UC San Diego

“Dreams Eclipsed: Culture and Warfare in Black Los Angeles” investigates the language(s) of social analysis that emerges from Black Los Angeles since the 1940s in order to make sense of warfare at home and abroad. Engaging Black literature, film, and music, this dissertation bridges various fields ranging from Black studies, cultural studies, carceral studies, critical theory, as well as histories of California and the Third World to examine how Black life in Los Angeles has been made more or less possible when interrogated through transnational discourses of war and conquest. I draw on histories of African captivity to generate a theory of the material and ontological constraints that poor and working-class Black people occupy when living under the precarious auspices of domestic militarism. This dissertation examines watershed moments in U.S. American social life such as the Second World War, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and the L.A. Riots of 1992 in order to illuminate the connection between the burgeoning warfare state and the increasing social and cultural permanence of mass incarceration, policing, and surveillance––i.e., the carceral state. Through examining carceral warfare and racial/gendered captivity as ideal structural features of postwar Los Angeles, this project situates Black working-class cultural production as a primary site for theorizing, navigating, and overcoming war at both the domestic and international scale. Key questions that drive this dissertation include: What can a place like Los Angeles say about the multiple discourses that allow logics of war to intersect with racialized and gendered captivity as logical conditions enabled through carcerality? Through Los Angeles’ expansion as a global, multi-ethnic metropolis, how is captivity understood as not only the condition that is produced by the carceral state, but also a condition that has always been transformed and depicted in Black arts and culture throughout the 20th century? At the core, “Dreams Eclipsed” deals with how Black people have not only constructed meanings of life and struggle in the city, but how Black culture in Los Angeles contributes to global narratives of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist struggles across the diaspora.