Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1904787
E. Hoover
This piece presents an exploration into how to write-do-think ineffable affective experiences that might cultivate more than human ethical relations in concrete environments. Learning from two urban commoning projects, I take guidance from Édouard Glissant’s aesthetic of the earth to recognize poetic practices that might seem anachronistic or naïve, awkward or intrusive, and in apparent contradiction to rational thought and critical politics. I adopt what Joan Retallack calls a “poethical attitude” to offer (reasoned) compositions with concrete as material and metaphor … mixed with a shimmer of alchemy.
{"title":"Poetic Commoning in European Cities – Or on the Alchemy of Concrete","authors":"E. Hoover","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1904787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1904787","url":null,"abstract":"This piece presents an exploration into how to write-do-think ineffable affective experiences that might cultivate more than human ethical relations in concrete environments. Learning from two urban commoning projects, I take guidance from Édouard Glissant’s aesthetic of the earth to recognize poetic practices that might seem anachronistic or naïve, awkward or intrusive, and in apparent contradiction to rational thought and critical politics. I adopt what Joan Retallack calls a “poethical attitude” to offer (reasoned) compositions with concrete as material and metaphor … mixed with a shimmer of alchemy.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"101 1","pages":"464 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74825160","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 : 2021-06-03DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903811
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
This photo essay traces the historical geography of Norco, Louisiana—heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical industrial complex. Norco, named for the first oil company sited there (the New Orleans Refinery Company), is the quintessential Louisiana petrochemical town, neither exceptional nor provincial, a place that for generations has been a nexus of struggles between racial capitalism’s extractive drive and the demands for collective life encapsulated in slave uprisings and environmental justice activism. Moreover, the fact that by the late 20th century, petrochemical pollution made the best path forward for residents of the historic Black freedom neighborhood Diamond was by fighting for relocation raises critical questions about the life and death work of just transition from oil capitalism.
{"title":"Life and Death in Louisiana’s Petrochemical Industrial Complex","authors":"Lydia Pelot-Hobbs","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903811","url":null,"abstract":"This photo essay traces the historical geography of Norco, Louisiana—heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical industrial complex. Norco, named for the first oil company sited there (the New Orleans Refinery Company), is the quintessential Louisiana petrochemical town, neither exceptional nor provincial, a place that for generations has been a nexus of struggles between racial capitalism’s extractive drive and the demands for collective life encapsulated in slave uprisings and environmental justice activism. Moreover, the fact that by the late 20th century, petrochemical pollution made the best path forward for residents of the historic Black freedom neighborhood Diamond was by fighting for relocation raises critical questions about the life and death work of just transition from oil capitalism.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"3 1","pages":"625 - 642"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77496158","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 : 2021-06-03DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903814
Gunter Gassner
This essay explores drawing as an ethico-political practice. Taking London as an example, I speculate about a critical and creative, radical and imaginative engagement with speculative urbanization processes at a time when the extreme right is on the rise and the populist far right has become increasingly mainstream. Reflecting on a nonrepresentational drawing approach that responds to distantiated expert eyes by breaking free from their knowledge and pre-defined moral standards of the capitalist city, I explore different lines: lines that commodify the cityscape; lines that cross commodifying categories; lines that creatively produce alternatives; and lines of violent creativity. In so doing, I scrutinize conservative links between a visuality of capital accumulation and fascist urban aesthetics.
{"title":"Drawing as an Ethico-political Practice","authors":"Gunter Gassner","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903814","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores drawing as an ethico-political practice. Taking London as an example, I speculate about a critical and creative, radical and imaginative engagement with speculative urbanization processes at a time when the extreme right is on the rise and the populist far right has become increasingly mainstream. Reflecting on a nonrepresentational drawing approach that responds to distantiated expert eyes by breaking free from their knowledge and pre-defined moral standards of the capitalist city, I explore different lines: lines that commodify the cityscape; lines that cross commodifying categories; lines that creatively produce alternatives; and lines of violent creativity. In so doing, I scrutinize conservative links between a visuality of capital accumulation and fascist urban aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"2 1","pages":"441 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89464066","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 : 2021-06-02DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903813
Chhandita Das, P. Tripathi
This article intends to critique the poetics of “literary cartography” and politics behind it through close analysis of Neelum Saran Gour’s representation of the city of Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) in Invisible Ink (2015) and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018). Mapping of spatio-religious experiences in Gour’s fiction connotes that literary cartography is an emerging alternative field that can generate topographical knowledge visualizing intangible spatial ethos. Therefore, place becomes an important interdisciplinary construct to examine sociocultural and religious spaces through literary imagination. The preamble of the Indian constitution emphasizes secular ethics, which is currently debated as in a state of crisis. Rereading Gour’s narratives within and beyond the adaption of a topographic and figurative framework of literary cartography infers that such “mapping” of spatiocultural experiences can help in establishing and sensitizing a secular ethos across genres and geographies.
