CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Visions, Spaces, and Shadows from the Golden State
12-13 June, 2025
University of Naples L’Orientale
LIST OF ABSTRACTS
Owen Atkinson
(University of Leeds)
Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech in California in support of the candidacy of the first significant postwar conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater proposes that the United States is in crisis. This is a hidden crisis, the future Californian governor argued, that is in fact occluded by the surface facts of economic prosperity presided over by New Deal liberals. Goldwater, of course, lost but won a 207, 000 vote majority in Los Angeles County. That same year Proposition 14 passed, effectively relegalising racial discrimination in the Californian housing market. This paper will draw a comparison between two later cultural objects: 1973’s photo-text installation Aerospace Folktales by the artist Allan Sekula, and Joel Schumacher’s 1993 Hollywood movie Falling Down to explore this undercurrent of reaction within the culture of Los Angeles. Both works present unemployed L.A. aerospace engineers dealing (in markedly different ways) with the crisis of recent unemployment, itself occurring in the shadow of various economic crises. For both figures, the economic crisis is also a crisis of identity which affects their relationship to housing, their neighbours and the urban environment of Los Angeles in general. Reinhart Koselleck famously drew out the etymological link between ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’, and suggested that ‘crisis’ relied on the postulation of a break within an understanding of history that is progressive, and engenders certain normative assumptions as to what life should be and become yet in this paper I will look at the ways in which the frame of ‘crisis’ can, and in Los Angeles has, also played into fairly un-critical support for right-wing Populist perspectives, with all of the implications this might contain for our present moment.
William Bauer
(University of California, Riverside)
In the twentieth century, California emerged as one of the most powerful states in the United States. After World War II, the state of California transformed from a largely rural and agricultural state into an urban and industrial one. These two developments produced extraordinary economic and demographic growth. By the early 1960s, California was the most populous state in the United States. And, today, California possesses the fifth largest economy in the world. Yet, historians have ignored that, in part, the California dream of economic and demographic progress depended on extracting land, timber, and water from Indigenous People’s reservation and unceded lands. During the twentieth century, California Indian Nations and people have been deeply entangled with extractive industries. In 1934, the United States passed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), which established procedures for tribes to form tribal governments and corporations. Many of Northern California’s IRA tribal governments negotiated contracts with companies to harvest timber on reservation lands. Indigenous People, such as Walt Lara Sr., a respected Yurok spiritual leader, and his brother Frank, worked as loggers. In the 1960s and 1970s, though, Indigenous People resisted extractive industry on their lands. Members of the Pit River Nation protested logging and logging roads that passed through their reservation by exerting sovereignty over their reservation lands. At the same time, the Round Valley Reservation’s tribal government led an effort to defeat the construction of a dam on the Eel River, which would have flooded their reservation. Finally, in the 1970s, Yuroks, including the aforementioned Walt Lara Sr., testified in Congress about how logging polluted the Klamath River and harmed salmon habitat. This paper, thus, problematizes the California Dream and brings attention to the political activism of California Indian people.
Vincenzo Bavaro
(University of Naples, L’orientale”)
The Los Angeles highway system is both a physical and symbolic cornerstone of the city's identity. Its vast, interwoven network not only shapes the daily lives of its inhabitants but also serves as a recurring motif in cinematic storytelling. This paper explores the representation of Los Angeles streets, and more specifically freeways, in film, analyzing how they function as a site of tension between freedom and entrapment, connection and alienation. By examining iconic films such as Crash (2004), Collateral (2004), Falling Down (1993) and Tangerine (2015) the paper interrogates the street as a liminal social space that mirrors Los Angeles’ cultural and socio-economic divides.
Drawing on theories of space and place from Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja, the paper examines how the street is rendered as both a literal and metaphorical social space in cinema. Through mise-en-scène, sound design, and narrative framing, filmmakers use streets and freeways to critique urban planning, class divisions, racial segregation, and the isolating effects of car culture. Moreover, the representation of the freeway in film often reflects broader cultural anxieties, from the existential dread of modernity to the yearning for connection in a sprawling metropolis. Ultimately, this paper argues that the cinematic freeway is a powerful lens through which to understand the socio-spatial dynamics of Los Angeles. As a space of perpetual motion, it embodies both the promises and pitfalls of urban modernity, offering a uniquely cinematic means of exploring how social space is lived, experienced, and contested.
Nicolangelo Becce
(Roma Tre University)
Post-WW2 Los Angeles from a Japanese American Perspective in Naomi Hirahara’s “The Chirashi Covenant” While the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II has been one of the most frequently depicted historical events in Japanese American literature, comparatively fewer works have focused on the post-internment years, particularly the harsh conditions faced by those who returned to the West Coast after the war. In recent years, historian and crime fiction writer Naomi Hirahara has sought to uncover this overlooked chapter of Japanese American history in nonfiction works such as Life after Manzanar (2018) and historical crime novels like Clark & Division (2021) and Evergreen (2023). However, it is in an earlier work, the short story “The Chirashi Covenant” (2007), that Hirahara most powerfully portrays a racially divided, intolerant, and oppressive Los Angeles of the early 1950s, where the protagonist, Helen Miura, challenges prevailing stereotypes about the Japanese American community. This paper examines how, by adhering to the logic of the noir genre, Helen’s cold-blooded murder of a white man not only exposes and reverses the unacceptable prejudice and racism that led the US government to apply the “state of exception” (Agamben 2003) during World War II and incarcerate the Japanese Americans, but also gives voice to a repressed, latent sense of revenge within the Nikkei community for the injustices endured during and after the war.
