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

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Cultural production has been an intrinsic part of the Los Angeles region's internal formation and rise to global influence.  Los Angeles arts and mass culture were forged in a furnace of imperialism and revolutionary movements, racial apartheid, middle-class reformers, and autocratic police departments, a period running from around 1900 through the 1950s.  

Four major, interrelated, and tension-filled themes are explored in these essays: 1) Censorship and propaganda in arts and mass media; 2) Ethno-racial apartheid and ideologies of race-ethnic difference; 3) Patriarchal gender relations, sexuality, and sexual emancipations and exploitations; 4) media violence in relation to physical violence in America's wars and on its streets.

Specifying the ways that these four elements of cultural production came together in city- and nation-building, in the production and the accumulation of power, and their impact on the world at large by the late 20th century is the overall goal of these essays taken together.  They argue that Los Angeles contributed a "pulp fascism" to American political ideology: a distinct form of global fascism that was just as vicious and inhumane as Italian Fascism or German Nazism, but cheap and incoherent because it was largely a product of commercial mass media rather than of political leadership.  It was, however, extremely deadly, even genocidal.  American pulp fascism, from the Ku Klux Klan to Christian Fundamentalism, was born in Los Angeles and justified mass racial killing and injustice committed by white Angelenos and by American leaders.

These essays also argue that Los Angeles produced new, carnographic forms of power in the bloodbaths of the 20th century, through the fall of censorship and the rise of the new Hollywood in the 1960s-80s.  Because production of mass culture took place in the segregated spaces of Los Angeles and in territories around the globe, the production of these films represented and carried along the reigning structures of inequality.  Movies were of and about the real world.  How this two-way flow from media to power operated is a major focus of these essays.

This page has paths:

  1. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
  2. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to the Age of Nixon and Reagan Phil Ethington
  3. Networks Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Manufacturing Mass Culture and the Rise of Racial Propaganda in Los Angeles, 1890s-1950s
  2. Migrating to the Screen: Racialization of Bodies in Visual Space
  3. American Pulp Fascism: Tarzan, Birth of a Nation, and the Ku Klux Klan, 1912-1930s
  4. The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture: 1900s-1950s
  5. Love with Strangers: LA Countercultures, Rise of an Art Capital, and the Ends of Art, 1950s-1990s
  6. Hollywood’s White Hunters: Colonizing Africa and American Mass Media, 1929-1939
  7. Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
  8. Bloodbath: New Hollywood, New Right, and the Carnography of Power, 1940s to 1980s
  9. [DISMANTLE AND DELETE] Moby-Dick: On the White Maleness of Hollywood, 1990s-Present
  10. Bibliography for White Shadows

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