CSP 16 Los Angeles Urban Cultures and Countercultures

This course explores the multicultural politics of Southern California since the late nineteenth century by focusing on the role of Chinatown, Black L.A., the Latino Eastside and Northeast Los Angeles, in defining, elaborating, and staging an alternative to the region’s ideological and cultural norms. We emphasize urban neighborhoods as crucibles of a bold and controversial multiracialism as the course takes us from the railroad era and Arroyo Culture through the mid-20th century freeway era and the more recent rise of urban transit and gentrification trends. We examine a series of bohemian revolts against increasingly oppressive and conformist norms and the development of a counter-hegemonic political aesthetics 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. Students will engage in oral history and sociological field interviews with artists and community members in neighborhoods such as Chinatown and Northeast LA.