Elisa Bordin
(Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
My contribution reads an unpublished work by authors John Fante and Carey McWilliams, “Home Is the Hunter”, in the light of L.A. urbanization, Mexican migration, and ideas of modernity. Often remembered as one of the best Angeleno writers, for his vivid and bittersweet descriptions of Los Angeles in his works, John Fante has been inscribed within the city public space, with a square dedicated to him in downtown Los Angeles. In this unpublished work for cinema and/or theater from the 1930s, now preserved at the UCLA Special Collections, Fante gives space to a forgotten memory of the L.A. city archive, that is, the repatriation of 1.8 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, a deportation that opposes the fetishization of the Mexican past of the city as visible in the marketability of the Old Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street in the 1920s.
Konstantin Butz
(Academy of Media Arts Cologne)
Skateboarding, particularly in its initial configuration as »sidewalk surfing« has always been associated with a distinctively Californian background. Medially constructed as a popular pastime for California’s surfers on days with no waves, many of its physical maneuvers are indeed inspired and influenced by the actual movements of surfing the waves of the Pacific Ocean. By way of theoretical recourses to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s »maritime model«, I introduce skateboarding as a transgressive practice that disseminates and transports its site-specific and cultural roots in California way beyond the Golden State. The skateboard, I argue, constitutes a vehicle that allows for the ephemeral evocation of a “portable” California wherever the four-wheeled device is set into motion. Moving along a line of flight that cuts across the California coast and reaches deep into urban landscapes all over the globe, the activity of modern skateboarding—particularly, in view of its origins in the empty swimming pools of Californian suburbia—has affected and still does affect people in the most landlocked regions of the world. With a skateboard, the essential maneuvers of California-made movements can be experienced and implemented on streets, sidewalks, driveways, plazas, hills, and wherever else you find a piece of paved ground: right at your feet. Following up on the evolution of skateboarding from the ocean to the land, from the beach to the city, from California to the world, from the vertical to the horizontal and back, I will also consider the emancipatory potential that comes along with a material practice that constantly adapts, adopts, and appropriates its immediate physical surroundings. Skateboarding, in this perspective, alters the way we look at the built environment we navigate in our everyday lives and challenges the norms of the architectural landscapes we inhabit. Infused with material notions of its site-specific origins at the US West Coast, skateboarding thus constantly initiates spaces of (oceanic) movement that invoke a sense of California in ever changing contexts.
Tommaso Caiazza
(Liceo Federigo Enriques, Rome)
From 1923 to 1925, Chicago School urban sociologist Robert Ezra Park led a team of scholars engaged in the research project called The Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast. From his headquarter in Chinatown, San Francisco, he supervised the collection of a vast amount of data pertaining to the condition of Asian immigrants, whose presence had long been rejected in California as well as in other States of the northern Pacific region. With the help of academic colleagues and their college students, quantitative but, most of all, qualitative materials were collected, especially interviews among Asians and white Americans also. By reviewing these materials together with Park’s writings related to the Survey, my presentation illustrates how the Chicago sociologist debated the topic of the alleged racial exceptionalism of States such as California by framing it within the broader history of migration in human civilizations. Although Park never went so far as to condemn the immigration restrictions passed rightly during the Survey, in 1924, he challenged the view of the Pacific Coast as the “frontier of the white man”, as a California journalist had defined it in the early Twentieth Century prophesizing a racial disaster caused by Asian immigration. Park, on the contrary, promoted the idea that the Pacific Coast was at the vanguard of a worldwide melting pot process brought by the emerging globalization. “The melting pot is the world”, wrote Park in 1926, by suggesting a double process: the impact of the Asian world through mass migration on the Pacific Coast, but also the U.S. impact on the Asian world through mass culture as a peculiar result of the spreading abroad of Hollywood movie industry products.
Pasquale Concilio
(University of Naples L’Orientale)
Often described as Anti-Nature and on the verge of environmental disaster, Los Angeles’s troubled relationship with nature is epitomized in the history of the city’s former water source, the Los Angeles River, now paved in concrete. In this proposal, I address two narratives dealing with the exploration of this unusual waterway: Dick Roraback’s article series In Search of the L.A. River, published on the Los Angeles Times from October 1985 to January 1986; and the illustrated bildungsroman The Ballad of Huck & Miguel (2018) by Tim DeRoche and Daniel González. The aim is to provide a key for understanding the city’s commitment (or lack thereof) to environmental and social issues regarding one of its most contested places in terms of environmental justice claims. Once an extremely erratic body of water, the Los Angeles River was straightjacketed in concrete after a series of violent floods in the 1930s and turned into a flood control system. Little is left of its former glory: decay, pollution, and lack of a discernible flow make it appear less a river than a highway. However, river’s advocates have always envisioned a brighter future for it, a “rebirth” that would place it as the center of communal life. The two narratives that I will discuss here were both intended to shed new light on the forgotten river. Roraback’s writing gained the river a return to the front pages – literally – after decades of oblivion and derision; Tim DeRoche and Daniel González’s novel ventures even further by resetting Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inside the Los Angeles River. Through these narratives, I intend to show how river narratives offer a unique perspective about the several crises that conflate into this atypical watercourse, and at the same time prove that the river can be a source of mutual help in a city prone to environmental danger.
