Some Slides about the Walter Mosley Novel Last Week

Black Betty is helping us analyze noir culture's third source, "legacies of slavery."  Here's some material from lecture.  Mosley details element of a noir society.   A segregationist police force, the LAPD, is fairly straightforward.

Mosley also focuses on the active agency of folks within the Black community.  There's Easy Rawlins's old friend Mouse, the enforcer / destroyer who is also occasionally a savoir in moments of danger.

And there's the real estate dream of Black-owned retail for the Black community, doubled-crossed.

Mosley grew up in central LA and was there before, during, and after the Watts "riots" / rebellion in 1965.  Black Betty appeared in 1994, and he was either writing it or its immediate predecessor during the Rodney King uprising in 1992.  He is well-aware of the history of police-community relations, and as far as I can tell, in agreement with the argument of the next slides, taken from Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1991), that the 1990s escalation of gang violence resulted in part from law enforcement's suppression of gangs that were political.

Another context for Mosley is Blaxsploitation film, whose golden age was 1970-75.  Most of the films featured whites preying on a Black community that was weakened by traitors within--sometimes Black politicians spouting Black nationalist rhetoric.   A hero or heroine comes forward to confront the predators and drive them back, at least temporarily.  Here are two.

 

We'll see next time, when we watch the end of Coffy, that it these films generally assume force can only be beaten with force.  Easy Rawlins doesn't agree.  Force from below almost always loses to force from above.  It is weaker and badly funded.  Hence Easy's stress on alliances and of course detection-- along with his floundering community development scheme.

 On Thursday we ended with a discussion of Betty Eady.  I argued that she's a complex, multisided character who is both beaten down and free--and free, mostly threateningly, through her sexuality.  Here are the passages:

We'll look at chapter 33 carefully.  I'll go on to argue that Black Betty offers a strong ending if not a happy ending, and in strength there's hope.