Graffiti and Street Art, Reviewed by Julia Tulke

graffiti, Uncategorized, urbanity, , , , , , , , , ,

 

Avramidis, Konstantinos, and Myrto Tsilimpounidi, eds.Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 281 pp. ISBN: 9781472473332.

Key words: Street Art, Graffiti, Space, Urban Studies

Gesturing towards the critical potentialities of an emergent field still largely “in search of academic legitimacy” (Ross et al. 2017), the essay collection Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City, edited by architect Kostantinos Avramidis and sociologist Myrto Tsilimpounidi marks a timely intervention into the field of street art and graffiti scholarship. Comprised of fifteen contributions with disciplinary attachments to not just architecture and sociology, but also anthropology, urban geography, and criminology, the volume posits itself as “a testament to the multiple ways by which graffiti and street art have changed our ways of seeing, knowing and representing urban environments” (1). Crucially, the authors of the volume treat their objects of study—graffiti and street art—not as a static ontological field but rather as dynamic epistemological devices that allow them to examine the “poetic relationship between graffiti, social conditions, and public space” (3). In a similar manner, instead of imposing a set of framing definitions onto the reader, the editors allow multiple conceptual approaches to street art and graffiti to circulate throughout the volume alongside one another. It is precisely this strategic openness that makes Graffiti and Street Art such a productive and compelling resource.

In their introduction, the editors map out with exceptional clarity what they consider a “critical turn in street art and graffiti scholarship,” tracing the development of the field through four distinct historical phases. The first wave of scholarship—preceded only by Jean Baudrillard’s exceptional 1976 essay “Kool Killer, or the Insurrection of Signs”—is inaugurated in the early 1980s by communication scholar Craig Castleman’s “Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York.” Castleman and other authors publishing during this first phase focused on describing the cultural phenomenon of graffiti as an “expression of dissatisfied youth” (19) as it had emerged in US-American cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the second wave of graffiti scholarship, stretching from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, authors turned towards more nuanced questions of “what graffiti does,  especially in relation to urban space” (19), while also steadily expanding the geographic scope of the field. Coinciding with the formation of street art as a genre, the third wave of scholarship brought forth a new commitment to context-considerate readings of both street art and graffiti. Authors also started to focus on the spatial politics of interventions into the visual landscape of the city in the context of the increasing militarization and commodification of public space. Graffiti and Street Art sees itself as part of a burgeoning fourth wave of graffiti and street art scholarship, aimed at destabilizing established ways of thinking, writing, and producing knowledge about how street art and graffiti function and circulate within complex and mobile material assemblages: “Prioritizing the visual, experiential and material along with the spatial and political, this volume aims to critically unpack the idiosyncrasies of our urban environments” (11).

The volume assumes a three-fold structure organized around different modes of engaging urban space through street art and graffiti. The first section, titledReading Graffiti, Street Art and the City, compiles contributions that “map, and critically reflect upon, the reactions that graffiti and street art invite” (13). Among them are several compelling chapters are written by established scholars in the field. Sociologist Jeff Ferrell, for instance, offers an account of the dialectical tensions that emerge from the contingent presence of street art and graffiti in the urban landscape, while criminologist Alison Young writes on the ambiguity surrounding legal conceptions of images in public space. Of particular interest is the contribution by urban geographer Kurt Iveson who prompts readers to rethink their assumptions about the relationship between authority and democracy vis-à-vis graffiti and street art. Self-authorized interventions into public space may be politically transgressive, but not always automatically transformative in a meaningful sense. He writes: “it is one thing to transgress the order of the city—it is another thing again to transform that order” (92). The most engaging entry in this section, however, comes from London-based architectural historian Sabina Andron, still a Ph.D. candidate at the time of writing her contribution. Her piece “Interviewing Walls: Towards a Method of Hybrid Surface Inscriptions” is distinctly inventive in that it introduces not only the new conceptual approach of hybrid surface inscriptions but also offers a corresponding methodology of photographic annotation. The term hybrid surface inscriptions is grounded in an approach that considers the totality of signs in public space—street art and graffiti, but also advertisement, as well as commercial and public signage—as “clusters of communication” (71) that form “complex urban palimpsests” (86). The potentials of reading the city through its hybrid surface inscriptions become particularly clear in the annotated photographs that accompany the piece, all of which were taken by the author in London (Figure 1). A kind of map of the city walls, these images illustrate how “[e]ach sign proves that a particular place is alive and inhabited, transforming surfaces into vigorous social spaces in contemporary cities” (81).

