Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2084431
B. Fok
ABSTRACT After seventy years of concerted expansion, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of the sea, this artificial land aspires to cut to the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). From what vantage point can one capture that sovereign gesture, whose structure is that of recursion? To venture an answer, I first proceed by asking: what exactly is being ‘reclaimed’ here in reclamation? Why should the creation of ‘new’ land need to be enacted in the idiom of a ‘re’? Though reclamation purports to create land ‘from sea’, key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand – a material substance which Singapore imports in such vast quantities that some have called it a ‘de facto transfer of territory’. Despite this, however, I argue that reclamation cannot simply be dismissed as a misnomer or as cynical rhetoric. Reclamation’s ‘re’ discloses rather than obscures the temporal workings of sovereign state power. Drawing on the legal history and ethnographic present of reclamation in Singapore, I explore how this implied recursiveness clues us into an essential temporal structure that animates the territorial state, with repercussions for the way we formulate our political critiques.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2022.2099919
T. Christiaens
ABSTRACT Giorgio Agamben’s public interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic against emergency measures like lockdowns, obligatory vaccinations and the prescribed use of masks have been highly controversial. I argue that Agamben’s essays must be read as a modern prophecy of doom warning for the dangers of biomedical technocracy. Agamben marshals the sound of Old Testament prophets to shock his readers into critically rethinking their complacency with governmental norms. This warning is appropriate yet ill-phrased: Agamben presumes the dominant obstacle to genuine debate in the public sphere is a standardisation of discourse under the power of monopoly capital, whereas the opposite problem of too many divergent voices is more salient for today’s digitally networked public sphere. Furthermore, Agamben depicts a too strong contrast between scientifically informed technocratic government and democratic freedom, which leaves him blind for the democratic potential of the sciences themselves. I employ Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society and social movements to introduce more nuance into Agamben’s apocalyptic prophecy.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1993078
M. Brown, C. Lam
ABSTRACT This special issue explores the intersections between notions of play and space. The notion of play as a space provokes questions about boundaries, and differentiations between spaces of play and not-play. While the notion of the space of play as – in one way or another – delimited is a recurring theme in conceptualisations of play, the contributions to this special issue are united by their consideration of the ambiguities of these boundaries, attending to the ways in which such spaces overlap, extend, can be displaced, or are blurred. Together, the articles offer different takes on what ‘play’ is and the experience of playces in various cultural practices or texts, and in different global contexts. They all posit however that play is not only an important topic to study, but an important concept through which to make sense of how we engage with texts, places and others. In approaching various examples as spaces of play, the articles in this special issue explore such ‘playces’ as spaces of ambiguous possibility.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1968307
H. Wirman
ABSTRACT Previous research successfully addresses how digital play fits into the social relations of urban space, often disrupting or enriching them (e.g., Montola [2005]. ‘Exploring de Edge of the Magic Circle: Defining Pervasive Games’. Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture 2005 Conference. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen) and the seamless transitions between digital and physical spheres (e.g., de Souza e Silva [2006]. ‘From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces’. Space and Culture 9:3, 261–78). Considering the social, temporal and spatial context of a play activity, it typically exists parallel to other forms of play. Be it an insider or an outsider, it is further important for people to be able to recognise activities of play as they take place. This article applies Huizinga’s idea of play demarcation to build an analytical frame ‘coincident play’ to aid in understanding contexts of play, especially in urban space. A single park in Hong Kong serves as a case and provides around 20 parallel play activities to study. The proposed approach allows us to identify and analyse socially, temporally and spatially coexisting play and playful activities and to recognise the richness that ensues in specific physical spaces.
