Alice Echols

Alice Echols is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75, and most recently, Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic. An important re-examination of collaborations between Blacks and whites in the freedom movement, Black Power, White Heat focuses on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party. Rather than romanticizing or belittling these activists, Echols emphasizes their achievements, while acknowledging how they came up short. She complicates the usual story by showing that, even after Black Power, activists partnered across the color line, albeit differently. In assessing how solidarity lost traction, Echols attends to one overlooked factor, the discourse of “radical chic” advanced by Tom Wolfe and deployed by conservatives against the movement. She is also the author of Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking about a devastating Depression-era banking scandal that stands as a cautionary tale about the seductions and dangers of unfettered capitalism. She lives in Los Angeles.