Editor’s Introduction

In 1929, a former social worker from Iowa, Bessie Averne McClenahan, published her doctoral dissertation in sociology at the University of Southern California (a department then under the leadership of Emory Bogardus, who had effectively imported the cutting-edge insights and techniques of the “Chicago School of Sociology” to Southern California). Entitled “The Changing Urban Neighborhood: From Neighbor to Nigh-Dweller” McClenahan’s thesis was based on extensive—and often vivid—interviews with mostly prosperous, white residents of a pleasant middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood near USC. What she discovered there might, for a present-day reader, summon a sense of horror, and perhaps a frisson of recognition, for it powerfully evokes some of the discourses of noir decades before their canonical emergence in the wake of World War II. Fear and paranoia had transfigured the landscape, ripped people from their communities, and made every neighbor a potential threat. Everyday differences among neighbors in terms of status, race, belief, and the like were magnified into a palpable sense of danger and alienation as relationships between self and others were recalibrated and retrenched, personal relationships often replaced by fantasy representations.Now, objectively, McClenahan’s Los Angeles was indeed a dynamic, multicultural place. And even back then, a century ago, it was overlaid with a strange overdetermination of the fantastic and the quotidian. Nathanael West would, a decade later in The Day of the Locust, attribute some of this chaotic interplay of sublime glamour and gritty, or even brutal, everyday urban graft to the pervasive influence of Hollywood and its intoxicating, desiccating culture of celebrity. For West, the city’s highly visible Midwestern migrants, folks like McClenahan and her interviewees, were the people who had “come to California to die” (West 60). Selling out their life’s labor, their métier, along with their farmsteads (in the nick of time, in retrospect, just ahead of the Dust Bowl), these migrant Angelenos found themselves on golden shores strangely rootless, disconnected from fertile soil and productive labor, and instead mired in pointless, obsessive leisure, vicarious stimuli, and a pervasive sense of anomie. Similarly, Carey McWilliams, in his 1946 Southern California Country, incisively dissected these same folk, whom he indeed collectively termed “The Folks,” as victims of a deeply entrenched set of urban booster discourses which, once again, created a fantasy image of Southern California that powerfully lured migrants into increasingly desperate quests for meaning, community, and belonging (manifested in fringe religious cults, sadly nostalgic “Iowa” Club picnics, and the like).Despite this critical tendency by these very smart observers to “blame the media,” as it were, by reading the sometimes surreal cultural landscape of a rapidly changing metropolis through a lens of systemic deception, with people taken in by a haze of artificiality and phoniness (nebulous and permeating as the emergent smog of the era), McClenahan herself seems to have found in Los Angeles a deeper level of fantasy that does not so much obscure residents’ relationships with urban space as construct it. And that fantasy emerges not from the creative engines of the mass culture industry, but from small acts of what we would today call social “sorting” within the ordinary grassroots experience of the metropolis. As McClenahan notes toward the beginning of her study:That divergence between the territorial and psychosocial layers of the city is what worries the author, for it is within the routine experience of urban space that people construct a virtual landscape of social meaning, overlaid with signification and sometimes a profound sense of belonging (or its opposite). Methodologically, McClenahan approaches her fellow Midwestern migrants with an eye to their everyday patterns of life—movement, recreation, sociability—to map out the spectral superimpositions casting shadows in the midday sun. Like West and McWilliams, she detects a restlessness, a prevalent paranoiac unease, among these folks, but attributes it not to the fantasies of mass media, but to something more quotidian.Many of the most explosive parts of this fairly brief 140-page study revolve around the overtly racist and xenophobic commentary of neighborhood residents as they discuss the increasingly complex ethnic landscape of the region, and McClenahan excerpts, often at length, many of these Angelenos’ screeds virtually verbatim (not occluding the slurs), allowing her subjects to express themselves without much hint of diplomacy or shame. Our Sociologist mostly cloaks herself in a professional armor of abstract neutrality as her largely Midwestern respondents inveigh against perceived “invasions” of African Americans, Japanese Americans, Jews, and other others, confining her own editorial voice mostly to footnotes rather cooly rebutting with factual details the more egregious misrepresentations her respondents trot out. Ultimately, what McClenahan is most interested in asking, it seems, is what these folks were