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This Element looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and respatialisation. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing.
This chapter contributes a means of teasing out the uneven spatial ordering of markets. Taking inspiration from Schatzki’s (1991, 2001) practice-based spatial ontology, we introduce a four-part scheme made up of ‘anchors’; ‘places’; ‘settings’; and ‘paths’. We ground the concepts in an empirical account of the Finnish Lapland’s emergence as the official ‘home’ of Santa Claus and the related historical constitution of a Christmas tourism market. With the future of market studies research in mind, we argue that this conceptual framework provides a way of thinking about market making as an inherently spatial process, while also supporting investigations of how markets and the concerns they help produce take shape unevenly over time and across physical space.
This Element considers the concept of performance diagrams and shows their historical, epistemic and aesthetic functions in theatre and dance. In three sections, the author surveys the architectural model of theatre by Vitruvius, the woodcut of Marlow's Doctor Faustus, Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne-Atlas, the spells and drawings of Antonin Artaud, the performance Paradise Now (the Living Theatre) and the choreography I am 1984 (Barbara Matijević). Demonstrating that diagrams can be applied to multiply dramaturgical trajectories, the text reviews their relevance for performance-making, analysis and documentation. The author argues that diagrams provide new tools for theory, practice and archiving, while at the same time enabling reflection on the intersections between poetics and politics. Focusing on the potentiality of diagrams to cut through representation and dichotomies, this Element affirms the visual, corporeal and spatial dimensions of performance-making. In doing so, it elucidates the significance of diagrammatic thinking for performance studies.
From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. This Element examines the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this Element offers a new model for studying the spatiality of popular fiction.
Edited by
Alejandra Laera, University of Buenos Aires,Mónica Szurmuk, Universidad Nacional de San Martín /National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina
This chapter analyzes the colonial period, taking 1536, the date of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, as a starting point. It aims to discuss texts linked to the conquest of the River Plate – namely, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios (1555), Ulrich Schmidl’s Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (1567), and Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Argentina (1612), among other letters, chronicles, and documents – using water, a key aspect of the spatiality constructed in these works, as a guiding axis for the analysis. This is not aesthetized water, waiting for a contemplative gaze, but water marked by overflow, excessive, water that stagnates, sickens, and stings, overcoming boundaries and impeding the actions of the body attempting to own those lands. In the colonial period, particularly in the texts discussed, a water matrix takes shape which will become the seed of fiction in Argentine literature. The presence of water not as a background or the setting for major events, but as a founding incident of narration, as the main driver of action; a presence which renders spatiality and the bodies traversing it (and enduring it) the keys to the narrative of the River Plate.
En este trabajo se presenta el estudio de los sitios con arte rupestre del faldeo oriental de la Sierra de Velasco y occidental de la Sierra de La Punta (norte de la provincia de La Rioja, Argentina). Los objetivos son definir la diversidad de representaciones a nivel local, evaluar la circulación de información a escala regional y examinar su rol en la conformación de paisajes sociales, durante los últimos 2.000 años. Para ello se realiza un análisis de los repertorios iconográficos y de los vínculos entre imágenes y contextos de emplazamiento. Los resultados sugieren que los sitios rupestres distribuidos en altitudes contrastantes implicaron diferentes prácticas sociales. Los emplazamientos pedemontanos, integrados a los espacios residenciales y productivos, se habrían conformado en torno a prácticas domésticas y simbólicas recurrentes, mientras que aquellos situados en las serranías de La Punta estarían vinculados con el uso de vías naturales de circulación. Esta segregación espacial involucra, a su vez, distintas temporalidades para la producción y el consumo de arte rupestre.
Whilst Richard Wagner has long been acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of orchestration, his treatment of the orchestra has only rarely received scholarly attention. This chapter uses a series of analytical vignettes to examine Wagner’s approach to the orchestra, each addressing a paradox or opposition. The aim is not to expound some grand, overarching narrative, but, instead, to use the friction between competing factors to demonstrate the inherent complexity of Wagner’s approach to the orchestra. The multidimensionality of Wagner’s orchestration is also seen in the highly nuanced interaction of its three main parameters: texture, timbre, and spatiality. The development of Wagner’s orchestration over his lifetime is not presented as a continuous progression; the individuality of each of Wagner’s scores – and even of scenes within those operas – reflects the inseparability of Wagner’s orchestration from its dramatic motivation.
