Date of Award
Summer 2024
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Cultural Studies, PhD
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Eve Oishi
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Darrell Moore
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Kevin Wolfe
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2024 Wilfred Joseph Doucet III
Keywords
Cultural Studies, Inner City Cultural Center, Nathaniel Taylor, PASLA, Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles, Vantile Whitfield
Subject Categories
African American Studies | Film and Media Studies
Abstract
This work examines the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PASLA), one of several cultural arts responses to the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Fundamentally, this work seeks to restore to memory and discourse the work of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles, its founder Motojicho Vantile Whitfield, and the PASLA Community Players. The Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles demonstrated a dynamic praxis in the South Central Los Angeles community, expressed through the organization’s motto, “social growth through the performing arts.” The Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles offered workshops in the literary, performance and technical aspects of drama and film, including an animation workshop and a children's workshop, and the company produced stage plays, televisual work, and independent films for public viewing. PASLA operated for twenty-seven years, if with financial difficulty, much longer than many of its contemporary community cultural arts organizations within Watts and the Watts Curfew Area. Vantile Whitfield and the PASLA Community Players were uniquely situated in Los Angeles with proximity and connections to the entertainment industry. Therefore, this work also examines the double consciousness or twoness the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles members confronted working in a Black Arts Movement aesthetic environment and modality while also working in the mainstream media and entertainment industry. The Black Arts Movement offered a corrective to the representations of African Americans in United States mainstream media, rooted as it is in the minstrel show legacy. Black Arts Movement artists theorized an alternative vision of the arts which turned to African cultures, African American folk culture, and other African Diasporic cultures for aesthetic models, a turn that PASLA embraced.
Internal colonialism theory frames this work, informed by a Fanonian understanding of colonial capitalist relations, including Frantz Fanon's understanding of the deployment of the cultural by the colonizer, the cultural responses of the colonized, and the artists’ role in the liberation movement. The work takes as a basic premise that the fundamental relationship between the U.S. state and civil society and African Americans remains exploitative and extractive, an extraction that is both economic and psychological. Using oral histories, archival research, and textual analysis, the work situates the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles within the social and political environment of mid-Twentieth Century Los Angeles specifically and the United States broadly. Inclusive of the years from 1950 to 1980, the United States underwent significant social and political change. Popular culture has reflected both the change and resistance to change since the mid-1960s. This work examines the cultural work of Black artists in the Los Angeles area during those thirty years, with concentration on PASLA’s activities during the ten year period from 1965 to 1975. As a comparison and a contrast, this work also offers an examination of PASLA’s Los Angeles companion organization the Inner City Cultural Center (ICCC), a community arts organization that pioneered multiculturalism and foregrounded its connections to the entertainment industry. This work will also include narrative interludes that share oral histories from the writer’s family members living in Los Angeles during the period, as well as autobiographical creative nonfiction passages to tell the story of a Black family in Los Angeles during the period as way of telling a story about Los Angeles undergoing change and the impact of arts education and access.
The Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles emerged at a historical moment of optimal social and political conditions for its creation, despite the financial difficulties routinely faced. This work concludes that the Performing Art Society of Los Angeles remains mostly absent from significant narratives of the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles because of its close interaction with the entertainment industry and willingness to accept funding from dominant institutions. However, the work of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles embodied the best principles of the Black Arts Movement. Nonetheless, members of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles, including board members, those in directorship positions, and Players worked in the contradictory environment of the dominant entertainment industry, including widely popular television series of the 1970s. The mainstream entertainment industry studios and stages continued as contested spaces over the meaning of Blackness in the public imagination. PASLA members were able to marshal their access to help transform the look of popular culture in the United States while contesting the legacy of minstrel show aesthetics, creating a significant body of work and extending a performance legacy that continues to inform literary and performance aesthetics locally in Los Angeles and among African American and African Diasporic communities.
ISBN
9798346863717
Recommended Citation
Doucet III, Wilfred Joseph. (2024). From the Inside Out: Excavating the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 909. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/909.