{"title":"Poetics and Politics of Literary Cartography: Secular Allahabad in Neelum Saran Gour’s Invisible Ink and Requiem in Raga Janki","authors":"Chhandita Das, P. Tripathi","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903813","url":null,"abstract":"This article intends to critique the poetics of “literary cartography” and politics behind it through close analysis of Neelum Saran Gour’s representation of the city of Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) in Invisible Ink (2015) and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018). Mapping of spatio-religious experiences in Gour’s fiction connotes that literary cartography is an emerging alternative field that can generate topographical knowledge visualizing intangible spatial ethos. Therefore, place becomes an important interdisciplinary construct to examine sociocultural and religious spaces through literary imagination. The preamble of the Indian constitution emphasizes secular ethics, which is currently debated as in a state of crisis. Rereading Gour’s narratives within and beyond the adaption of a topographic and figurative framework of literary cartography infers that such “mapping” of spatiocultural experiences can help in establishing and sensitizing a secular ethos across genres and geographies.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"93 1","pages":"1 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80148930","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 : 2021-06-02DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903812
M. Rhodes
Each year the National Eisteddfod alternates between north and south Wales in a festival that consistently redefines itself and what it means to be and perform Welshness. As a publicly funded and organized national institution, the National Eisteddfod’s performances, competitions, and pavilions reflect aspects of Welsh memory and heritage through traditional poetry, dance, and music. Likewise, this space is central to the continuing evolution of Welsh memory and Welsh music. The work of memory, language, and music during the annual ten-day festival in 2018 experienced numerous structural changes from customary eisteddfodau. Through musicals, folk music, carnivals, and other performances, music and memory in Cardiff Bay intersected with transatlantic identities, protest, and the deindustrialized urban setting. Using interviews and a transoptic landscape analysis, this paper explores the musical, performative, and national landscapes of the 2017 and 2018 National Eisteddfodau to better understand these emerging postcolonial, post-industrial, performative, and pluralized memories in Wales.
{"title":"The Nation, the Festival, and Institutionalized Memory: Transoptic Landscapes of the Welsh National Eisteddfod","authors":"M. Rhodes","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903812","url":null,"abstract":"Each year the National Eisteddfod alternates between north and south Wales in a festival that consistently redefines itself and what it means to be and perform Welshness. As a publicly funded and organized national institution, the National Eisteddfod’s performances, competitions, and pavilions reflect aspects of Welsh memory and heritage through traditional poetry, dance, and music. Likewise, this space is central to the continuing evolution of Welsh memory and Welsh music. The work of memory, language, and music during the annual ten-day festival in 2018 experienced numerous structural changes from customary eisteddfodau. Through musicals, folk music, carnivals, and other performances, music and memory in Cardiff Bay intersected with transatlantic identities, protest, and the deindustrialized urban setting. Using interviews and a transoptic landscape analysis, this paper explores the musical, performative, and national landscapes of the 2017 and 2018 National Eisteddfodau to better understand these emerging postcolonial, post-industrial, performative, and pluralized memories in Wales.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"3 1","pages":"558 - 583"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80275545","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 : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1922091
Lindsay Bremner
This GeoHumanities forum arose out of three symposia convened by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages over a three-year period: Monsoon [+ other] Airs, held in April 2017, Monsoon [+ other] Waters in April 2018, and Monsoon [+ other] Grounds in March 2019. The ambitions of the symposia were to develop new intersectional understandings of monsoonal esthetics, agencies, epistemologies and ontologies, and to engender monsoonal ways of thinking. The papers in this Forum are an outcome of these gatherings, whose full proceedings are available on the Monsoon Assemblages website: http://monass.org/outputs/.
{"title":"Introduction: Thinking with the Monsoon","authors":"Lindsay Bremner","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1922091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1922091","url":null,"abstract":"This GeoHumanities forum arose out of three symposia convened by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages over a three-year period: Monsoon [+ other] Airs, held in April 2017, Monsoon [+ other] Waters in April 2018, and Monsoon [+ other] Grounds in March 2019. The ambitions of the symposia were to develop new intersectional understandings of monsoonal esthetics, agencies, epistemologies and ontologies, and to engender monsoonal ways of thinking. The papers in this Forum are an outcome of these gatherings, whose full proceedings are available on the Monsoon Assemblages website: http://monass.org/outputs/.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"19 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87089147","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 : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1907207
D. Tedesco
In this exploratory piece, I read the material and metaphorical world of fashion for insight into the contemporary political condition. Drawing on my participation in a week-long professional training program in fashion and dress curation—hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum (February 2018) —I examine curatorial practices as a methodological resource for engaging the limited and unstable spatiotemporal and subjective investments of modern politics. I suggest that fashion curation can reimagine and rematerialize political geographies and political subjectivities in the uncertain contexts of global urbanization, decolonization, and other contemporary challenges to political modernity. The narrative approach and visual documentation aim to immerse the reader in an experiential encounter with a curatorial methodology for feeling how the political world might be fashioned otherwise. This contribution works to mobilize and affectively engage readers in material metaphors for the complexities of contemporary spatiality and subjectivity.
