UC Santa Cruz

The central aim of this dissertation is to effectively trace the intersection of race and urban epistemology by examining representations of the American metropolis in literary and cinematic noir. In addition to analyzing classic hard-boiled texts and noir films, I introduce a new range of texts that suggestively argue for the racialization of the city as a significant source of noir anxiety; these texts, I contend, speak directly to the complexities in the evolution of noir and its many subgenres and appropriations. One of the primary interests of my dissertation, then, is to explicate the ways in which race narrativizes the city, and in turn, how the city narrativizes race.

In my investigation, I look to social histories of cities as well as theories of urban phenomena, which provides me with a useful historical entry point in reading the noir city as producing powerful fictions of urban epistemology. In my analysis, I include readings of Dashiell Hammett's Personville, Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley's opposing epistemologies of postwar Los Angeles, and noir's repeated use of Chinatown as an exotic mise-en-scène. I end my analysis with a provocative suggestion that Iceberg Slim and Sam Greenlee's narratives are mutations of noir, where the black ghetto is the contemporary incarnation of the "mean streets" that produces a different set of noir heroes - the pimp, spy, and hipster. Stifled by carceral conditions and white surveillance practices, these new noir protagonists may "own" the streets, but they also reveal that positing the black male body as a site of the hyper-urbane produces its own set of profoundly mythic constructions.