Boomtown Bladerunner and Its Discontents

As pinned down and laid open on the pages of “Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City,” the City of Angels may be nearly unrecognizable to many of the readers who are likely to pick up the book. A “crater of genocide” is how editor Deepak Narang Sawhney describes the place, a “dystopian metro-galaxy.”

“Unmasking L.A.” is the latest addition to the literature of despair that has attached itself to Los Angeles, a counterweight to what Sawhney calls “the hype, promotion and spectacle that have shrouded Los Angeles in a cloud of mythic glory for so long.” As seen by Sawhney and most of his fellow contributors, L.A. is the “urban, gritty edge of First World greed and Third World resistance,” a place that can be understood only in terms of its own profound dysfunction.

“Upon arrival to the shores of Los Angeles, asylum seekers, ‘illegal’ recruits, determined actors, fluid nomads, promising directors, and hopeful immigrants find themselves mesmerized by the city’s seemingly infinite economic and geographical vastness, the year-round sunshine, the ostentatious wealth seeping out of gated communities, and the sheer possibility that anything can happen,” writes Sawhney. “They are simultaneously appalled by the superficiality of the city, the plasticity of the residents, the sprawling mess of traffic jams, and the polluted atmosphere of el pueblo bent on suffocating itself to annihilation.”

Sawhney, a fellow at the State University of New York, Binghamton, has consulted 10 outspoken critics and commentators, ranging from the strident urban critic Mike Davis (“Ecology of Fear”) to the mellow New Age guru Deepak Chopra, from poet Jimmy Santiago Baca to the collective of artists and writers called Situationist International, and he presents their musings on Los Angeles (and much else besides) in the essays, studies, manifestos, poems, photographs and conversations that appear in “Unmasking L.A.”

Not all of contributors are capable of the high-intensity rhetoric and white-hot passion that characterize Sawhney’s prose, and each one approaches the target from a different line of attack, but most of them seem to agree that Los Angeles is a place with a dark past and an uncertain future. To know the truth about the City of Angels, they suggest, we need to look at crime, poverty and racial conflict as the glimmerings of an ugly reality glimpsed behind the pretty myths.

“[T]o understand what goes on in L.A., we must see the flow of people, information, and disease between the city and the pen,” insists author and professor Christian Parenti, whose “Satellites of Sorrow” is a study of California prison culture, “and we must also examine the specific brutalities of life inside prison.” And Paul Von Blum, a professor of art history and African American studies, who contributes a survey of “Resistance Art in Los Angeles,” asks us to regard the work of graffiti artists as the use of “guerrilla tactics” in a struggle against the “prevailing corporate and governmental dogma.” “The fusion of Mexican muralism and hip-hop culture,” Von Blum insists, “has encouraged young people, predominantly of color, to use public and private walls, alleys, tunnels, and abandoned buildings to offer serious challenges to the existing social reality.” Only rarely do we come across a note of affirmation or celebration in “Unmasking L.A.,” and even then it is a glimpse only through the experience of a life on the mean streets. A poem by Baca, for example, imagines a young woman’s hands as “earth swans / surrendering only to love,” swimming through “streams of police bullets, / lakes of drugs and hypodermic needles” but “unscathed by drive-bys, by stab wounds, / by violent fights with my boyfriend”:

my hands submerge into hearts

and print papers with blue and gold and brown

and I bring them like a schoolgirl

home to show the world

how my hands look on paper

Sawhney is not merely a collector and compiler of other people’s points of view; his voice can be discerned throughout the book, even literally when he presents the transcriptions of long conversations with Davis, Chopra and Columbia University humanities professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. And the dialogues include some very odd moments for a book that is supposedly about Los Angeles.

A mostly noncommittal Chopra, for example, refuses to buy into Sawhney’s dialectic: “I do not think in terms of positive or negative,” Chopra insists. “Evolution happens.” And, even though Sawhney announces his intention to reveal “the Third World geographies, cultures, and populations of Los Angeles,” it is downright bizarre when he and Davis end up in a chat about whether the excesses of the British East India Co. entitle the people of India to sue the British government for reparations.

“I was asked by a British newspaper if the Gujarat earthquake can be blamed on the British,” says Davis. “I said why not.... I think the assets of the royal family are exactly what should be used to meet these claims.”

For all its bombast, “Unmasking L.A.” remains a provocative book that adds to the rancorous but illuminating debate over the origin, meaning and destiny of the City of Angels. And, despite its harsh and unforgiving take, the volume concedes that Los Angeles, even if lamentable, is somehow inevitable.

Los Angeles may be “America’s manifest destiny run amok,” as Sawhney puts it, but it is also “the epicenter of globalization, the Ellis Island of the Pacific Century.” And, for better or worse, as Sawhney concedes, “Los Angeles defines the future of cities to come.”

Some of the same concerns about race and identity in the crucible of contemporary Los Angeles can also be found in “Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990,” but here the focus is tighter and the prose more disciplined. Lon Kurashige, a history professor in USC’s program in American studies and ethnicity, looks for the meanings that are expressed in the celebration of “Nisei Week,” an annual festival mounted by the Japanese American community of Los Angeles since 1934.

Kurashige decodes and explains the “micropolitics” of Nisei Week--the street parades and beauty pageants, talent shows and essay contests, performances of music and dance, displays of arts and crafts. “Always lurking in the celebration was the fact--and fear--of racial conflict,” explains Kurashige.

The subtext of Nisei Week, as Kurashige points out, has changed over the years. The festival began during the Depression as a way to encourage second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) to “buy in Lil’ Tokio,” as the downtown neighborhood was then known, by reminding the younger generation of their heritage. Later, the appeal reached beyond that community: “What stood as symbols of ethnic pride for Japanese Americans were also exotic enticements for white America.” Even after 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, a “community fair” was presented behind the barbed wire at Manzanar, although the dire circumstances prompted the participants to send a very different message: “We are American,” as Kurashige sums it up. “We are not Japanese.”

By the 1970s, the politics of Nisei Week had changed yet again. A group of high school students joined the street parade in 1972, for example, but when they reached the reviewing stand at the center of Little Tokyo, they burned a Japanese war flag as a way of protesting “Japanese and American imperialism” in general and the war in Vietnam in particular.

By 1990, Nisei Week celebrated what Kurashige calls “the new cosmopolitanism” as festival organizers “deliberately sought to foster good relations with neighboring racial minorities by inviting participation from groups of blacks, Latinos, Chinese, and other Asian Americans.” At the same time, the redevelopment of Little Tokyo with money from Japanese investors created friction with the local Japanese American community. “The bridge of ethnicity initially designed to unite Japanese Americans,” writes Kurashige, “was transformed into a wedge that increased divisions in Japantown.” Kurashige’s monograph may lack the splenetic quality of Sawhney’s manifesto, but the authors share a sense of outrage. Beneath the surface of “Japanese American Celebration and Conflict” is a caution against regarding Japanese Americans as a “model minority,” thus overlooking the impact of racism on both Asian Americans and African Americans. “Yellow is a shade of black,” Kurashige reminds us, quoting Columbia University professor Gary Y. Okihiro, “and black a shade of yellow.”