White Shadows: The Eros, Race and Power of Global Hollywood
What was the role of Los Angeles in the global production of mass culture, and to what ends? By producing the world's most seductive and profitable product, it also produced a considerable portion of the power that rules the world. Eros, race, and violence were core elements of this new culture industry's spectacular growth, and the immense wealth and power that it produced.
Los Angeles became the primary point of cinematic-industrial production by the 1920s and remained the leading global producer of mass culture by the end of the Second World War in 1945. Los Angeles increasingly lost that lead by the last two decades of the 20th century, while Television and new networked forms of mass media have emerged. What differences did these developments make, and how does Los Angeles contribute to the global mediascape after it ceased to dominate global production?
This series of essays traces the culture-power production that took place in "Hollywood." Here we assess the Hollywood/Los Angeles mass media industry, not as a general or comprehensive history of the movies. Readers have many fine studies of Hollywood moviemaking for that purpose.
These essays focus on the "shaping" role of Hollywood's mass media industry in the strands narrated in other Paths of Ghost Metropolis: stories of racial apartheid and struggles for justice: political, economic, and social-geographic formation. The most destructive weapons on Earth were designed and manufactured in Los Angeles. The most powerful (Nixon, Reagan) and the richest man in the world (J. Paul Getty) in the 1970s and 1980s were Angelenos. The most deadly and destructive civil uprisings in U.S. history took place in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. Los Angeles came to be a role model for suburban living and suburban political-economies. These convergences demand interrogation for linkages. It is those linkages that these essays seek to map.
Los Angeles became the primary point of cinematic-industrial production by the 1920s and remained the leading global producer of mass culture by the end of the Second World War in 1945. Los Angeles increasingly lost that lead by the last two decades of the 20th century, while Television and new networked forms of mass media have emerged. What differences did these developments make, and how does Los Angeles contribute to the global mediascape after it ceased to dominate global production?
This series of essays traces the culture-power production that took place in "Hollywood." Here we assess the Hollywood/Los Angeles mass media industry, not as a general or comprehensive history of the movies. Readers have many fine studies of Hollywood moviemaking for that purpose.
These essays focus on the "shaping" role of Hollywood's mass media industry in the strands narrated in other Paths of Ghost Metropolis: stories of racial apartheid and struggles for justice: political, economic, and social-geographic formation. The most destructive weapons on Earth were designed and manufactured in Los Angeles. The most powerful (Nixon, Reagan) and the richest man in the world (J. Paul Getty) in the 1970s and 1980s were Angelenos. The most deadly and destructive civil uprisings in U.S. history took place in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. Los Angeles came to be a role model for suburban living and suburban political-economies. These convergences demand interrogation for linkages. It is those linkages that these essays seek to map.
This page has paths:
- Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from the Clovis Conquest to the Nixon Tyranny Phil Ethington
- Networks Phil Ethington
Contents of this path:
- Preface to White Shadows
- Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry, 1895-1920
- Intersections and Identities: Del Río, Ahn, Hayakawa
- White Shadows in the South Seas: The Making of Imperial Hollywood in the 1920s
- Three Sisters of Mass Media: Cinema, Radio, Television, 1920s-1950s
- Tarzana of the Apes: American Pulp Fascism from Chicago to the San Fernando Valley, 1912-1920s
- Hollywood’s White Hunters: Los Angeles in Colonial East Africa, 1929-31
- Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
- Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City, 1931-32
- Bloodbath: New Hollywood, New Right, and the Carnography of Power, 1960s to 1990s
- Bibliography for White Shadows
