Los Angeles is a productive site for this discussion given the role space has played in producing the city’s racial geographies. Migration patterns, segregation, redevelopment, policing, and media representation have all shaped how communities inhabit, claim, or are denied access to space. This session builds on scholarship in Black studies, ethnic studies, literary studies, urban studies, and media studies that has emphasized the way race and space is mutually constituted. Moreover, panelists show how literary and cultural analysis can make visible forms of racialized spatial struggle that are not always legible through demographic accounts alone.

In “California Creoles: Tracing Black Creole Literature in Los Angeles,” Laine Barriga examines Black creole migration to Los Angeles during the Second Great Migration and the literary production that emerged from these communities. Focusing on neighborhoods such as Watts, Compton, Leimert Park, and Jefferson Park, Barriga traces how Black Creole social worlds took shape in relation to enclave formation and community institution building. Turning to works by the Watts Prophets, Father Amde Hamilton, Wendy A. Gaudin, and Robin Coste Lewis, the paper argues that literature serves as a crucial archive of Black Los Angeles, especially as material traces of these communities have disappeared from the urban landscape.

Andrea Delgado’s “Side by Side but Not Eye to Eye: English, Spanish, and Korean Speaking Communities during the LA 1992 Uprising,” shifts attention to the racialized production of public discourse. Through an analysis of English-, Spanish-, and Korean- language news coverage, Delgado shows how the uprising was framed differently across linguistic media publics and how those differences shaped divergent understandings of the event’s causes and consequences. Delgado’s paper expands the panel’s account of racialized space by showing that urban conflict is mediated not only through physical geographies but also through the media that structures who is addressed as well as narrates who and what is heard.

Finally, Alexandra Meany’s paper, “Spatializing Racial Difference and Geographic Struggle in Paul Beatty’s Los Angeles,” reads The Sellout as a historically grounded account of the relationship between Blackness and space in Los Angeles. By focusing on the disappearance and attempted reinstatement of the fictional town of Dickens, CA, Meany shows how the novel stages placemaking, segregation, and boundary making as central to racial formation. The paper argues that Beatty’s satire is a critique not only of postracial discourse but also of how Black communities are made vulnerable to erasure while continuing to generate forms of spatial and political resistance.