Masters Thesis

Seeking the Next Saroyan: Cultural Representations of Armenian Americans of Los Angeles

Though the specific timeline of the multicultural history of Los Angeles might be debated, Los Angeles's role as a center for people of varying races and ethnicities is rarely called into question. Aside from contributing to traditional cultural products like food, music, and fashion, a variety of ethnic and racial groups—including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and Jewish Americans—have had an active role in the producing such popular cultural products as television and film in Los Angeles, sometimes to the delight, but sometimes to the dismay of people from their very communities. For more recent immigrant communities, like the Armenian Americans in Los Angeles, their anxiety regarding cultural representation may manifest itself through ethnic self-policing. Armenian Americans have lived in Los Angeles in significant numbers since the 1960s and have had a more obscured ethnic representation by way of literature, television, and film than other ethnic groups. Recently, however, with the rise in popularity of the television reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, one example of Armenian American life has become very visible. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which Keeping Up with the Kardashians has become the new cultural text that is produced, distributed, and consumed by an American public who view the Kardashians as representatives of Armenian Americans from Los Angeles and how such a representation has become a source of friction for Armenian Los Angelenos.

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