Week 10 Section
• General business
• Wrapping up Twilight Los Angeles,
1992
• Closing business
General Business
REMAINING OFFICE HOURS
• Thursday 6/2:
3:30 to 6:30 PM
• Friday 6/3:
10:00 AM to 2:00 PM; 3:00 PM to 4:00PM
• Saturday 6/4:
out of town; e-mail me
• Sunday 6/5:
noon to 6:30 PM (at Starbucks on Regents)
• Monday 6/6:
8:00 AM to 6:30 PM
PAPER 2 DUE BY NOON
*you can give me your paper; SASE optional
• Tuesday 6/7:
10:00 AM to 2:30 PM
FINAL 3:00-5:59 PM (in usual lecture room)
Translation and Perspective
• In . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him:
• We’ve talked about the vignette structure with different voices providing perspectives
on the lives of migrant farm workers, in particular, as well as racial and cultural “others”
more generally.
• We’ve talked about what’s lost in translation as the translator frames Rivera’s story
through her word choices.
• We’ve talked about how the moviemakers frame the story by making it more of a
narrative about the boy and his family.
• In Bone:
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Leila translating for her family
Leila translating for school (for her job)
Leila translating as the narrator to the audience (and Ng translating as author)
Translating lives through paper records and memory
• In Twilight:
• Multiple voices translating different perspectives on the events leading up to, including,
and following the Rodney King beating (make sense of it for others and for oneself)
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Media giving particular perspectives
Different communities giving perspectives (often related to race and class dynamics)
The courts and jurors framing the events
Maxine Waters reaching out to President Bush to tell him what it’s all about
Even Reginald Denny having to be told what happened when he was beaten
Smith’s perspective in introduction and giving us language and bodily cues in parentheses
throughout some of the pieces so we can hear/see people. Imposes a particular order onto the
stories for us and formats them a bit like poetry. The events “would be variously referred to as
a ‘riot,’ an ‘uprising,’ and/or ‘a rebellion’” (xviii)—import of words/labels.
Twilight—Structure
• Introduction by Smith before the text proper
• Prologue
• Establishing continuity and defining the “enemy”
• The Territory
• Backstory—focusing on history of police brutality, class, and gang violence;
continues perspectives on “enemy” and “they”
• Here’s a Nobody
• More focused on Rodney King’s beating (includes his aunt, the police, witness,
juror)
• War Zone
• Aftermath of the not-guilty verdict—destruction in LA, Denning’s beating,
perspectives re: Korean and black relations
• Twilight
• Aftermath, clean-up work, questioning what now
• Justice
• People looking back—a lawyer on taking the case, Mrs. Young-Soon Han on justice
for Korean business owners, on youth, on gang and race warfare
*Note the timeline of events from 1991-1992 at the end; discusses shooting of
Latasha Harlins, Rodney King beating, and Reginald Denning beating
Twilight—More context
• The professor mentioned 3 key factors:
• History of policing and police brutality in L.A.
• Economic restructuring
• Demographic shifts
• Gang violence is a recurring theme/topic in the text. How does that link
to these factors, and did any details re: gang violence resonate with you
as you read?
• Watts riots of 1965—recall Yamamoto’s references to the Watts riots in “A
Fire in Fontana.”
• The week-long incident itself revolved around Marquette Frye, an African
American motorist who was pulled over and seemed to be drunk. Brother
Ronald Frye wanted to take the car home as his brother was arrested, but
the police refused; brothers and their mother were arrested as a crowd
gathered. Unrest soon escalated, beginning mostly with stone-throwing
and vandalizing police property; then there was looting and burning,
mostly of businesses but some residences.
• BUT this was the product of growing tensions similar to those in 1992
rather than revolving around one “isolated” incident.
• 34 killed, 1,032 injured, 3,438 arrested. 1992 numbers surpassed these a
bit, and in both cases the National Guard was called in.
Twilight
• What is the significance of twilight?
Twilight—re: twilight
“Twilight #1”—Homi Bhabha (famous postcolonial studies scholar), 232-34
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“That fuzziness of twilight allows us to see the intersections of the event with a
number of other things that daylight obscures for us, to use a paradox. We have
to interpret more in twilight” (233).
“Magic #2”—Betye Saar, 235-36
• “It was, um, still light, because it didn’t last for a very long time. So it’s like
this sort of in between day and night when the sky is sort of gray and we
were walking back to the car” (235). Confronts scene of protesters in West
Hollywood but refocuses on sky: “That’s kind of what I remember about
the sky, the kind of surreal time of day, because it’s between day and night
. . . . It’s very surreal, I think, or maybe even magical. But magic is not
always good, because it implies all sorts of things, like evil and control”
(236).
“Limbo/Twilight #2”—Twilight Bey (gang member), 253-56 (and intro)
• People say he has “a lot more wisdom than those twice your age,” so he
takes “twi” from “twice” and “light” signifying knowledge and wisdom. “So
twilight is that time between day and night. Limbo, I call it limbo” (254). “I
affiliate darkness with what was first, because it was first, and then
relative to my complexion. I am a dark individual” (255).
Twilight—Priorities
• “I Was Scared”—Anonymous Young Woman, USC student
• “I was scared to death. I’ve never felt as scared, as frightened, in my life.
Um, and it was a different fear that [than?] I’ve ever felt. I mean, I was
really afraid. At a certain point it dawned on us that they might try to
attack the row, the sororities and the fraternities. Because they did do
that during the Watts riots. And, um, they . . . they went into the house,
where they smashed the windows. I don’t know how we got this
information but somebody knew that” (156).
