THE LITERARY AND VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF LOS ANGELES NOIR IN CHICAN@ AND LATIN@ LITERATURE
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Fiercely Femme
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OG
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La Profe
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RAG
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T1/\/ F01L H/\T
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What is Latin@ noir at night?
Noir: a sub-genre of the detective mystery that deals with the darkest aspects of human society—rape, incest, drug-, alcohol-, sex-, and other addictions, murder, mutilation, human trafficking, and other social injustices. Sometimes called “hardboiled,” in reference to the hardcore yet cynical and at times self-destructive detectives and the corrupt criminals they track, the genre is characterized by gritty realism, social disorder, violence, and nocturnal settings in the darkest, meanest streets of the city. Noir highlights the social deterioration caused by racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, rape, pedophilia, police brutality, and corporate greed—among other crimes.
How does Los Angeles at night encapsulate the formal and aesthetic elements of “noir” genre fiction? How is the night symbolic of the “dark” aspects of Chicana/o and Latina/o culture, such as narco-narratives (popular music and television), gendered death tolls (the murdered young women and girls on the U.S.-Mexico border), and other nightmares (AIDS, human trafficking, police brutality, family betrayal)? How is night a metaphor for forgetting, as both cultural and historical amnesia? How does the night alter our experience of and relationship to the city?
This blog, our stories, and our literary mapping of the city leave clues about our individual and collective L.A.tinidad in the City of Angels.
This course is the brainchild of Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba at UCLA, and was offered for the first time in Spring quarter 2015, thanks to the four intrepid graduate students who enrolled. The course was funded by a grant from the Urban Humanities Initiative.
How does Los Angeles at night encapsulate the formal and aesthetic elements of “noir” genre fiction? How is the night symbolic of the “dark” aspects of Chicana/o and Latina/o culture, such as narco-narratives (popular music and television), gendered death tolls (the murdered young women and girls on the U.S.-Mexico border), and other nightmares (AIDS, human trafficking, police brutality, family betrayal)? How is night a metaphor for forgetting, as both cultural and historical amnesia? How does the night alter our experience of and relationship to the city?
This blog, our stories, and our literary mapping of the city leave clues about our individual and collective L.A.tinidad in the City of Angels.
This course is the brainchild of Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba at UCLA, and was offered for the first time in Spring quarter 2015, thanks to the four intrepid graduate students who enrolled. The course was funded by a grant from the Urban Humanities Initiative.
