STUDY QUESTIONS

CALIFORNIA:  AN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY (8th Ed.)

CHAPTER 32  -  CULTURE AND IDENTITY

1. What is the essence of California's artistic identity rooted in?
2. What did "the San Francisco Renaissance" of the 1940s promote?
3. What did the Beat Generation of the 1950s promote?
4. What thematic differences did Joan Didion and Gerald Haslam promote in their novels about California?
5. Who was the most important figure in the emergence of a Mexican American literature?
6. How do authors Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston thematically embrace the constant movement of people into California by focusing on a character's present with a past lived somewhere else?  Would you agree that their novels highlight the tension between acculturation and tradition?
7. What are the differences between abstract expressionism in San Francisco and the L.A. look of Southern California in the 1960s?
8. Explain pop art in the 1960s and funk art in the 1970s.
9. How did shopping centers take on a new look in California in the post-war decades?
10. What did the California ranch-style house have its roots in?
11. Which music group made the "California sound" popular?
12. What was acid rock and where was it pioneered?

Key Names, Terms, and Concepts