Introduction: Los Angeles Studies and the Future of Urban Cultures

The transfer of the editorial and administrative offices of the American Quarterly to the University of Southern California and Los Angeles affords us an opportunity to explore the meaning of the abstraction "America" in 2004. Los Angeles is a site of struggle and servitude, imagination and affluence, gluttonous greed, and punitive poverty. It is a place where people secure unpredictable pleasures and suffer unendurable pain. Learning from Los Angeles requires us to listen to the voices of its vernacular artists and activists.