The Radical Imagination of Mike Davis
▻https://jacobin.com/2022/11/mike-davis-southern-california-capitalism-struggle
When Mike Davis died last month, he was a celebrity, but hardly one drawn to his effervescent fame. City of Quartz, his surprise bestseller, won him an international audience in 1990. Davis later reported himself “utterly shocked” by the book’s success. Thereafter, he might have spent decades on the lecture circuit, but Davis plowed ahead, turning out one volume of Marxist-inflected social criticism after another, often contemplating an amazingly disparate set of apocalyptic challenges: climate change, world hunger, viral pandemics, and the rise of homegrown fascism.
Je vous propose de lire l’extrait suivant de son introduction dans City of Quartz. On y découvre une comparaison statistique qui en dit long sur l’intensité de la violence à laquelle sont exposés les classes populaires du pays qui se réserve le droit exclusif de faire valoir ses intérêts manu militari .
Homicide is still the largest single cause of death for children under eighteen in Los Angeles County. Years ago, I used the Sheriff Department’s ‘gang-related homicide’ data to estimate that some 10,000 young people had been killed in the L.A. area’s street wars, from the formation of the first Crips sets in 1973—4 until 1992. This, of course, is a fantastic, horrifying figure, almost three times the death toll of the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland over a roughly similar time span. It is even more harrowing when we consider that most of the homicides have been concentrated in a handful of police divisions. Add to the number of dead the injured and permanently disabled, as well as those incarcerated or on parole for gang-related violations, and you have a measure of how completely Los Angeles – its adult leaderships and elites – has betrayed several generations of its children.
Cette brève mise en relation nous fait comprendre que ces films dits de suspence comme The Warriors et Assult on Precinct 13 constituent effectivement des reconstitutions dramaturgiques de la réalité vécue par nos amis étatsuniens.
The Warriors
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_(film)
Assault on Precinct 13
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_on_Precinct_13_(1976_film)
On trouve les oeuvres de Mike Davis chez notre vendeur préféré de livres anglais et dans les bibliothèques clandestines de l’internet. Cet auteur exceptionnel nous indique toujours le chemin vers une compréhension des conditions d’existence sous l’impérialisme
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)
Books
Nonfiction
Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (1986, 1999, 2018)
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990, 2006)
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998)
Casino Zombies: True Stories From the Neon West (1999, German only)
Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (2000)
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, edited with Hal Rothman (2002)
Dead Cities, And Other Tales (2003)
Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew (2003)
The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005)
Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006)
No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, with Justin Akers Chacon (2006)
Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007)
In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (2007)
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2007)
Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible (2012)
Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (2018)
Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener (2020)
Fiction
Land of the Lost Mammoths (2003)
Pirates, Bats, and Dragons (2004)
#USA #Los_Angeles #violence #jeunesse #marxisme #sciences #guerre
