In 1891, Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield expresses what was considered a primary function of the English novel in the nineteenth-century: to educate women with principles to live virtuously. In Tess…
Archive for 2022
Introduction
For some time, secular prophets have predicted the demise of the Christian Right, a politically muscular movement of mostly white conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons.1 Demographics suggest waning affiliation, as…
City of Quartz, City of Gold
In 2013 I drove across Los Angeles to watch South African-Canadian director Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium at the Cinerama Dome. A devastated Earth! An impoverished population without health care or reliable…
Ecology of Hope
If this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from the classrooms, streets, and studios of forty years ago, then so be it; on the basis of…
Noir Politics in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz
“(Social) space is a (social) product,” Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, but this “fact” is “concealed” under global capitalism because space reduces the “real’…to a…
Against Confusion: Mike Davis’s Storytelling as Political Clarity
To the disappointment of my closest companions, I never tire of the opening lines of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. In fact, I try casting bardic inspiration on my students…
Writing Under the Influence
In my library, I have what I call ‘the premier bookshelf.’ There I keep the books that I credit for providing the inspiration to earn a Ph.D. in History and…
Dark Shadow: on Mike Davis and The Exiles
Angel’s Flight, the 1901 funicular that still graces Bunker Hill, serves as a visual touchstone for a certain version of Los Angeles, one characterized by both noir aesthetics and working-class…
Calypso Mike: A Caribbean Tribute to the California Kid
My first encounters with Mike Davis occurred while scouring online forums and generously pirated PDFs for choice excerpts of his monographs as an adolescent socialist in the Catskill Mountains. My political…