Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles [Hardcover]

Eric Avila (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0520241215 | ISBN-13: 978-0520241213 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces." - George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness"

From the Inside Flap

"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces."--George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (August 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520241215
• ISBN-13: 978-0520241213
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,359,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars minimal coverage of the 1960s onwards, July 25, 2008

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W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (American Crossroads) (Paperback)

In what the book covers, it does so quite well. But the book came out in 2004. Its weakness is in the last section, the Epilogue. Into which Avila puts the events of the 60s and beyond. We are talking about some 45 years to 2004. There is relatively little discussion of these years. Where large changes occurred. In demography for example, so that Latinos, broadly defined, became the largest ethnic group in Los Angeles.

Also, the Watts riot of 1968 is slightly covered. But the 1992 race riot not at all. Surely the latter, and the recession of the early 90s, which dragged on into a very slow recovery for LA, had some effect on the book's thesis? And if it did not, then that should be explained.

Or maybe all this is [to be] the subject of another book by the author?

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, March 4, 2008

By 

pj (Lagrangeville, ny USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Hardcover)

I had to read Eric Avlia's "Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight" for a course and was dreading it. I figured that it would be a rather tiresome book pointing out racism in pop culture. Instead I found a terrific work on how race and urban vision informed the spatial construction of modern Los Angeles.

As a lifelong New Yorker, I'm more than willing to have my low opinions of LA confirmed, and Eric Avila, a professor at UCLA, provides some good grist for that mill. Avila argues that the spatial construction of LA, beginning in the 30s and 40s, was informed by a vision of the city which contrasted itself consciously with what he terms "the Noir City." Avila's "Noir City" is exemplified by East Coast cities like New York. The Noir City is dirty, crowded, racially and culturally polyglot, and dangerous. Avila traces how Los Angeles boosters, often with roots in suburban and small town Midwestern states, rejected this vision of the city. They saw Los Angeles as a cleaner, safer, more orderly city, which was also, not coincidentally, racial white. Avila looks at elements of popular public culture in LA, such as Disneyland and Dodgers Stadium, to show how this vision of clean respectable orderliness was realized in post war LA. These arenas of cultural display offered an orderly homogenize entertainment for the masses.

At the same time the city was undergoing a spatial segregation based along racial and class lines. As Dodger Stadium moved into Chavez Ravine it displaced a longstanding Hispanic community. But far more important were changes in transportation and municipality. Avila traces how, in the early 20th century, Los Angeles public transportation system, which had been adequate and which could have taken off dramatically, was left behind in favor of a car centered transportation network. The automobile, and the resulting highway system, had a decisive impact on the shape of Los Angeles. People who had once congregated on the subways and trolley were now isolated in their cars. The highways allowed suburban commuters to bypass other neighborhoods entirely. A white suburban commuter could live all his life in Los Angeles and never have to see a racial minority or poor person.