actually afraid of? Why is it that these relatively prosperous property owners, thoroughly cloaked in the social advantages that come with unquestioned whiteness, especially in an era where a host of legal and cultural superstructures enforced that lofty status with brutal efficiency, felt so frankly paranoid about their own perfectly nice neighborhood? Why were these seemingly stolid Midwestern salt of the earth types so caught up in a highly racialized version of status anxiety?For McClenahan, the answer lies in the disrupted social networks that had, even by the 1920s, undermined the neighborhood as a place of belonging: “Neighboring has given way to nigh-dwelling; neighborhood has been succeeded by communality” (115). Through their own everyday choices—seemingly innocuous patterns of movement and association—these white, middle-class city dwellers undermined the structures of empathy and solidarity that they themselves expected to bind a community together, that “democratic admixture on the pavements and in the parks” that Mike Davis lauded as the most optimistic potential of urban life (Davis 231). Simply by traveling on daily journeys throughout the expanding megalopolis (rapidly exceeding a million in population at the time of the study), these folks forged elective connections with disparate, far-flung communities of interest scattered around a vast urban landscape. What was left behind was a topography of fear and suspicion, as folks’ mental maps of belonging and comfort diverged more and more from the locus of their residential communities:Into the vacuum left by a vanishing shared common ground of quotidian social interaction rushes every conceivable fear and suspicion that circulates through the social imaginary, particularly in an unapologetically racist era. Thus fantasies of danger and alterity overtake the basic lived experience of neighborliness, for good or ill, as new patterns of far-flung elective social interaction, facilitated by telephones, electric interurban railways, and the growing prevalence of automobiles and motorbuses, replace those everyday encounters inevitably forced upon us by simply rubbing shoulders in shared civic space.Now, implicit in McClenahan’s analysis is a nostalgia for the lost community of democratic interaction, where the “intricate sidewalk ballet” memorably described by Jane Jacobs played out its own retrospective utopian fantasy (66). Today that sense of being doomed to paranoia as a result of our own introverted everyday choices of friends and associates resonates as strongly as ever before, particularly in the context of virtual patterns of association disconnected from spatial propinquity and mediated by emergent technologies of travel, communication, and tele-presence.Resonant as well is the intertwining of fantasy and everyday experience in the urban context, which was the theme of 2022’s PAMLA Conference in Los Angeles and a touchstone for the articles in this issue of Pacific Coast Philology. Indeed, several of the articles that follow explore the way that history runs, sometimes subtly, through our present narratives and lived environments, literally laying the groundwork for the world we have all entered in progress, as it were.My own article, “Two Midcentury Modernisms in Southern California,” is an expansion of my Presidential Address at that 2022 conference. It builds on two decades of teaching and writing about the cultural legacies of Los Angeles within an urban historical context. Here, I seek to unpack the overdetermined implications of what we think of as modernity in L.A., discussing some of the classic works of midcentury modern architecture within the less celebrated contexts of such monumental structures as the freeway system, the channelization of the Los Angeles River, and the more pernicious noir structures of large-scale discriminatory social engineering that pervaded the era.Similarly, our Forum from the 2022 PAMLA conference, “City of Refuge: Exile, Dispossession, and Cultural Renaissance,” is reprinted with slight revisions in this issue, and provides excellent illustration of how many scholars have endeavored to amplify further histories from the margins in Los Angeles. Yolanda Daub, Peter Shulman, and I sat down with three notable scholars from different humanistic disciplines to discuss a few of those projects. Alison Rose Jefferson began by describing her own efforts to commemorate a pioneering African American community in Santa Monica that, before the 1950s, demonstrated a little-known collective effort to realize the “good life” in the beach city, before being displaced by cruelly targeted freeway expansion and urban renewal. Benno Herz of the Thomas Mann House set the scene of another exiled community by describing the thriving, vibrant European Jewish expatriate community in Los Angeles during and after World War II, emphasizing the role the (Lutheran) Mann family played in offering refuge for literary and film figures escaping the Holocaust. Finally, Jan Lin explored the cultural dynamics of gentrification and communal transformation in Northeast Los Angeles over the past century, shedding light on the increasing cultural influence of