Figuring the future in Los(t) Angeles

Abstract

This article examines Los Angeles' symbolic relation to the rest of the US, deriving from its multi-layered political, social, economic, racialized and environmental complexity. Metropolitan Los Angeles has become 'a dystopian symbol of Dickensian inequalities and intractible racial contradictions', according to historian Mike Davis. Rather than representing America's modernity, Los Angeles has come to symbolize 'the collapse of the American Century'. Accordingly this article explores the motives of African American writers in representing Los Angeles as a politically and environmentally disastrous living space and a figure for the state of the nation. The value that black writers place upon and celebrate in the multiple range of urban ethnicities is at odds, not only with the class and racialized political and economic hierarchies of the city which oppresses its black residents but also contrary to contemporary dominant models of American citizenship. The article considers work by Chester Himes, Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley and argues that within and without the borders of the US, labels like 'minority' or 'ethnic' literature ghettoize, marginalize and minimize its significance. Yet the work of these authors currently carries the weight of the search for a more ethical and moral sense of responsibility for the state of a nation skidding down the path of increasing inhumanity, injustice and disregard, not only for the majority of its own population but for the majority of the residents of this planet. These works are significant acts of dissent from the perpetuation of injustice in contemporary politics, from the increasing extremes of wealth and poverty, and from the parasitic relation of the US to the environment.