Rachel Marie Davis
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
The novel Ripe (2023) by Sarah Rose Etter presents the binary opposition of livelihoods in 21st century San Francisco, California. Ripe is a story about Cassie, a woman working for a tech company in Silicon Valley called “Voyager.” Cassie is increasingly critical of the functions of her company in tandem with San Francisco as a city. As stated by the author Sarah Rose Etter, the central component of the novel is that while San Francisco seemingly offers one thing, in reality, it is something completely different. Cassie experiences this contradiction firsthand. For example, a houseless man sleeps outside her front door every night and Cassie witnesses people bathing themselves in the river since they have no other resources. Cassie alludes to a mental health crisis in the city as suicide is normalized. Moreover, her company commits unethical behavior multiple times in the narrative. The combination of Cassie’s experiences portrays San Francisco as a place of duplicity. This binary opposition is conveyed through the structural mechanisms in the novel. Etter implements a fragmented narrative as each chapter alternates between Cassie’s lived experience and scientific discourse on black holes. This fragmented style aligns with postmodernism as the stylistic device of alternating chapters corresponds directly with the contradictory nature of economic inequality in Silicon Valley. The image of a black hole is a symbol of neo-liberal capitalism’s impact on one’s mental health as Cassie envisions one following her. The black hole expands when her boss criticizes her or other upsetting things happen to her. The black hole represents the despair caused by late-stage capitalism. Silicon Valley is a space of contradiction. While tech employees enjoy an expensive brunch, residents of San Francisco are misplaced. This novel contributes to rethinking the “California dream.” The HBO television comedy Silicon Valley and the science fiction novel The Circle by Dave Eggers convey a similar thesis. Silicon Valley exists in the public imagination as a place bursting with opportunity; however, literature and other forms of media are exclaiming this is only the reality for an elite few.
Ali Dehdarirad
(Sapienza University)
Although the issue of wildfires in California has been a long-standing concern, the environmental disasters of the past couple of weeks have exceedingly made it clear that more than ever politics plays a significant role in alleviating or exacerbating the lives of average citizens. Holding hostage federal disaster aid to California, on Friday, January 24, 2025, Donald Trump blatantly stated that what he wants in exchange is voter ID at the polls and sending more water from Northern California to other parts of the state. While a host of literary works have dealt with what Mike Davis described as an “apocalyptic threat” (1998) to everyday life in Southern California, here I aim to analyze the representation of the political apparatus in Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). Such an analysis pursues two goals. Firstly, it intends to tackle the narrative strategies that these novelists employ to lay bare the inadequacy of the official system of power in preserving the redwoods of Northern California. Secondly, it endeavors to shed light on the ways that these two texts, and perhaps fiction more generally, might contribute to the pursuit of (environmental) truth in an age in which the notion of objective truth in the political realm is increasingly under threat. Returning to my title, it draws on the names of a song by the Los Angels-born punk rock band Bad Religion and a famous apocalyptic painting in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). Indeed, it is meant to put forth the question that if such an environmental catastrophe has been taking place over the years due to anthropogenic activities, what are, if any, the strategies through which fiction might help counter those detrimental tendencies to both humanity and the planet.
Antonio Di Vilio (University of Naples L’Orientale) and Shelleen Greene (University of California, Los Angeles)
Smog (Franco Rossi, 1963) concerns Vittorio, a Roman lawyer, whose delayed flight forces him to spend two days in Los Angeles, encountering members of the city's Italian ex-patriate community. While in the title, the word “smog” is seldom used in the film, nor is air pollution centered in its narrative. The smog is more atmospheric and existential, hovering above and around as the sign of the detrimental effects of modernization, including rampant infrastructural development and the fear of atomic catastrophe. In this presentation, we examine the urban milieu as site for the return or haunting of Italian migration, registered in the tensions between Vittorio, a product of Italy’s “economic boom,” and the Italian ex-patriates. In particular, this tension is elaborated in urban geographies that create proximity between the Italian migrant community and other ethnic minorities. We suggest that Smog be read among other LA.-based eco-critical films such as The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961), set in the indigenous communities of Bunker Hill, and Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978), set in the black American neighborhood of Watts. These films trace displacement and resettlement through postwar environmental despoilment, urban erasure, and privatization, opening a cinematic dialogue concerning postwar migrant mobilities.
Emma Dinuzzi
(Independent Scholar)
The California Dream, with its promises of boundless opportunity, sunlit landscapes, and suburban idylls, carries with it darker shadows of exclusion, displacement, and systemic inequality. Little Marvin’s Them (2021-2024) subverts this myth through a chilling portrayal of a Black family’s pursuit of the dream in 1950s suburban Los Angeles. This series exposes racial violence, psychological trauma, and socio-economic barriers that haunt marginalized communities in California’s past and present. The goal of my paper is to explore how Them interrogates the mythos of the Golden State by reframing the sunny optimism of mid-century suburbia as a space of terror and racial hostility. Drawing from Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, this analysis situates Them within the broader historical context of racially restrictive covenants and the cultural construction of whiteness in California’s postwar boom. The series’ use of horror, both supernatural and social, is examined as a lens through which systemic racism becomes visceral and inescapable, aligning with Katherine McKittrick’s concept of “plantation futures”. Additionally, this paper examines the visual and narrative strategies that define Marvin’s Them, focusing on the stark contrasts between sunlit, idyllic exteriors and the claustrophobic, menacing interiors that symbolize the rupture of the California Dream. It also explores the visceral, embodied performances of terror and resilience that anchor the series’ critique. By dismantling conventional cinematic and televisual portrayals of California as a utopia, Them reimagines the Golden State as a fragmented.
