New Orleans Brings It All Together

Furthermore, for much of its history, commenta- tors have generally rendered the city as economically and politically backward, a bastion of corruption, premodernism, inefficiency, and hedonism anathema to a broader American experience grounded in Puritan and Yankee values of thrift, hard work, progress, and self-denial. Since well before writers like George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, and Grace King made a whole genre out of New Orleans's supposed exceptionalism after the defeat of Reconstruction, American culture had imbibed an image of the city as antithetical to either the progress or sterility of bourgeois, market-centered modernity, depending on who was writing. Los Angeles became the location du jour for scholars to "excavat(e) the future," as the subtitle to Davis's study put it. [...]the early 2000s, LA seemed to offer a singular site at which to conduct place-based humanistic, historical, and social-scientific inquiry concerned with the spatial, economic, ethnic, and environmental character of the so-called postmodern world and to divine the shape of things to come.5 As Soja argues, "There may be no comparable urban region which presents so vividly such a composite assemblage of . . . the recent history of capitalist urbanization in all its inflectional forms.