While Los Angeles has regularly been called the “City of Angels,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has argued that a more appropriate epithet would be the “City of Inmates,” as Los Angeles has historically been a site for innovations in imprisonment, surveilling, policing, and oppressing various communities for their race, ethnicity, class status, sexuality, and other out-group identifications. Literature and cinema have long been fertile sites for examining the ramifications of police- and prison-centric ideologies within American society and culture, particularly for a city that defined itself by cinema. This panel for MLA 2027, “Literary and Cinematic Representations of Carceral Los Angeles,” invites presentation proposals on books, films, TV shows, and related media set in Los Angeles and its surrounding areas that represents police, prisons, and other aspects of the American carceral state.

Topics of particular interest include:

• Race, racism, and white supremacy within the Angeleno carceral state
• Gender and sexuality as areas of policing and surveillance
• Immigration (particularly Latine and Asian immigration) to Los Angeles and its connections to carcerality
• Los Angeles carcerality in relation to specific genres (film noir, science fiction, historical drama, etc.)
• Representations of real life carceral events within Los Angeles history (the 1965 uprising, the 1992 uprising, the Rampart scandal, etc.)
• Spatial logics contained within Los Angeles carcerality
• (Anti-)Carceral activism throughout Los Angeles history
• The evolution and professionalization of the LAPD and Los Angeles prisons/jails

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to jddebroc@go.olemiss.edu by March 16.