition of a Black Los Angeles	65	(41)
4. "A Rage for Order": Disneyland and the Suburban Ideal	106	(39)
5. Suburbanizing the City Center: The Dodgers Move West	145	(40)
6. The Sutured City: Tales of Progress and Disaster in the Freeway Metropolis	185	(39)
Epilogue. The 1960's and Beyond	224	(19)
Notes	243	(38)
Selected Bibliography	281	(18)
Index	299