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Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power

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The social, cultural, and political history of Los Angeles shaped the messages in the movies, radio, and television made there, and the mass media made in Los Angeles shaped the entire world.

Cultural production has been intrinsic to Los Angeles: both its internal formation and its rise to global influence.  Los Angeles arts and mass culture were forged in the furnace of a growing, multi-ethnic, migrant-stocked metropolis in the US-Mexican Borderlands and the Pacific Rim routes to Asia and South America.  It was forged in--and contributed to--U.S. imperialism and revolutionary movements, and came to deadly world power in the propaganda of the 1930s and World War II.  Combining its dual roles as capital of US mass media production and the capital of US aerospace production, Los Angeles became a pivot of global history in the Cold War, producing two world-historic presidents: the first capturing Washington with Angeleno militaristic and racial ideology; the second capturing the American mind with Angeleno media artifice.

These visual essays tell these stories and many more: of the role LA played in the recasting of the relations of men and women; its role in remaking the way human beings see and hear, think and live; its role as a birthplace of "fascism" worldwide; its role in emancipating the human spirit and subverting the Enlightenment's deepest values of democracy and equality.  Hollywood's visual culture was invented and came of age in the first half of the 20th century, a period of racial apartheid, political upheaval, and autocratic police departments.  Tooled-up for propaganda, It projected its  cultural power on the world in the years after World War II and minted the political culture of the post-Enlightenment world: a carnography of power.

This page has paths:

  1. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
  2. Networks Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. White Shadows: The Rise of Mass Media and Racial Propaganda, 1890s-1930s
  2. Bathos and Bloodbath: Television, New Hollywood, New Right, and the Carnography of Power, 1940s to 2010s
  3. The Fine Art of Rebellion: Southern California Avant-Gardes, 1900-2000
  4. Bibliography for White Shadows