In a review article for the West Australian in 1939, a literary critic known as ‘Norbar’ proclaimed that in the recent past, the ‘most outstanding of Australian novels ... have been novels of city life’. This was a welcome development, Norbar maintained, a sign that Australia had ‘ceased to be a mere colonial appendage to Europe ... and [was] rapidly becoming an expanding industrial nation of the south’. Much of this ‘outstanding’ literature was produced by women (Modjeska; Sheridan). In quick succession, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw published novels set in contemporary Sydney, capturing the city in a period of rapid development as it attempted to move from colonial chaos to modern rationality. In these novels, women’s position in urban space is unstably located at the nexus of participation and exclusion, reflecting the writers’ status as both insiders (as white settlers) and outsiders (as women) in the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal project of Australian urban modernity. This chapter shows how the architectonics of the novel and topography of the city interacted at a time in Australia when both forms were emerging into modernity.
This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.
This chapter on definitions, concepts, and the context of Krautrock exercises different modes of theorising the music. First, the chapter analyses the origins of the term and considers different semantic connotations. Second, the chapter traces the reception of its sounds during and after its heyday (1968 to 1974) and both inside and outside of Germany. Third, the chapter attempts to define musicological characteristics of Krautrock in relation to other musical forms. In the last section, the chapter illustrates how national and transnational identity as well as spatiality can serve as concepts that connect Krautrock’s history, identity formation, and overall politics.
As an anatomist of socially inculcated identities, DeLillo deploys a recurring motif of automobility, which helps to dramatize and often satirize some common white American male inclinations. Propelled by a sense of something missing in their routinely plotted lives, DeLillo’s protagonists often lurch into escape mode in an archetypal white American male way, by jumping in a car and hitting the road. However, their clichéd and encapsulating choice of vehicular transport itself signals how difficult it can be to escape an identity largely formed by negation, that is, by white masculinity’s self-defining exploitation of others. Given the conceptual emptiness that DeLillo finds at the heart of white American male identity, pursuits of a seemingly more genuine self usually result in such protagonists driving themselves right back to where they more or less began.
Taking as its point of departure the preeminent association between momentary experience and urban existence, this chapter expands on how the modern city’s relationship to temporariness is conceived by approaching it through particular forms of temporary urban space. It focuses in turn on several sites that emerged (and subsequently vanished) in the early twentieth century, each of which embodies a metropolis in microcosm: the White City exhibitions, the trench system on the Western Front, and the elaborate sets that were constructed for an expanding British film industry. In drawing a connection between literature’s interest in temporariness in this period and the pseudo-cities that parallel it – exhibitionary, military, and cinematographic – the chapter charts how responses to urban ephemera in the work of such writers as Isaac Rosenberg, Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, and Katherine Mansfield are inflected through these spaces, as well as how such responses evolve across the century’s opening decades.
This chapter argues that the spatialising habits of the short fiction of the period can best be understood in terms not only of a modernist preoccupation with the complex and ambiguous layering of urban milieu, but of its polar opposite: the threat (or promise) of movement, of inter-relation, which unsettles the remote traditional communities portrayed in local colour writing. James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and ‘The Stranger’, and ‘A Conjugal Episode’, a late story by one of the most successful New Woman novelists, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), will be taken to exemplify the first of these tendencies. The second can be shown to include stories about Englishness and empire, by Rudyard Kipling and D. H. Lawrence; stories about migration, by Joseph Conrad and George Moore; and stories about ghosts, by M. R. James and May Sinclair. In either case, short fiction tended to be at its best, and most characteristic, when least forgiving.
Providing an innovative spatial analysis of Copperbelt towns, this chapter explains the uneven nature of formal and informal development of mine townships, non-mine municipal areas and informal settlements. The chapter explains how mine companies and states sought to manage the separate development of these areas and how residents came to understand and represent their distinctive nature but also their inter-related social and economic character. It explores segregation between and integration of mine and non-mine areas and how the correlation between employment and housing reinforced social divisions within African society. Through a focus on the mining towns of Likasi (DRC) and Mufulira (Zambia), it explains how housing shortages and the high cost of urban life drove many residents to informal settlements and to pursue economic activities that were incompatible with the conventional view of the Copperbelt’s urban ‘modernity’.
Chapter 2 focuses on three texts concerned with the imperial space of Constantinople: the Description of a crane hunt, the Encomium of Emperor Manuel Komnenos and the Itinerary. The first work is a detailed ekphrasis of an imperial hunt in which the emperor himself takes part. The same imagery of hunting as an equivalent of war is prevalent in the encomium, praising Manuel’s victories against the Hungarians. The Itinerary, a narrative poem that describes the poet’s experiences during an embassy, is here interpreted as a means of praising the qualities of the capital left behind. It is argued that all three texts take on the function of imperial praise and, moreover, that the experience of the capital’s imperial space plays a particular role in the construction of that praise. The encomium becomes a praise of not only the emperor but also of the rhetorician and his skills.
