Playing on the Edge

Halloween in Isla Vista, an un-sponsored annual street party, attracts an estimated average of 20,000 revelers into a minuscule, 1.5 square mile area each year.

Yet it has been consistently dismissed by UCSB administrators, the police, and local press as a dangerous frivolity, unworthy of critical inquiry. Until now, this complex cultural performance has remained buried under three decades' worth of rumor, assumption, and enforced silence.

This book breaks that silence, exploring the event's history through archival sources and oral histories, providing an in-depth reading of the event's present manifestation through various theoretical lenses, and pondering the future both of this cultural performance and of the culture of which it is a product and a reflection.