Latinx residents within the realm of the arts, particularly.That theme resonates with the experience of Harry Gamboa Jr., PAMLA’s 2022 Plenary speaker, who I had the honor of interviewing for this issue. Gamboa is an internationally respected giant of the contemporary arts in Southern California, innovating in site-specific performance, film, and, in multiple forms, photographic representation. His foundational work with his artistic collaborators in Asco in the 1970s emerged as a blinding, defiant declaration of cultural autonomy, wit, and rebellion against the soul-crushing oppressions of mid-century working-class East L.A., where institutional authorities used subtle and brutally overt techniques to police the aspirations of the Latino community. In this interview, Gamboa illuminates the contexts and motivations for his celebrated half-century long oeuvre and explains why the camera can be such a powerful weapon for cultural liberation and expression, particularly within an urban culture so deeply inscribed by authoritative (and authoritarian) images and ideologies.This issue also features four original articles that each explore the literary and cultural history of Southern California and other communities, real and imagined. Like the long-ago scholarship of Bessie McClenahan, these contemporary studies identify unexpected ramifications that emerge from changing social contexts, particularly in the interactions between lived space and ideological fantasies of all sorts. Brian Eberle’s “Promise and Precarity: Moving Through Eden in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!” explores the geographies of the early twentieth century Southland as markers of the emerging ideological consciousness of James “Bunny” Ross Jr., the novel’s peripatetic protagonist. Building on the theoretical insights of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, Eberle maps the movements of Bunny’s flivver as he comes to recognize the social consequences of an exploitative and extractive economic order.Reflecting a similar concern with social justice and community, while roving considerably farther afield spatially, Jack Love explores the fantastic geographies of the body, as seen in Babel-17, a novel written by New York science fiction great Samuel Delany in 1966. Love focuses on the way the social underclass “Transport” employees utilize highly creative cosmetic alterations of their physical form to express a sense of group identity, belonging, and a deep connection with archetypal mythological discourses within an expanding human interstellar empire. Here, the fantasy landscape is literally inscribed through the flesh of these marginalized, exiled workers. Unlike the Angelenos in McClenahan’s case study, Delaney’s subjects find community in shared physical space and leverage fantasy representations not to stoke paranoia and hatred, but to build a heterotopic alternative social universe capable of bringing people together.Perhaps the very spatial freedom granted to McClenahan’s white, middle-class respondents contributed to their sense of rootlessness. Being compelled to defend one’s neighborhood from erasure might foster the persistence of community, as we observe in Alexandra Lee Meany’s “Spatializing Racial Difference and Geographic Struggle in Paul Beatty’s Los Angeles.” Unpacking the 2015 satiric novel The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Meany locates its fictional, marginalized community of “Dickens” within the real social contexts of Southern California and within an imagined world where the neighborhood is gradually erased from official maps of the L.A. area. Meany shows us how vigilante efforts by locals to reinscribe the existence of this multi-ethnic enclave, to effectively resist its erasure, reiterates the importance of visibility within what Mike Davis famously termed “fortress L.A.”In “Navigating Nihilism: Surrealism and Self-Realization in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays,” Emma Spies draws on the work of André Breton, a founder of Surrealism, to trace the intellectual and automotive journeys of Joan Didion’s protagonist, Maria, as she wanders the freeways of greater Los Angeles. Whereas Bunny’s drives sparked increasing social consciousness in Eberle’s reading of Oil!, Spies depicts Maria’s wanderings as part of a progressive degradation of meaning and coherence, as real and imagined blur. Here, once again, the overlap between fragmented urban topography and the interior contours of the imagination, and particularly paranoid ideation, emerge as a powerful thematic with both social and personal implications.As we see throughout this special issue of Pacific Coast Philology, the creative connections between space and cultural production are powerful indeed. Further, in Los Angeles, particularly, the interplay between the quotidian and the fantastic is more complex than a simple opposition between real and fake, grassroots and mass-produced. Instead, fantasy, whether retrospectively or prospectively utopic, dystopic, or heterotopic, is imbricated thoroughly with lived space on the level of ideology and imagined or creatively remembered histories, narratives, and images.