Michael Docherty
(Appalachian State University)
In 1902, Black newspaper editor Jefferson Edmonds triumphantly declared California “the greatest state for the Negro,” and the promise of an integrated El Dorado indeed renewed its appeal to successive generations of Black migrants from emancipation to World War II. By the 1960s, California had established itself as a hub of radical African American politics, a place to imagine Black futures. Yet California is also the state of the Watts Rebellion and Rodney King, of the most restrictive historical redlining practices in the nation, of Bobby Hutton shot down with his hands up. This talk, which constitutes a précis of my in-progress book project, Black Horizons: African American Literature and the Possibility of California, will explore how Black writers of fiction have considered the Janus-faced role that California has played in the history of African American life. I will demonstrate the central but understudied role played by California in the African American literary imagination—as a speculatory space where alternative possibilities for Black existence can be hypothesized and, perhaps, made real. Post-1960s African American fiction, this talk will argue, responds both to California’s contested role in histories of African American liberation and to a dichotomous sense of extreme possibility (at once utopian and apocalyptic) that defines the cultural construction of California. For authors from Ishmael Reed to Wanda Coleman, Al Young to Dana Johnson, California enables new ways of thinking about Blackness. Though their approaches and conclusions differ, these writers share a sense that California’s unique history and spatiality provoke new possibilities in the U.S. racial imaginary. Apprehending a place whose role in American self-narrative has always been uncertain, they ask why that role should not be, for African Americans, the fulfilment of dreams deferred, an inexhaustible elsewhere. In this talk, I will focus on Young’s fiction—in recognition of the fact that the vital prose of a former California poet laureate has persistently been overlooked and, just four years since Young’s death, is already in danger of eluding scholarly attention.
Julia Fiedorczuk
(Warsaw University)
Forrest Gander, famously described by Robert Hass as „a restlessly experimental writer” has consistently developed a unique poetics of listening, tuning into the complex reality of Anthropocene with its multiple, interconnected crises. At the same time, Gander’s work and poetic genealogy are strictly concerned with the landscapes and specific locations in California. Gander’s postmodern lyric addresses the entanglements of personal and political, human and more-than-human, material and spiritual, mammalian and geological through forms that take inspiration from Anglo-American modernist tradition as well as non-western (e. g. south-Asian) literatures. He is sometimes associated with „ecopoetics” however this term should not be understood as denoting some special genre of poetry but rather as involving “the incorporation of an ecological or environmental perspective into the study of poetics” (Kate Rigby). In my talk, I am going to focus on Gander’s 2021 collection, Twice Alive. Growing out of a collaboration with a mycologist (Anne Pringle), the poems tell the story of human and more-than-human intimacy unfolding within four types of California landscape (sea, forest, desert and wasteland). These settings correspond to the types of landscape used by the Bengali poetic tradition known as the Sangam. I am going to read Gander’s complex, multi-layered work as an attempt to recreate a complex set of relationships between various actors and phenomena that make us who we are. While Twice Alive derives its understanding of intimacy from lichen (composite organisms, where individuality is lost as a result of of transformative proximity), California is more than a backdrop for the processes described in the poems. Its human and non-human inhabitants, its geology, its dynamic (and troubled) ecology can be said to participate in the processes of poiesis Gander’s investigative work wishes to explore.
Garrigós Cristina
(National University of Distance Education)
Cherríe Moraga's memoir, Native Country of the Heart (2019), highlights the author's reflections on her mother's struggle with memory loss due to Alzheimer's disease. Moraga connects this personal experience to what she perceives as the erasure of Native Californians. By revealing Elvira's past and discussing her journey of self-discovery as a lesbian, Moraga delves into her genealogy. She brings attention to the bodies of Indigenous people buried beneath the family house in San Gabriel, reminding readers of a past that, though forgotten, continues to resonate in the present. The text highlights how the erasure of both individual and cultural memory challenges the notion of "normalcy" associated with dementia, as well as the ethnic and gender identity of the writer. My paper will examine the significance of the house concerning the identity of a Mexican American woman with Alzheimer’s. It will explore how the temporal and spatial connection to the house, as the site of memory, is experienced by her daughter—the memory keeper—as a palimpsest where past and present coexist. Using memory loss as the central theme, Moraga reveals personal and communal history. I will use the concept of unhousing as a radical revision of dominant historical narratives (Geyh). As "home places can be sites to reconstruct and reimagine colonial histories" (Geraci), the loss of the house and the memories associated with its inhabitants raise questions about these genealogies, prompting a reexamination of colonial historiography and, consequently, the narratives that shaped the nation. Thus, instead of framing the memoir as a familial story offering a genealogical perspective aligned with traditional national narratives, Moraga liberates her mother and herself from this framework. By concentrating on amnesia, she creates a dual movement: one of historical inscription and another that destabilizes “normal” or dominant discourses.
Melanie Gish
(Independent Scholar)
Wedged in-between environmentalism on the political Left and Evangelicalism at large on the political Right, the evangelical environmental -or creation care- movement is minuscule compared to the two movements that spawned its precarious existence. Since 1979/80, fewer than a dozen national evangelical environmental organizations have been established in the US. Yet two of the three pioneering creation care non-profits were founded in California in the 1980s, one involving a bona fide conversion to environmentalism -or "born-again again" experience- on part of its founder. Moreover, although the very first evangelical environmental 501(c)(3) is located in northern Michigan, its founding director Calvin B. DeWitt and others within the creation care movement seem to have drawn considerable inspiration from John Muir -"another reader of the two books" (i.e. the "book of creation" and the Bible)- and his legacy. California has played a pioneering and outstanding role in environmental leadership and policy since the 19th century, in no small part due to its magnificent but vulnerable geography. More so than anywhere else in the US, a "'green state' political identity and culture has emerged" since Muir spent his first summer in the Sierra, driven mostly by "citizen mobilization, business support for critical environmental policy initiatives, and the state’s regulatory capacity" (Vogel, California Greenin', 2018). While American evangelicals traditionally take a small government, pro-business and 'theology first' approach, it seems to have been mostly cultural pressure that initially compelled creation care leaders to read the Bible through a green lens, and to align their politics and actions more toward the Earth. A closer look at the founding of creation care pioneer organizations in the 1980s may thus reveal that, so far, California's role in the genesis of evangelical environmental activism has unfortunately been underappreciated.
