CSP 70 Countercultural Northeast LA: The Arts of Resistance

This course explores the cultural politics of Southern California since the late nineteenth century by focusing on the role of the “greater Eastside,” and particularly Northeast Los Angeles, in defining, elaborating, and staging an alternative to the region’s ideological and cultural norms. With particular emphasis on this urban district as the birthplace of a bold and controversial multiracialism, the course will take us from the Arroyo Culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, through a series of bohemian revolts against an increasingly oppressive and conformist norm, to the development of a particular counter-hegemonic political aesthetic, particularly expressed through music and the visual arts, that would inform and inspire movements for liberation and expression by African Americans, Latinos, and Angelenos of all ethnicities by the early years of the twenty-first century.