This chapter maps the emerging conceptual terrain of posthumanism and its relevance for discourse studies, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics and applied linguistics work. Posthumanism is a label applied to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches across the humanities and social sciences that are calling into question dominant assumptions generated by Western Enlightenment thinking about the human by giving greater consideration to the role of material objects, animals and the environment in understanding the social world. Posthumanism thus considers the implications of the central role of materialism in our understandings of human agency, language, cognition and society. For discourse studies, a turn to posthumanism requires us to examine the role of discourse in how humans become entangled with the material world through their everyday embodied interactions with objects, artifacts, technologies, plants, animals, and the built and natural environment. Through embracing an activity-oriented perspective toward these human–nonhuman entanglements, the implications are that we must rethink modernist categorical boundaries between subject/object, human/nonhuman and society/nature, both within metadiscourses about these dichotomies and through a more microanalytic lens in the analysis of text and talk.
In “Digital Hemingway,” Laura Godfrey offers an in-depth overview of Hemingway’s growing presence on the Internet since 2000. At the start of the new millenium, website technology and in particular interactive maps were relatively primitive. Hemingway fans/followers such as Michael Palin – the former Monty Python comedian whose late-1990s BBC series Hemingway Adventure popularized Hemingway tourism – employed only basic interactive technologies, relying on more analog experiences. Soon, however, advances in programming allowed for modes of mapping and spatial assessment that broadened the way readers could visualize place in Hemingway. With the introduction of e-books c. 2004, the experience of the Hemingway “book” also transformed – so too with access to images of Hemingway online and of clips on YouTube, in particular his playfully weird acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1954. Godfrey also examines Hemingway’s place among the ever-proliferating memes that online users create and circulate. She also discusses the roles he plays in various forms of online gaming. All of these technologies have transformed the relationship between the reader and Hemingway’s writing.
Justice is endlessly negotiated in everyday life. What motivates the contributors of Everyday Justice is to account for the complexity of justice in the everyday. By using ethnographic studies from various locations and putting into play a range of approaches, the contributors of this volume argue for a view that takes everyday practices of justice as a starting point. The introduction then offers an overarching rationale for teasing out the framework of justice and injustice, justice and law, and relational justice as this has the potential to orient a theoretical account of (everyday) justice. The anthropology of justice in this volume sheds light on how people work every day to bring justice’s future promise – if we accept that justice holds such a promise – into the present.
Assumptions regarding space and spatiality exist in all major theoretical traditions in international relations, from realism to constructivism, but the mutual constitution of space and social interaction in the study of world politics requires further conceptual development in its own right. This article suggests a preliminary research agenda for the study of space and social relations in IR by lending insight from Georg Simmel’s classical sociology of space. Simmel’s approach offers scholars of contemporary world politics an innovative conceptualization of the relations between physical and symbolic space (‘the physical-symbolic axis’) and between space and time (‘the spatio-temporal axis’); and a set of practical analytical tools to apply in IR research by defining the foundational qualities of space (exclusivity, divisibility, containment, positioning, and mobility) and suggesting a typology of distinct sociospatial formations: organized space, governed space, fixed space, and empty space. The article discusses the potential of Simmel’s nuanced relational approach to contribute to the contemporary study of world politics, and demonstrates its utility in two particular areas of research: the study of unbundled sovereignty and mobility in late modernity; and the study of empty spaces in IR.
As urbanisation has come to characterise contemporary societies, large cities have become quite ambivalent places for the human species: they are removing the human body from its perceived natural condition, while increasingly attempting to provide a cure for the ills of a sedentary life. Fitness gyms are presented as the ‘natural' solution to our ‘unnatural' lifestyle as urban dwellers and as a therapeutic fix to the ills of metropolitan living. This paper deploys a mix of qualitative methods (ethnographic observation, interviews and discourse analysis) to explore fitness culture as an urban phenomenon. Using data from Italy and the UK, it develops a micro-sociology of the spatiality of the gym that helps to approach this institution from within, deconstructing those claims which contribute to its cultural location as a key ingredient in contemporary urban lifestyles. The paper first looks at how fitness culture is negotiated through the marshalling of structured variety within the spatiality and temporality of gyms. It then explores the specificity of fitness as urban, instrumental leisure as compared with other forms of active recreation or sports available in urban contexts. It finally considers, on the one hand, the way in which fitness activities are continuously renovated, drawing on the fields of both sport and popular culture and, on the other, the kind of subjectivity and embodiment that fitness culture normatively sustains.