Sarah Gleeson-White
(University of Sidney)
New York City and, more recently, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington DC, are the sites that continue to inform scholarly approaches to and understandings of the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s. One consequence of such spatial framing has been the obscuring of the contemporaneous near-frenzy of Black cultural production taking place on the West coast. In this paper, building on important histories of early twentieth-century Black California—Douglass Flamming’s, Emily Lutenski’s, Catherine Parsons Smith’s, Daniel Widener’s, Alison Rose Jefferson’s—as well as my recent discoveries in UCLA’s and the Huntington Library’s archival holdings, I unearth the thriving Black literary scene of 1920s Los Angeles. Clustered around Central Avenue, this “little Harlem,” as Chandler Owen described it in 1922, included authors (Wallace Thurman, Arna Bontemps), journalists (Fay Jackson) and musicians (Harold Bruce Forsythe), and was supported by several Black periodicals and literary societies. Here, I focus on two Black ‘little magazines’ that have attracted next-to-no scholarly attention: The Outlet (1924-1925) and Flash (1929-1930). Thurman, who founded and edited The Outlet, declared it “the first western Negro literary magazine,” and in many ways, it was a rehearsal for his better-known, 1929 Harlem-based little magazine, Fire!!. Jackson, with James W. McGregor, edited Flash, a magazine that Alice Dunbar Nelson described as “a miniature Tatler.” Both The Outlet and Flash published columns about Los Angeles’ social, political and cultural life, in addition to fiction and poems, and book reviews, among much else. These important, albeit short-lived, little magazines provide invaluable insights into Black Los Angeles of the 1920s. They also remind us of the centrality of periodical culture to the New Negro Renaissance, and more, that Harlem’s own cultural flourishing did not emerge from nowhere—nor from the Migration from South to North alone. As it turns out, it had been percolating in California.
Florian Groß
(Leibniz University of Hannover)
Ever since its emergence in coastal Southern California in the late 1970s, SoCal Punk has been one of the Golden State’s most place-specific cultural expressions—and a constant critical voice on the state of California. Intricately connected to the skate and surf culture that emerged around the same time (Butz 2012), SoCal punk bands have used popular imaginations of California as a backdrop for their musical, textual, and performative aesthetics. In their subcultural (self-)fashioning as outsiders to a perceived mainstream, these engagements work along the lines of a criticism of the status quo, yet do so from a social and cultural position that remains closely connected to the dominant society criticized by these artists (Frank 1997). While many examples of outright criticism of American and Californian society can be found across. SoCal punk, this paper focuses on those songs that connect their subcultural social critique with narratives and tropes of natural disaster—from earthquakes to wildfires. Case studies include (but are not limited to) “Sink With California” (Youth Brigade, 1983), “Los Angeles is Burning” (Bad Religion, 2004), and “Surviving California” (Lagwagon, 2019). This paper aims to connect these songs’ lyrics with their musical and cultural style and argues that their explicit and reciprocal connection of environmental disaster and social crisis works both in a literal sense as well as along metaphorical lines that give the respective social critique a heightened sense of urgency and inevitability. Next to this, their specific connection also strengthens the songs’ aesthetics of place, tying it to a very particular imagination of California between ‘Endangered Eden’ and ‘Paradise Lost.’ Finally, this paper will show how, in the light of the L.A. wildfires of January 2025, the “imagination of disaster” (Davis) evident in a song like “Los Angeles is Burning” has to be read as the prescient outcome of a long critical as well as metaphorical engagement with the Golden State’s social and environmental issues rather than the apocalyptic foreboding of sensationalist subversives.
Gayle Kennedy
(King’s College London)
French philosopher, writer, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir visited California in February-March 1947 during her long-awaited coast-to-coast journey across the United States. Her time in the Golden State, focused primarily in Los Angeles, offers a vivid snapshot of post-war California that speaks to wider cultural and political issues of the era. Her time in California and her erudite observations on California’s perceived exceptionalism were documented in her travelogue, America Day by Day (1947). Beauvoir captured California as a microcosm of American paradoxes. In Hollywood, she encountered screenwriters and filmmakers stifled by censorship and fearful of looming McCarthyist purges, lamenting what they saw as the decline of intellectual artistry in cinema. The Black Dahlia murders haunted the city, amplifying anxieties around gendered violence, while gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell embodied a media culture Beauvoir derided as anti-intellectual and fear-mongering. California’s racial tensions also came under Beauvoir’s scrutiny, particularly the uneasy position of its Mexican population, though her observations reflect both the era’s prejudices and her own blind spots. My paper will argue that Beauvoir saw California as an intensified exemplar of the broader issues she encountered in America: political apathy threatening democracy, a reactionary press fomenting fear and hysteria, anti-intellectualism that dampened any challenge to hegemonic narratives, and social inequalities undermining the nation’s ideals. Yet California also revealed countercultural undercurrents, such as her encounters with avant-garde artist Man Ray, offering glimpses of resistance. By situating Beauvoir’s reflections within the cultural and historical context of post-war California, this paper will explore her insights into the Golden State’s unique role in shaping—and mirroring—American contradictions. Through her erudite critique, initially suppressed in the original 1952 US translation of her French travelogue, we see a California both deeply flawed and profoundly influential, a space where the tensions of democracy, media, and identity were laid bare, foreshadowing many of the cultural and political battles of today.