{"title":"Curating Political Subjects: Fashion Curation as Affective Methodology","authors":"D. Tedesco","doi":"10.1080/2373566X.2021.1907207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.1907207","url":null,"abstract":"In this exploratory piece, I read the material and metaphorical world of fashion for insight into the contemporary political condition. Drawing on my participation in a week-long professional training program in fashion and dress curation—hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum (February 2018) —I examine curatorial practices as a methodological resource for engaging the limited and unstable spatiotemporal and subjective investments of modern politics. I suggest that fashion curation can reimagine and rematerialize political geographies and political subjectivities in the uncertain contexts of global urbanization, decolonization, and other contemporary challenges to political modernity. The narrative approach and visual documentation aim to immerse the reader in an experiential encounter with a curatorial methodology for feeling how the political world might be fashioned otherwise. This contribution works to mobilize and affectively engage readers in material metaphors for the complexities of contemporary spatiality and subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":53217,"journal":{"name":"Geohumanities","volume":"6 1","pages":"328 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74871412","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 : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1904785
Eric Guibert
In opposition to the general understanding of animism as an irrational religious set of beliefs, the—secular—modern animism embodied in this practice of built and grown architecture is operative. It conceives of places—ecosystems—as beings with agency that we garden with to nurture and express their resilience. It is a useful ontology for ecological practice; this architectural animism is ontopolitical; it co-creates a common world. At a recent symposium, a number of projects were presented as architectural soils and to give a voice to these earthly beings, the method was to write a letter from them to me. This first letter with the response in this article forms the beginning of an animistic correspondence. The medium places the reader in a pluriverse, in between the multiple voices of various “actants.” The text is isomorphic to the embodied dialogue of this earthy practice. It is useful both to nurture societal awareness—empathy and care—towards these fragmentary ecosystemic beings, and as research method to conceive them, and our relationship.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1923405
Bethan Bide
As the commodity chains supporting the fashion industry have become ever more global and complex, so the work of constructing and maintaining the reputations of fashion cities such as London has also needed to evolve. Museums have played a key role in this process through their dissemination of discursive narratives about the places, spaces, and people that constitute London’s symbolic fashion capital. Taking the Victoria and Albert Museum as a primary case study, this paper explores how changes to the networks and processes of the fashion city in the decades following the Second World War were connected to the growth of fashion within the museum. Looking at two key exhibitions: Britain Can Make It (1946) and Fashion: An Anthology (1971), it traces how the museum responded to processes of deindustrialization and cultural change by bringing the city’s commercial fashion cultures into the museum space, resulting in the museum becoming an important site for the fashion city. Finally, it asks whether the legacy of this process has resulted in increasingly narrow and homogenous fashion exhibitions that have the potential to harm London’s fashionable reputation by excluding many of the diverse networks and places that make the city’s fashion culture unique.
随着支持时尚产业的商品链变得越来越全球化和复杂，建立和维护伦敦等时尚城市声誉的工作也需要发展。博物馆在这一过程中发挥了关键作用，通过它们传播关于构成伦敦象征性时尚之都的地点、空间和人物的话语叙事。本文以维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆为主要案例研究，探讨了二战后几十年时尚之城的网络和过程的变化如何与博物馆内时尚的发展联系在一起。通过两个重要的展览:Britain Can Make It(1946)和Fashion: An Anthology(1971)，追溯了博物馆如何通过将城市的商业时尚文化带入博物馆空间来应对去工业化和文化变革的过程，从而使博物馆成为时尚城市的重要场所。最后，它提出了这样一个问题:这一过程的遗留问题是否导致了越来越狭隘和同质化的时装展览，这些展览可能会损害伦敦的时尚声誉，因为它们排除了许多使伦敦时尚文化独一无二的多样化网络和场所。
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Pub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1926306
J. Cane
This article is concerned with an object called the “dolos,” a concrete coastal structure developed by the South African state at the height of apartheid, in 1963. A twisted H-shape with attenuating limbs, it is formally rather beautiful, exhibiting a kind of brutal elegance, and it has been successfully used in hydraulic engineering projects around the globe. It is, nevertheless, a relatively unremarkable invention. Even in its category of “coastal armor,” it was invented 14 years after the first, French-patented Tetrapod. And yet, during apartheid and after, it captured the popular imagination of many white citizens who proudly connected with the narrative of innovation, self-sufficiency and apartheid modernity. The history of the dolos reveals a modernizing state that worked vigorously through its parastatals and research institutions to explore the material, structural and esthetic possibilities of concrete to articulate a convincing and legitimate national identity. This article joins with scholars in the critical oceanic humanities who are arguing for more-than-human, Anthropocene-directed research in the Global South, framed by Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg’s call to adopt a more-than-wet ontology addressing the (i) materiality, (ii) motion, and (iii) temporality of the ocean and, indeed, of ocean infrastructure.
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