Dean J. Franco

The Border and the Line (eBook, ePUB)

Race, Literature, and Los Angeles

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Los Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.-and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers-this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space.

The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena María Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Januar 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503607781
• Artikelnr.: 54594143

Autorenporträt

Dean J. Franco is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 (2012) and Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing (2006).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Borders and Lines of Social Identities
chapter abstract
The chapter posits a theory of how race materializes through the production
of space. With reference to Ernesto Laclau's rhetorical theory, the
introduction examines how metaphor and metonymy correspond to the social
and political significance of racial identification. Thus the Introduction
aligns the contingent formation of racial and religious identities with
metonymy, or the material experience of being-in-place, and aligns static
racial names with metaphor. The Introduction theorizes the terms border and
line as interrelated figures of spatial constraint and access. Each term
has a normative and a transgressive meaning, and the Introduction explores
how and when the normative meaning of one term is in play, the
transgressive meaning of the other term likewise emerges.
1Redlining and Realigning in East L.A.: The Neighborhoods of Helena María
Viramontes and Union de Vecinos
chapter abstract
This chapter takes on a fundamental question for literature scholars: How
can readers bear responsibility for the literature they read and love? The
chapter argues that the reader becomes the neighbor to the literature, and
follows with an exploration of the philosophical and material implications
of that neighboring. The chapter examines Helena María Viramontes's novel
Their Dogs Came with Them, set in Boyle Heights at the peak of its gang
wars in the 1970s, and explores the real neighborhood, including the
activist project Union de Vecinos, a socialist organizing collective
inspired by liberation theology to reclaim the neighborhood, from both the
gangs and reactionary policing, in the name of social justice. In both
examples, the chapter posits the concept of the miracle as something
worldly and material, capable of transformation.
2The Matter of the Neighbor and the Property of "Unmitigated Blackness"
chapter abstract
The first half of this chapter explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded
in the heart of Watts by Budd Schulberg after the Watts Riots in 1965.
Schulberg created Frederick Douglass House, a charitable foundation and a
physical building for black creative arts, and the chapter argues that
Schulberg's personal and financial investment in Watts relocated his
political standing as the "neighbor" to the Watts writers with whom he
worked. The chapter examines a conversation between Schulberg and his
friend James Baldwin, about the meaning of "race." Both writers hit upon
"love" as the only way to cut through the Gordian knot of racism binding
the nation. The chapter closes with a study of Paul Beatty's Los Angeles
novel, The Sellout (2015), in which love is ironized and black Angelenos
assert an atavistic claim on property, with segregation, plantations, and
the return of slavery.
3My Neighborhood: Private Claims, Public Space, and Jewish Los Angeles
chapter abstract
This chapter argues for the emergence of privately held ethics in the
formation of neighborhood publics. The chapter primarily focuses on Jewish
neighborhoods, including the L.A. Eruv, the largest in the West. An eruv is
an area with boundaries designated by a rabbinical authority to constitute
domestic rather than public space for Jews living within. Eruv is Hebrew
for "mixture," and it involves mixing public and private spaces into one
large "courtyard" or domestic enclosure. The chapter argues that the eruv
is a "counter-public" for the Orthodox space it circumscribes, but that the
public alignment of "Jewish" with "Orthodox" eclipses other kinds of Jewish
publics in Los Angeles. The chapter compares the idea of the neighborhood
in the eruv with Jewish concepts of the neighborhood in a recent short
documentary, My Neighbourhood, about secular Israeli Jews who partner with
Muslim Palestinians to protest Orthodox Jewish appropriation of
Palestinians' homes.
Conclusion: Love, Space, and the Grounds of Comparative Ethnic Literature
Study
chapter abstract
This chapter argues for the value of comparative analysis in studies of
race and ethnicity, and makes the case for the inclusion of Jewish studies
in the ethnic studies matrix. The Conclusion reviews the parallel but
distinct histories of ethnic studies and Jewish studies, and explains the
basis of their mutual exclusion. The Conclusion posits the book's critical
motif of "the neighborhood" as the apt figure for reconciling different
academic accounts of race and ethnicity, and for seeking understanding
through unexpected comparisons across racial groups.