Stefano Luconi
(University of Padua)
Conventional scholarly wisdom contends that Italian newcomers held a racial middle ground between “whites” and “Blacks” upon landing in the United States in the decades of the mass transatlantic fluxes from the late 1870s to the early 1920s. Many were olive-skinned individuals from the Meridione, a section of Italy that African “contaminations” had allegedly affected for centuries. Therefore, they were not considered fully-fledged Caucasians. This was, for instance, the reason why in states such as Louisiana and Florida especially Sicilians were subjected to lynching, a form of extrajudicial popular justice and retribution that was usually reserved for African Americans. As this thesis further goes, Italian newcomers and their offspring became “white” in the eyes of the broader U.S. society only by distancing themselves from African Americans. Such a transformation occurred during World War II, when Italian Americans participated in anti-Black hate strikes and racial riots. This paradigm, however, seems to be hardly applicable outside the Deep South. In particular, California offers a different scenario. In this state in general and specifically in San Francisco, which was home to the largest Italian settlement on the Pacific coast, large numbers of Hispanics and Asians placed other minorities than African Americans at the bottom of the hierarchy of color. The sizeable presence of such groups, with whom migrants from Italy could not be associated on the account of their pigmentation, usually prevented native whites from challenging Italia Americans’ Caucasian extraction. Moreover, Italian migrants rushed to distance themselves from Asians and to side with whites almost as soon as they settled there. For example, they advocated the exclusion of prospective Chinese newcomers even before the outbreak of the civil war. Consequently, in California Italian Americans entrenched themselves on the white side of the color line much earlier than in other sections of the country.
Enrico Mariani
(Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Ecologies of Waters and Oil Extraction: Mary Austin’s Forerunning Literary Resistance
Southern California’s economic and demographic boom, nearly a century ago, was made possible thanks to extraction practices of marketable and infrastructural natural resources: oil and water. The social, anthropological, and ecological impacts of such practices have been recorded by writers and journalists since the early days of Los Angeles. Their works represented how oil extraction and water diversion shaped the ecology of the region and the lives of migrant labors, indigenous communities, and settler farmers, other than L.A. residents. Behind the renown cinematic successes of Chinatown (1974) by R. Polanski and There Will be Blood (2007) by P. T. Anderson lie, respectively, the literary works by Louis Adamic and Carey McWilliams about the L.A. aqueduct, and Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927) about the 1920s oil boom.
All of them, however, are somewhat indebted with the works of Mary Hunter Austin. This paper thus addresses topics such as social inequalities and ecological changes starting from Austin’s Southern California works The Land of Little Rain (1903) and The Ford (1917), based on her experiences as a Kern County and Owens Valley resident during the first oil boom and the construction of L.A. aqueduct. Drawing from Matthew S. Henry’s notion of “extractive fiction” (2019), this paper reads Austin’s writings as seminal ecocritical works which still prove to be valid additions to Mike Davis’s chronicling literary “ecologies of fear” in Southern California. Austin’s works, in fact, have an enduring legacy in literature, cinema, and the understanding of recent natural disasters and eco-protests.
Agnese Marino
(Roma Tre University)
The mass repatriation of Mexican Americans between 1930 and 1935 remains a largely overlooked chapter of California’s history, a humanitarian disaster with profound echoes in the contemporary politics of the U.S.-Mexico border. Told through the perspective of one of the hundreds abandoned “children of the border,” Desiré Zamorano’s The Dispossessed (2024) sheds light on the often-forgotten history of Latinx California. The novel reveals how practices such as deportation, forced sterilizations, repression, and the destruction of enclaves like Chavez Ravine were not exceptional occurrences but rather part of a sustained pattern of state violence and cultural erosion. My analysis examines the intersection of California exceptionalism with local political and cultural reactions to the state of exception at the militarized border, where the suspension of legal protections serves to reinforce political sovereignty and perpetuate exclusion, family separation, and community disintegration.
Martinicorena Sofia (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
“Some Ruined Heaven:” California Violence in Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus
The opening epigraph of Gold Fame Citrus (2015), the first novel published by California-born, Nevada-based author Claire Vaye Watkins, reads: “There it is. Take it.” Eloquently uttered by William Mulholland, the man who brought water to Los Angeles, the succinct statement summarises the attitudes that have represented the history of westward expansion and settlement. The allusion to the history of water (and land grab) in California, personified by Mulholland and his legacy, frames a novel that reimagines the near future of California in post-apocalyptic, environmentally catastrophic terms. This proposal explores Watkins’ novel as an example of California fiction that reassesses the weight of the mythic west and its nefarious consequences. The result of such re-imagining is a text that compresses the history of the US west during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries into a single story of violence. Through the reconceptualisation of a new set of water wars which feel worryingly prescient, the uncanny presence of the Manson Family and the allusions to the nuclearized west and its aftermath, Watkins offers a desolate picture of the west, of its past and most probably of its future⎯which, according to the novel, is structured by violence. Against the vision of California as an ever-redemptive place for new beginnings, Gold Fame Citrus defines the state by its sense of finality. If we agree with William Wyckoff when he argues that “The West’s fortunes are rooted in water. Every drop of water is money in the West” (6), then Gold Fame Citrus is an exercise in attempting to disassociate the environmentally exhausted west with the ideological (and economic) pillars that have sustained its existence as a cultural symbol. The mythic notion of California as the sunshine state is thus erased in favor of a representation that privileges violence over the mystifying conceptions that conceive of California as a mythic, bountiful Eden.
