Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (review)

In the 1990s and early 2000s, a dozen sociologists, mostly Korean Americans, published books that examined the 1992 Los Angeles riots and their effect on the Korean community. Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots is the most recent and probably the last book that focuses on the same topics. The author, Min Hyoung Song, is also a Korean American scholar. But unlike other Korean authors of books focusing on the 1992 Los Angeles riots, he is not a sociologist, but a professor of English literature.

When I received a copy of this book for a review, I was very curious about what Song, as a professor of English literature, had to say about the Los Angeles riots and their effect on Korean Americans. I quickly read the preface to find out what is the focus of the book. In his preface, Song claims that he wrote the book with two beliefs in mind. First, he emphasizes that it is important for academics to write critical essays instead of taking the elitist approach “too removed from what really matters to people” (vii). Second, he also emphasizes that his choice of writing about the 1992 Los Angeles riots was based on his belief that focusing on a specific historical event is “one of the best ways to ground discussion about issues of far-reaching significance” (viii). So his preface made it clear that he intended to discuss critical social issues by focusing on the Los Angeles riots. As such, Strange Future is Song’s social critique.

But the author provides more than his own social critique in the book. He also provides literary comments on novels and films covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It may be therefore more accurate to say that he critically discusses social issues, such as race, economic relations, and national identity, by analyzing novels and films covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In fact, as a professor of literature, he seems to have originally started the literary critique of recent novels by young Korean American authors. However, since all the novels and films by Korean Americans have touched on the Los Angeles riots, he seems to have decided to focus on the riots and their effects on the Korean community. Moreover, since the riots affected other groups as well as Korean immigrants, he also analyzed novels and films focusing on the riots created by non-Korean writers. The following sentence in his preface succinctly reflects the development of the main theme of his book: “As I researched the riots, trying to understand why [they were] so significant for my ethnic group, I began to understand that (1) I couldn’t focus just on my ethnic group and (2) the issues raised by everything I was reading addressed some far-reaching questions about the changing meaning of race, economic relations, national identity, and mass mobility within and across national borders” (viii).

This book consists of the introduction, five chapters, and the epilogue. In the first chapter, “Racial Geography in Southern California,” Song analyzes urban and suburban developments, demographic changes, and racial segregation in Southern California after World War II based on his review of novels and historical books. He indicates that these developments “explicitly sought to create new, integrated, and fully rationalized habitations of housing, work, and shopping for whites. . . . Nonwhite Angelenos found themselves occupying the negative spaces of the city to which planners and developers had not yet turned their attention in the 1960s and 1970s” (45–46). Citing Rodriguez’s Always Running, Song points out that developers even did not recognize the existence of the communities that had formed in “negative spaces.” Minority residents in old barrios and other unincorporated territories were “constrained by the need to respect the racial boundary between rationalized and negative spaces” (49). Song claims that this city-building project contributed to “a stark social reality that pits many racial and classed...