• SHIFT “First of all, my parents were on their way . . . All I can think of . . .
one bottle, one shear from one bottle in my father’s car, he will die! He
will die” (157).
• MORE CLARITY “And those are his pride and joy. They are perfect. They
are polished. They are run perfect. They are perfect. All I can think of is a
bottle gettin’ anywhere near it” (158).
*So much of the entire text of Twilight and the context of the events
themselves boils down to priorities, and this is an extreme yet poignant
illustration of how that works and what it means.
Twilight—Masculinity and Urban Soldiery
• “A Bloodstained Banner”—Cornel West (scholar, actor, author)
• “Richard Slotkin talks about dis in terms of being a gunfighterr (grabbing
the ‘r’) nation. . . . To be like Rambo, . . . this kinda gangsterous orientation,
. . . gangster rap, which is deeply resistant of, uh, against racism and so
forth but so centered on machismo identity because you tough like a
soldier, you like a, uh, military mayan” (42-43). See Slotkin’s Regeneration
through Violence, for example.
• “therefore the interests of black women are subordinated and the black
men become the machismo heroes, because they’re the ones who defy
and women can’t do that. . . . So you get this encounter between two
machismo heroes [black men vs. police or hegemonic power]” (44).
• “Broad Daylight”—Anonymous Young Man (former gang member)
• “they thought ain’t nobody that stupid to shoot people in broad daylight.
And I was the opposite. My theory was when you shoot somebody in
broad daylight people gonna be mostly scared” (26).
• “Ask Saddam Hussein”—Elaine Brown, former Black Panther Party leader
• “I think people do have, uh, some other image of the Black Panther Party
than the guns. The young men, of course, are attracted to the guns” (227).
• “So don’t get hung up on your own ego and your own image and pumping
up your muscles and putting on a black beret or some kinda Malcolm X hat
or whatever other regalia and symbolic vestment you can put on your
body” (231).
Twilight—Protection
• “Godzilla”—Anonymous Man #2 (Hollywood agent), 134-41
• Privileged whites fearing ambiguous “they” who are looting and
burning. He feels guilty about the state of race relations as other whites
are fleeing as though chased by Godzilla, “talking about the need for
guns to protect ourselves” (136).
• “The Beverly Hills Hotel”—Elaine Young, real estate agent, 150-55
• Goes on a date to the Beverly Hills Hotel and stays there. The privileged
are “talking and trying to forget what was going on” (152). Seek
protection there and try to forget, then try to protect yourself from
people’s outrage when they attack your sense of privilege.
• “I Remember Going . . .”—Rev. Tom Choi, 201-03
• Puts on his clerical collar: “I remember doing that specifically because I was
afraid that somebody would mistake me for a Korean shop owner and . . . And,
um, either berate my physically or beat me up. So I remember hiding behind
this collar for protection” (201). Then realizes he doesn’t need it to be safe.
• “A Jungian Collective Unconscious”—Paula Weinstein, 204-13
• “what disturbed me . . . was watching rich white people guard their
houses and send their children out of L.A. as if the devil was coming
after them. And it wasn’t realistic. It was, I think, a media fest of making
white people scared of the African-American community” (211).
• Carl Jung (Swiss) re: analytical psychology, collective unconscious,
synchronicity
Twilight—Rooms
• “A Weird Common Thread in Our Lives”—Reginald Denny, beaten by the LA
Four Plus, 103-12
• “Someday when I, uh, get a house, I’m gonna have one of the rooms and it’s
just gonna be of all the riot stuff and it won’t be a blood-and-guts memorial,
it’s not gonna be a sad, it’s gonna be a happy room. Of all the crazy things
that I’ve got, all the, the love and compassion and the funny notes and the
letters from faraway places, just framed, placed, framed things, where a
person will walk in and just have a good old time in there. It’ll just be fun to
be in there, just like a fun thing, and there won’t be a color problem in this
room” (111).
• “Trophies”—Paul Parker, Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee, 170-79
• “Now we got some weapons, we got our pride. We holdin’ our heads up and
our chest out. We like yeah, brother, we did this! We got the gang truce
jumpin’ off. Basically it’s that you as black people ain’t takin’ this shit no more.
. . . [I]t was some victory. I mean, it was burnin’ everywhere. . . . When I finally
get my house I’m gonna have just one room set aside. It’s gonna be my No
Justice No Peace room. Gonna have up on the wall No Justice over here No
Peace, and have all my articles and clippings and, um, everything else. I guess
so my son can see, my children can grow up with it. Know what Daddy did”
(177).
Twilight
• Lots of overlap with other course material from this
quarter, and the professor will perhaps draw connections
across the course material in tomorrow’s lecture, like:
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Power structures, repression, segregation, force, contact
The rhetoric of warfare
Making the invisible visible
Mediation, perspective, narration (including media & technology)
Violence
Activism
Othering (“them”)
Intersections of race and class
Gender (masculinities and femininities)
Community, solidarity, identity
Space and place (geographies and ideologies)
Closing Business
• Final exam review sheets (hard copies and posted on the course
website)
• We haven’t gotten to Alexie yet (tomorrow’s lecture), so do fill in
some of the terminology and key quotes based on lecture.
• 90% of the time when I mention page numbers or quote something,
it’s because the prof explicitly read that part in class (so those are
the most likely passages to show up as IDs versus text she didn’t
read aloud).
• I’m happy to meet with individuals or small groups to discuss the
readings as preparation for the final. I have office hours all the way
up to final exam time next Tuesday.
• Thanks for your hard work and good humor, and for an amazing
quarter—for me. Hopefully for you, too. Maybe? Oh, well . . .