Magdalena Modrzejewska
(Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
The (1881) Speranza Colony represents one of the final attempts to implement and practice the Icarian dream: the establishment of a utopian socialist society. Inspired by Étienne Cabet’s influential novel Voyage en Icarie (1840), many sought to bring this vision to life. This book described an ideal nation, symmetrically organized into one hundred provinces, with a capital city, Icaria, and its meticulous symetrical urban planning. In this utopia, all aspects of public life were carefully structured, all property was collectively owned, and resources were utilized to promote equality (including gender equality) and eliminate poverty. Starting in 1848, Cabet’s followers attempted to implement the Icarian program in various American communities. Despite their dedication, these endeavors faced numerous challenges, including internal divisions and financial instability. The repeated failures ultimately led a determined group of Icarians to relocate to Speranza, California. This marked their final effort to realise their utopian vision, adapting their ideals to the unique social, economic, and environmental conditions of Californian life. This paper explores the similarities and differences between Speranza and other Icarian utopian settlements in America, with particular emphasis on how the community adjusted its utopian vision to the circumstances. Key topics include the role of commerce in sustaining the colony, the adaptation of communal ideals to the Californian context, and the evolving role of women within the community’s structure. Despite the quixotic efforts of its members, mainly Dehay and Leroux family, the Speranza colony disbanded in 1896, marking the end of the Icarian movement. With its dissolution, Étienne Cabet’s dream of creating a new, egalitarian world in America was buried—leaving behind a legacy of inspiration and lessons for future experiments in utopian living.
Giuliana Muscio
(University of Padua)
If one considers the cultural role of Italy in California the expected image of both California and of the Italian diaspora changes dramatically. The California of Italian Americans is not the wild West or the desert but the garden, the vegetable garden, with olive trees, orange groves and vineyards, with Tuscan villas instead of ranches. Taking into account the publication of a booklet entitled Our Italy by Charles Dudley Warner (New York: Harper Bros,1891) presenting the State of California to the American public as similar to Italy in landscape, climate, economy it is evident the effort of associating the American re-founding of the Mexican territory annexed in 1848, with the image of a magnificent Mediterranean coast, a mythical garden, resembling Italy-- a European nation, not anymore an Hispanic dominion. Visually this association was encouraged by Italianate architecture -an eclectic style combining Renaissance, Palladio and Pompei, a cultural appropriation by which California villas were designed by American architects who had studied in Italy or gone on the Grand Tour but built and ornated by Italian craftsmen. A further element in the “Italianization” of California was the Panamerican Exposition of 1915 where this cultural aspiration was represented by the success of Marcello Piacentini’s “Italian citadel” for the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. (“The pavilion is beautiful: It is a real heart of Italianness (in other words, discernment and taste, transported so far away.”) Piacentini had worked with a variety of historical styles, developing an exhibition route enclosing open spaces in an asymmetric arrangement that replicated the spontaneity and the picturesque layering of history of a typical Italian town. The international jury of the Expo awarded the Italian citadel designed by a young Piacentini the Grand Prize, crowning the acquisition of an access to the Pacific Ocean-the dream of the West- with the representation of an entire civilization.
Fulvia Sarnelli
(University of Naples “L’Orientale”)
Historically, California has been at the forefront of reproductive rights advocacy, with incisive activism, landmark legislation, and court cases paving the way for broader access to contraception and abortion services. Recent developments, such as the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, have intensified the attention surrounding reproductive justice. As California positions itself as a sanctuary for those seeking reproductive healthcare, the image of a bodily-autonomy haven state has been complicated by the recent uncovering of restrictive policies and cases of sterilization that targeted low-income, racialized communities. This paper intends to explore selected contemporary cultural products, both fiction (such as Brit Bennett’s 2016 novel The Mothers, the anthology Comics for Choice [2018 and 2023])) and documentaries (Renée Tajima-Peña’s No Más Bebés [2016] and Erika Cohn’s Belly of the Beast [2020]), that dismantle reductive narratives about reproductive freedom in California by tackling its discursive repertoire of exceptional activism and disastrous abuse.
Scarpino Cinzia
(University of Milan)
The story of the Salton Sea – California’s largest inland lake – is one of conflicting narratives at the intersection of geology and ecology, capitalist “boom and bust” enterprise, water engineering and management, agribusiness, and environmental exploitation, disaster, and protection. The Salton Sea was created in 1905 as an inflow of water from the Colorado River; it became a resort destination for Hollywood stars in the 50s and 60s, started to decline as a tourist attraction in the 70s, and plummeted into a severe environmental crisis in the 80s due to contaminating overflow from the Imperial Irrigation District and the reduction of that same water input in the 90s which brought, along with die-offs of fish and birds, unprecedented evaporation that released toxic dust clouds. As of today, the area is, again, at the intersection of renewal and disaster, both ecologically and socially: if it has become a haven for renewable energies on the one hand, the enormous deposits of lithium in what has been labeled as “Lithium valley” could expose it to the uncertain future of exctractivism. In this paper, I will explore this history and focus on two documentaries by artist and filmmaker Lucas Marxt dedicated to the Salton Sea and its surroundings, Valley Pride (2023) and Marine Target (2022).
Cinzia Schiavini
(University of Milan)
This paper seeks to investigate California as a stage, as well as California as it is staged, in Arab-American theatre, and the peculiar facets the state’s exceptionalism and myth acquire under the lens of “the last minority that is safe to hate”, especially after 9/11. My investigation will focus first on the importance of California in the rise of Arab-American theatre (and the role the first Arab-American theatre organization, the San Francisco- based Golden Thread Production, born in 1996, has had in the development of a national network) and then on the ramifications of California and its imagery in two plays by Yussef El Guindi, Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith (2006) and Johad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes (2008).
