The Scripps College Humanities Institute begins its spring 2007 program, “L.A. Palimpsest: Recovering Los Angeles’ Hidden Stories and Forgotten Communities,” with an opening lecture “Landscape of Soul: Hollywood, Watts, and Beyond,” on Tuesday, January 23, at 7:30 p.m. with poet and performance artist Wanda Coleman in the Garrison Theater, Scripps College Performing Arts Center. All program events are free and open to the public. For more information and a complete schedule of events, please call the Humanities Institute at (909) 621-8326.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Humanities Institute created a program to uncover aspects of Los Angeles’ social, economic, ethnic, and artistic history that have been obstructed due to the city’s ability to continually reinvent itself. The Humanities Institute’s spring 2007 program is co-organized by Nathalie Rachlin, director Scripps College Humanities Institute and Susan Rankaitis, Fletcher Jones Chair in Studio Art, Scripps College.
With “L.A. Palimpsest,” the Humanities Institute hopes to refute the clichés that Los Angeles is a rootless, center-less, polarized, and fragmented city. Urban and social historians, journalists, artists, writers, and musicians engaged in the work of uncovering the lost past of L.A. 20th-century diverse urban communities will visit the Scripps campus to discuss their research and offer opportunities to discover aspects of the city and its environs that lie beneath the shallow stereotypes of the region.
Derived from the Latin palimpsestus, palimpsest is something having diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface. Los Angeles has often been portrayed as a city of the future. With each development boom, massive industry transformation, and gentrification of its urban landscape, L.A. has reinvented itself and willed itself into a city unburdened by history.
By embracing rapid economic development, relentless urban and suburban expansion, and reliance on the automobile, L.A. has been a unique experiment in the creation of an urban utopia that often chooses fantasy and myth over reality and history. In order to fulfill the city’s utopian destiny, entire neighborhoods were demolished, whole communities—often working-class, ethnic, and racial communities—were displaced. As places and people were dispersed and their history and memories were buried in the rubbles of each destruction and reconstruction, L.A.—as historian William Deverell has shown—”whitewashed” its past. “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” George Orwell, 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Guest speakers include Thom Andersen, Eric Avila, Wanda Coleman, Dana Cuff, Michael Dear, William Deverell, Philip Ethington, Robbert Flick, Ken Gonzales-Day, Robert Gottlieb, Tomo Isoyama, David James, Steve Lopez, Walter Mosley, Georges Sanchez, RJ Smith, Raphael Sonenshein, D.J Waldie, and Mark Wild.
For a full schedule of events related to the spring 2007 program, contact the Scripps College Humanities Institute at (909) 621-8326.