Walking, Working: The LA Rebellion and Ordinary Movement

• In Event: Place and Space in Multiracial Organizing

Abstract

Los Angeles is sometimes considered an “unwalkable” city, dominated by its expressways and its neighborhoods separated by polluted arterial roads. But the city nonetheless contains a significant population whose modes of transport are walking, bike-riding, and taking buses and the underused subway system. This paper, on Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts, points to the practice of walking work in LA, showing how foot travel provides an opportunity for deep cinematic tension and revealing the particularities of working in the second-largest city in the US. In both these films worker traverse the city on foot and via bus, setting an elongated filmic tempo. This talk is part of a book-length project on minor cinema, non-automotive transit, and working in public in LA. The manuscript delves into films by and about Native, Black, and Chicano filmmakers to unearth a walking archive that is particular to the genealogy of labor in the city, a practice that is widely recognized in histories of cities like Chicago and New York but undertheorized in “car cities,” particularly amidst the rise of car culture in the midcentury.

Biographical Information

Bio: Megan Tusler received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2015, where she teaches courses in comparative ethnic literature, the American novel and cinema, and literary culture and urbanism. Her teaching work in courses like Feeling Brown, Feeling Down and California Fiction pulls together methods in theories of race and ethnicity, critical theory, film studies, and affect in conversation with works in the US minor fiction and cinema. She is currently at work on two projects: one that explores race, misanthropy, and negative affect in the ethnic American novel and another about walking and labor in Los Angeles minor cinema. She has worked in the curatorial department at the Chicago History Museum and has been a Newberry Library fellow in the Ayer Collection of American Indian Studies and has held fellowships from the Osage Nation of Oklahoma and the Mellon Foundation. Her published work appears in American Indian Quarterly, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Post45 Contemporaries, The LA Review of Books, and is forthcoming in SubStance; she also curated “Five Best Books in US Indigenous Literature” for Five Books. She is the co-host of the podcast Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective.

Author

• Megan Tusler, University of Chicago