Back to the UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC) - Archive of Past Events

Wealth Whiteout in the New Gilded Age.
Cecelia Tichi, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
November 30, 2006

At the approach of the new millennium, detective novelist, Walter Mosley, decried the degradation of social conditions in the United States in his nonfiction, “Workin’ on the Chain Gang,” in which he declared that “poor medical care, job insecurity, and lack of proper education” now “pervade every cultural group, creed, race, and religion.”  Mosley pointedly includes whites in this assessment.  Novelist Andre DuBus III provides the narrative exegesis of Mosley’s argument in his  novel, “House of Sand and Fog,”   The prize-winning novel (made into a feature film) ostensibly dramatizes the battle for possession of a California bungalow by a single white woman and an émigré Iranian colonel from the Shah’s air force.  Apparently a cross-cultural struggle played out in the United States, the novel is really a defamiliarized portrayal of the current crisis over home ownership, a crisis of status and identity.