先前的研究成功地解决了数字游戏如何融入城市空间的社会关系，通常会破坏或丰富它们(例如，Montola[2005])。“探索魔法圈的边缘:定义普及游戏”。2005数码艺术与文化研讨会论文集。哥本哈根:哥本哈根IT大学)以及数字和物理领域之间的无缝过渡(例如，de Souza e Silva[2006])。“从网络到混合:移动技术作为混合空间的界面”。空间与文化，9:3,261-78)。考虑到游戏活动的社交、时间和空间背景，它通常与其他形式的游戏平行存在。无论是圈内人还是圈外人，更重要的是让人们能够在游戏活动发生时就意识到这一点。本文运用Huizinga的游戏划分理念来构建一个分析框架“巧合游戏”，以帮助理解游戏的背景，特别是在城市空间中。以香港的一个公园为例，提供了大约20个平行的游戏活动来研究。所提出的方法使我们能够识别和分析社会，时间和空间共存的游戏和游戏活动，并认识到特定物理空间中随之而来的丰富性。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1968306
I. Ntalla
ABSTRACT The paper critically examines connections of play in interactive and immersive spaces that comment on climate and environmental crisis. The analysis of a playful museum space with a focus on the responses of the audience members emphasises how this type of environment brings play and playfulness to the foreground while engaging with a topic that can be abstract, perplexing and formidable to comprehend and digest in its magnitude. The conception of play and manifestations of playfulness are analysed through the qualitative data from an on-site audience research conducted at the High Arctic installation at the National Maritime Museum, London. Interactive and immersive practices shift our attention to play with the somatic sense (Paterson, M. 2007. The senses of touch. Oxford & New York: Berg), movements and sensations. The multi-sensory and spatial elements blur the boundaries and challenge the perception of play and playfulness for adult audiences. How can these mediated spaces expand or reinforce our understanding of play? Play is a rich metaphor that uncovers a network of relationships that is often overlooked. The paper discusses how these spatial, embodied practices and modes of engagement extend and provoke our conceptions of play when considering the immediate, yet distant threat of climate change.
本文批判性地考察了互动和沉浸式空间中对气候和环境危机的评论。对一个有趣的博物馆空间的分析侧重于观众的反应，强调这种类型的环境如何将游戏和游戏性带到前景，同时参与一个抽象、复杂和难以理解和消化的主题。游戏的概念和游戏的表现形式是通过在伦敦国家海事博物馆的高北极装置进行的现场观众研究的定性数据来分析的。互动式和沉浸式练习将我们的注意力转移到身体感觉上(Paterson, M. 2007)。触觉。Oxford & New York: Berg)，动作和感觉。多感官和空间元素模糊了界限，挑战了成人观众对游戏和玩乐的感知。这些中介空间如何扩展或强化我们对游戏的理解?游戏是一个丰富的隐喻，它揭示了一个经常被忽视的关系网络。本文讨论了这些空间的、具体的实践和参与模式如何在考虑到气候变化的直接威胁时扩展和激发我们的游戏概念。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1955719
M. Brown, Jude Roberts
ABSTRACT In this article we situate Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls as a ‘pornographic playground' arguing that it is through ‘play' that the text is able to position itself as serious and not-serious simultaneously, something central to its navigation of the ethics of its pornographic mode. Contextualising our analysis by considering the relative absence of ‘sex' as an example of ‘play' in scholarly texts, as well as the debates around the porn-wars, we argue Lost Girls uses a playful mode as part of its subversive reiteration of pornography, and as an attempt to render pornography ‘feminine’. In doing this, it nevertheless creates a space of tacit exclusion, creating a sexual playground predicated upon class privilege. However, it is as a space of play that the text navigates the ethics of representation – something particularly important to its dealing with serious themes including sexual assault, incest and paedophilia – by insisting upon the simultaneous connection and separation between the actual and imaginary, the real-world and not-real-image/text/imagination. Speaking back to wider debates around pornography, the text positions the navigation of such ambiguity as central not only to the ethics of texts, but also to the creation of spaces of play.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1943698
M. Brown
ABSTRACT This article explores Han Chinese tourists' practice of self-photography in ‘ethnic' ‘costume' at tourist sites in China and Japan. Drawing on ethnography and interviews with young Han women, it aims to problematise the innocence of such play. Contextualising this analysis with the visualisation of identity within China, this article explores how the playful mode itself allows for Han individuals to position themselves as ‘sophisticated' in their consumption of traditional cultures, while tacitly separating them from the supposed ‘traditionality' of other groups. Drawing on Huizinga's ‘magic circle’ and Foucault's concept of ‘heterotopias’, it is argued that the imaginative space that is created is not at the tourist location, but rather within the confines of the images themselves. Analysing the ways in which tourists play out their ideas of ‘ethnic others', it explores the tropes within the photographs, and how these link to wider practices of ‘othering'. The article explores the ways in which ‘play' renders cultural difference ‘safe'-because-‘not serious’ – but also positions those in a privileged position to safely play with different cultures supposedly superior in their ability to do so.
