From: hfspc002-AT-csun.edu
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 23:17:07 -0800
Subject: SPOON-ANN: CFP, Los Angeles, 1999


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            =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-                        L.A. TIMES
            Third Worlds and Peripheral Zones
            =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
                   Call for Participation


Editors seek submissions for an interdisciplinary collection of original essays,
photographs, artwork, and electronic multimedia on the city of Los Angeles. The
anthology will examine the intersection of urban cultural studies with
contemporary social, political, literary, and economic manifestations of
resistance to modern and postmodern relations of power.

Since the city's birth in 1781, Los Angeles has led both a material and a mythic
existence. Contemporary Los Angeles scholarship — which experienced a
renaissance after the publication of Mike Davis' critically acclaimed City of
Quartz in 1990 -- has addressed the often glaring contradictions between these
two planes. Such scholarship has expanded enormously in recent years.

While this work has produced imaginative narratives and insightful criticisms of
current sociocultural and political-economic trends, the editors feel that Los
Angeles scholarship has yet to produce the kind of sustained and
interdisciplinary critical engagement that its subject matter demands.

L.A. Times: Third Worlds and Peripheral Zones addresses itself to this critical
lacuna, furthering the scholarly renaissance stimulated by City of Quartz. This
collection brings together
diverse responses to the complexities facing L.A. today. The volume will bridge
several interpretive perspectives, including political science, economics,
philosophy, literature, and communication.

By examining L.A. as the intersection of post-industrial capitalism and internal
Third World zones, L.A. Times produces vivid accounts of contemporary
interactions within the urban core, documenting sectors that resist suppression,
and analyzing the socio-economic histories that sediment sectors of L.A. into a
systemic surveillance of the mass. The editors of this collection are most
interested in the micropolitical movements of resistance contesting modern
exercises of power.

The aim of L.A. Times is to zoom in on the current social, political, cultural
and literary climate of Los Angeles by examining the spatial and economic forces
which marginalize sectors of the
ever-shifting population into L.A.'s "internal Third Worlds": the South Central
of African America; the migrant, seasonal labor of undocumented America; the
immobile, forgotten masses of incarcerated America; the diasporic enclaves of
Latino and Asian America; the disappearing tribes of native America.

Topics to be explored include: the place of L.A. in the new global economy;
mediated discourses of L.A.; Hollywood noir; working class displacements and
migrations; Angeleno "white flight"; Proposition 187 and anti-immigrant
hysteria; the increasing carcerality of L.A.; sociopolitical violence; the
criminalization of the black and Latino underclass; underground music culture in
L.A.; urban planning; public transportation; political corruption in L.A.; and
much, much
more.

Please send two (2) copies of completed papers by December 31, 1998 to:

       Bernardo Alexander Attias
       Department of Communication Studies
       California State University, Northridge
       Northridge, CA 91330-8257

For further information please e-mail the editors:

Bernardo Attias <drben-AT-pacificnet.net>
Deepak Sawhney  <dsawhney-AT-tui.edu>