European Journal of American Culture - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2001

The end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth brought Chicago to the front of the list of great urban centres across the globe. This rapid elevation was the result of a concordance of circumstances which themselves represented new forms of urban conceptualism. Today we find ourselves in a position similar to that experienced by the denizens of Chicago at the turn of the century; on a global scale, we have found new technologies of representation at precisely the moment that significant new forms of urban space and urbanity are emerging. But to see these as unconnected would be to miss the lessons of a century ago. New Internet technologies offer forms of representation that promise universal applicability but in fact reinflect information about the city in both blatant and subtle ways. Here and now, again, we find older systems of representation still holding out against the promises of new technologies, even as the new technologies have begun to transform our systems of imagining urban space.

Globalization has forced large cities like Los Angeles into a reopening of the debate about scale, substance and boundaries of governance. While over time, Los Angeles has developed into a fragmented, private and horizontal city, there have also been historical countertendencies of regionalist, public and vertical urbanization trends. Consolidationism currently appears most visibly in the attempts to establish some form of regional cooperation and governance in Southern California. This paper interprets recent debates about the rewritten City Charter as part of the consolidationist tradition of the urban area and the ways in which, on the other hand, secessionism, a means of local politics having a long tradition in Los Angeles, is offered by its defenders as an potential solution to the problems of urban governance in the age of globalization and as an historical antipode of consolidationist tendencies in the area. This paper looks particularly at San Fernando Valley secessionism as a product of the tumultuous events of the early 1990s in Los Angeles, of changed legislation which makes it easier for parts of cities to secede, and of the consolidationist process of rewriting the City Charter of 1925.

Written in response to the political debate generated by the London press after the fall of Quebec in 1759, and establishing Benjamin Franklin's notion of American nationalism before the American Revolution, The Canada Pamphlet stands as one of the most complex and sophisticated pieces of pre-revolutionary American thought. In it Franklin entertained the idea of an homogeneous American population in manners, language and religion as a reaction against ethnic and political warfare within Europe. Drawing on the ideas of Hobbes, Hume and Spinoza, Franklin believed that political and ethnic relations were exclusively dominated by power, leaving no room for multi-culturalism in America, preferring instead the implementation of the British Crown model in the colonies to foster internal peace there.

This article uses Jim Jarmusch's film, Dead Man as the basis for an analysis of dominant narratives of the American West and the ways in which these are articulated with the forms of Western capitalism. It argues that the film offers a critique of the cult of the Western and seeks also to secure the legitimacy of an alternative, local or little narrative through its deconstructive techniques and that its pragmatics of narration work against hegemonic discourses of discovery and civilising as the narrated journey is viewed through the downgrading, violation and spoliation of indigenous peoples and territories. The argument shows how the film explores the cartographies of violence in the American (and Western capitalist) imaginary and narrates against the historical, political, economic and symbolic erasure of Native Americans. Linked with this is an examination of the manner in which the film reflects upon themes of spirituality, transience and death. As a film of self-reflection it is not solemn or merely politically correct but a comedy which mocks liberal platitudes while it systematically divests a moral economy of its narrative centrality and continuity.