Scholarship and activism have increasingly shed light on the carceral history of Los Angeles (and California more broadly) and how the city has operated as a laboratory for the expansion of the carceral state and police power from the birth of the city to the contemporary moment centered on the LAPD, creating a “city of inmates” as coined by historian Kelly Lytle Hernández. This carceral system within Los Angeles has often been used against those who are seen as hostile towards the desires for upper-class Anglo supremacy, such as Chinese immigrants, white male drifters, queer women, and the generations of Black migrants that came to Los Angeles out of a sense of potential advancement in society. In addition to Hernández, scholars like Mike Davis, Max Felker-Kantor, Damien M. Sojoyner, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have demonstrated the wide range of aspects in everyday life within Los Angeles and California that are affected by the carceral state, from education and the family unit to the economy and government-citizen relations. However, the vast majority of study regarding carceral Los Angeles has been within fields like history, critical prison studies, and sociology, even though the wide range of fictional literature and films produced about the city can narrativize the spread of carcerality in a more approachable and understandable way than pure history can. This proposed panel, “Literary and Cinematic Representations of Carceral Los Angeles,” will examine how Los Angeles-set literature and cinema from the past eighty years have depicted carcerality within the city and its response from both citizens and artists. If accepted, this session would help to broaden the reach of critical prison studies-based scholarship within literary studies and media studies, particularly in the criticism surrounding the literature and cinema of Los Angeles.

This session will consist of three presentations, each lasting around 15 minutes in length, that will provide fruitful for the post-presentation discussion. The first speaker, Isabel Lane, is a Preceptor at Harvard College’s Writing Program who focuses on intersections between human and environmental harm, environmental justice, and industrial systems. Her presentation, entitled “’The Bad Future of California’: The Prison Beyond Los Angeles,” uses Mike Davis’ framework of the “ecology of fear” present within the history of Los Angeles to examine the fiction of Chester Himes and Edward Bunker, both formerly imprisoned men who became successful authors after leaving prison, who used their writings to illustrate how Los Angeles’s urban sprawl during the twentieth century operated as part and parcel of the city’s greater carceral project. The second speaker, Romina Garcia, is a Provostial Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University whose research focuses on examining the structural and administrative anti-black violence that encompasses Black women within anti-violence work. Her presentation, entitled “Feeling and Feeling for: Antiblack Containment and Queer Imaginings,” uses the 1996 crime film Set It Off to consider the queered links between racial formations, sexualities, intimacies, and liberation against a backdrop of containment, utilizing Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s theory of Black queer “crosscurrents.” The third speaker, William Bonfiglio, is a Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis whose research interests include identity and performance; monuments, memorials, and commemorative practices; and theater and migration. His presentation, entitled “Barrio in Crisis: Emancipation, Fate, and the Disruption of Carceral Logics in Oedipus El Rey,” argues that Luis Alfaro’s adaptation of the Oedipus myth to the contemporary prison system allows those incarcerated to regain agency and forces their audience to reexamine their beliefs about the humanity of those deemed by society as “criminal.”