{"title":"Heterophotographies: play, power, privilege and spaces of otherness in Chinese tourist photography","authors":"M. Brown","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1943698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1943698","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores Han Chinese tourists' practice of self-photography in ‘ethnic' ‘costume' at tourist sites in China and Japan. Drawing on ethnography and interviews with young Han women, it aims to problematise the innocence of such play. Contextualising this analysis with the visualisation of identity within China, this article explores how the playful mode itself allows for Han individuals to position themselves as ‘sophisticated' in their consumption of traditional cultures, while tacitly separating them from the supposed ‘traditionality' of other groups. Drawing on Huizinga's ‘magic circle’ and Foucault's concept of ‘heterotopias’, it is argued that the imaginative space that is created is not at the tourist location, but rather within the confines of the images themselves. Analysing the ways in which tourists play out their ideas of ‘ethnic others', it explores the tropes within the photographs, and how these link to wider practices of ‘othering'. The article explores the ways in which ‘play' renders cultural difference ‘safe'-because-‘not serious’ – but also positions those in a privileged position to safely play with different cultures supposedly superior in their ability to do so.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":"307 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74941074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1991823
Wikanda Promkhuntong
ABSTRACT This paper extends the notion of film tourism in the context of Thailand from the focus on destination marketing to affective connections between film locations and fans. Combining frameworks from fan studies particularly the notion of pilgrimage, and a conceptual way of linking play with space in game and architectural studies, the paper examines playful practices at film locations and associated spaces mediated by digital photography, video and online story-telling associated with the Thai genre films called nang rak, which emerged in the early 2000s–2010s. The examination of play practices highlights the imaginative, performative and mediated plays by film fans, which created play movements in space or ‘kinesis’ at the film locations making them become cultural playgrounds for identity negotiations and the sites for expressing desires for affective cities. The paper also invites further consideration on fan pilgrimage in relation to changes with political climate, tourism development and vernacular cultural sites.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1898429
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
ABSTRACT This article investigates three storytelling arts as spaces of narrative play: theatre, film and narrative-based gaming. It traces the lineage from Oedipus Rex and early tragic theatre to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, followed by The Walking Dead Telltale Games series, relating how each text presents protagonists who are marked as criminal from the opening of the narrative. Rope and The Walking Dead both work from the prophetic prototype developed in the Oedipus myth and use reflexive engagement with their own storytelling practices to ask open questions of stigma, sexuality, ethnicity and problems in the ongoing negotiation of play as both a coping strategy for social and legal marginalisation, and a safe space for interrogating our precognitive moral intuitions and biases. All play is fragile, and serious consequence always threatens the boundaries of Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ of play; this means that play statuses must be consistently negotiated and updated by those participating, a concept I refer to as ‘the invitation to play’. This article explores how storytellers navigate such distinctions in asking participants to reflexively consider the boundaries of consequence in the narrative arts and in their lives.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1942109
Zachary T. Androus, Magdalena E. Stawkowski, Robert A. Kopack
ABSTRACT The goal of this special issue is to offer critical explorations of territoriality both in historical and within contemporary special territorial designations, with a specific focus on space, place, and landscape rather than just individuals. The articles in the issue are linked by their novel application of the principal of extraterritoriality to special territorial designations of various types in a range of geographic contexts. This introduction explains how each article in the issue utilises extraterritoriality in a distinctly innovative way to help make sense of a particular circumstance that is insufficiently explained by other available theories. They are linked by their concern with space, governance and the invisible operation of exceptions to the normative order of governance.
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