Rosemary Serra
(University of Trieste)
The experience of Italian immigration to the West Coast has long been considered by most scholars as unique in the panorama of Italian communities in the United States for the economic well-being and the level of integration achieved. Italians arrived fairly early on in the economic development of California. These immigrants found not only a less crowded territory that offered suitable jobs thanks to the landscape similarity with Italy, but also a younger and less hierarchical society, where they could compete on an equal footing with the American “pioneers”. In marked contrast to most American cities, where southern Italians formed the bulk of subsequent immigrants, Italians in Northern California came primarily from Northern Italy. One of the aspects that made California unique compared to the rest of the United States was the extremely heterogeneous demographic context since its conquest against Mexico in the war of 1846-1848. The Californian state developed a “racial system” based not on the traditional “black / white” dichotomy but on a “layered” hierarchy in which the Indian and Mexican populations, immigrants from Asia, Hispanic America, Europe and other areas of the country flowed with the start of the “gold rush” in 1849, a date that marked the arrival of the first and largest migratory wave of Italians in California. “Racial” heterogeneity characterized Northern California in particular, where demographic and economic development began with the emergence of San Francisco as the largest port on the west coast. In 1860 California was the state where the largest number of Italians lived. This proposal aims to reflect on the ways in which the perception of identity and the meaning attributed to Italianness by Italian immigrants in California have changed. The presentation will introduce a brief historical reconstruction of the steps that marked the process of integration of Italians into the state and discuss how immigrant identity is maintained and transformed as immigrants become assimilated into mainstream America. This presentation also explores how the Italian identity and heritage continue to live on. The basis for my analysis utilizes recent studies conducted through the testimony of young Italian Americans and Italians living in California, to understand how Italian ethnicity is not a component removed from social life but the ways in which it manifests itself have changed as have changed social codes of ethnic identification.
Eleni Tasioula
(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
This paper examines the 1993 memoir of Mexican-American activist, poet and former LA's poet laureate Luis J. Rodríguez against the background of east LA’s Chicano gang violence in the 1960s and ’70s. Rodríguez’s narrative offers a storied account of his involvement in the violent rivalries of barrio life which inherently reflect the “Golden State’s” social injustices, racialized vision and structural discrepancies. This research argues that the author’s forthright portrayal of gang life manifests as a poignant representation of LA’s underbelly - a conjuring of persistent politicized agendas regarding the state’s substructure, ongoing discrimination and lack of accessibility. Notions as such appear as deeply embedded in LA culture and interlinked with the debunking of its myth-making tales. A present-day reading of the memoir allows for a meditation on LA’s recurring systemic injustice towards racialized subjects which has affectively shaped and transformed the state’s underclass.
Nele Thomann
(Heidelberg University)
Subnational units of government have become important players in shaping and implementing policies addressing collective action problems, such as climate change. In the US-context, states have oftentimes been described as ‘policy laboratories.’ Among the nation’s 50 states, none has put forward environmental policies as comprehensive as California. The state has established its own environmental agencies, repeatedly contested federal policies that conflict with its objectives, and developed measures to safeguard its regulatory autonomy. Despite the lack of a cohesive US environmental policy, research frequently highlights the so-called ‘California effect’ as a recurring trend within this policy domain. California’s boldness in environmental governance has been ascribed to its geography, cultural and economic history, and, to a lesser extent, to its comparatively lenient constitutional constraints. As the nation’s economic powerhouse and the world’s fifth-largest economy, California has actively engaged in the international arena (paradiplomacy) to enhance its role in environmental governance. California has repeatedly pushed for bolder and faster action on climate change and environmental protection at international fora, pursued bi- and multilateral agreements with its counterparts and other counties, and repeatedly been a strong voice in support of the Paris Agreement, even (or especially) amidst US withdrawals. Despite a rising interest in substate involvement in global environmental policy within academic fields like international relations and political science, surprisingly little research has been conducted on California as an emerging actor in environmental governance. By drawing on theories of federalism to analyze California’s recent actions, and by looking more closely at the political mechanisms underpinning a historically consistent, future-oriented Californian environmental policy, this contribution aims to identify the factors enabling California to function as a laboratory for progressive and comprehensive environmental policy development. Moreover, it aims to detangle the process through which the legitimacy built on a domestic level propels California to actor-status in global environmental governance.
Giacomo Traina
(University of Trieste)
An Italianate style farmhouse lies at the southern end of San Jose’s Kelley Park. It houses the Viet Museum, a volunteer-run permanent exhibition devoted to the memory of the long-dissolved Republic of Vietnam, the American-backed nation vanquished by the communists in 1975. Its halls are jam-packed with vintage rifles, pennants, and military uniforms. In its front yard, a landlocked boat replica commemorates the one-million refugee exodus that marked the death of South Vietnam and the birth of Vietnamese America. Not too far, the arcades of Vietnam Town and the shiny-floored aisles of the Grand Century Mall define the Vietnamese business district, a line of strip malls and restaurants that sprawls out over the edges of Story Road. Boasting a population of over 100,000, San Jose’s community is the second-largest Vietnamese enclave in the US after Orange County’s Little Saigon. Theirs is a tale of wars that do not end when history books say they do, as it was here that one of the main anticommunist fronts bent on overturning Hanoi’s rule during the 1980s, the Mặt Trận, was based—an organization that many connect to a still-unsolved string of murders of journalists. Vietnamese American literature has long given voice to such hidden memories. Scholarship has been devoted to these narratives, reading them in light of the unspoken legacies of trauma that engendered them. Connecting Vietnamese American literature with the sociohistorical contexts that inform it, this paper aims to re-map San Jose as a diasporic literary space, from Lan P. Duong’s poetry to Thien Pham’s panels, from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fictions and recollections to Clément Baloup’s French Vietnamese outsider’s view, all the while retracing the tangled memories of war and exile that shape both the city’s Vietnamese community and its literary representations.