Writing Graffiti, Street Art and the City, the book’s second section, approaches graffiti and street art through its “aesthetics and styles, spatial tactics, language used, urban settings, materiality and locality” (15). It opens with Rafael Schacter’s exceptional essay “Street Art is a Period, PERIOD. Or, Classificatory Confusion and Intermural Art.” The anthropologist here posits that street art constitutes a distinct aesthetic period and scopic regime that was “operative, and crucially, innovational, between the years 1998 and 2008” (105). In the present moment, the practice of street art, at least in Europe and North America, has been distorted to become synonymous with large-scale murals (or neo-muralism) whose production relies on the technical apparatus of the street art festival. The placement of such works in urban landscapes is in turn fundamentally co-opted by the demands of the creative city, employed strategically to embed false notions of authenticity into space and catalyze the gentrification of neighbourhoods. Departing from this rehearsal of an argument already well established in the field, Schacter proposes the term Intermural Artto conceptualize contemporary practices that push against the boundaries of street art and graffiti, “occupying the vital space between the street and the studio, between the independent and the institutional; a practice occupying the spaces in between in disruptive, innovative, boundary-shifting ways” (111). What follows Schacter’s piece is a fascinating set of methodological and epistemological interventions, two of which stand out in particular. Architect Panos Leventis, writing on inscriptions along the UN buffer zone in the divided Cypriot city of Nicosia, pilots a narrative approach in which the urban landscape is not merely an object of analysis but also the site of embodied first-person encounters. Oscillating between description, analysis, photographs, and prose-like sections, his writing creates a polyphonic rhythm truly committed to capturing the contingent ambiance of everyday life in the city. Sociologist Mona Abaza, writing about the context of Cairene graffiti of the Egyptian revolution, probes important questions of ethics and accountability in street art and graffiti research. Having witnessed a heightened academic as well as journalistic interest in Cairene graffiti during and after the revolution of 2011, Abaza describes a hegemonically structured regime of knowledge production marked by the primacy of the Western gaze, the emergence of repetitive narratives, and researchers on the ground being relegated to the position of mere “service providers.”

The volume’s final section Representing Graffiti, Street Art and the City, examines “how, why, and with what impact graffiti, street art and the city are represented in media” (16). Spanning a broad range of approaches and contexts, the section includes two empirical case studies—one set in São Paulo, one in Ottawa—as well as a chapter devoted to a literary study, focusing on Arturo Pérez-Revertes El francotirador paciente [The Patient Sniper], a novel devoted to the fictional graffiti writer SNIPER emerging out of the streets of Madrid. Alongside them is a most notable piece by Lachlan MacDowall. Titled “#Instafame: Aesthetics, Audiences, Data” it traces the aesthetic and political implications of graffiti and street art’s current shift towards digitally mediated circuits of circulation and encounter. As artists have come to seek and achieve fame—graffiti lingo for (peer) recognition—increasingly through social network interfaces, MacDowall urges researchers of contemporary graffiti and street art to recalibrate their notion of “the street” accordingly, treating it as both a “backdrop for the production of digital content and a site of globally connected political action” (232). Moving from the conceptual towards the empirical, he goes on to analyze a specific dataset consisting of the 100 most followed graffiti and street art accounts on the popular photo-sharing platform Instagram, assembled and coded manually by the author. Analyzing the distribution of formal attachments, gender, and other aspects, MacDowall demonstrates how the configuration of contemporary street art and graffiti cultures is reflected and shaped by the platform. This account of what is ostensibly the future direction of both the study and practice of graffiti and street art would have made for a meaningful closing chapter for the volume. Instead, the editors reserve the last pages of the book for a contribution that turns towards a historical point of origin: “one of the most enduring and least understood aspects of graffiti writing, namely the tag” (265). Sociologist Gregory J. Snyder makes a persuasive argument to recuperate the tag from its marginalized position within graffiti and street art scholarship, and to foster an appreciation for its innovative and aesthetic capacities. “Long live the Tag” (272), the last sentence of the book, stands as a testament to the editors’ deep commitment to a lateral engagement with graffiti and street art, as well as a careful decentering of teleological narratives, hegemonic discourses, and regimes of knowledge production—contours of the critical futures of the field.

Reviewed by Julia Tulke, University of Rochester, NY

References

Ross, Jeffrey Ian, Peter Bengtsen, John F. Lennon, Susan Phillips, and Jacqueline Z. Wilson. “In search of academic legitimacy: The current state of scholarship on graffiti and street art.” The Social Science Journal 54 (2017): 411-19.

Down-Market Walkability

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Down-Market Walkability

by, Jim Morrow

The idea of a walkable city is quite popular. As the argument goes, life is better if people go for a walk. Medical scholars say that walking improves mental and physical health. Social research shows that people who regularly walk are less likely to be lonely than those who are home- or carbound. Environmental analyses make it clear that any reduction in car travel will make urban spaces safer and more sustainable. Plus economic reports suggest that businesses in walkable neighbourhoods do well in terms of sales and tax revenue.

In Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck calls walking an ends and means. As he explains, ‘walkability contributes to urban vitality and [is] most meaningful as an indicator or urban vitality’. Simply put, a city that entices people to get out and walk is ‘more liveable and more successful’.

Speck and others who promote walkability have carefully crafted an image of a city that is intelligent and creative. It is a place where locals stop-by their favourite cafe for an iced latte or make a quick trip to the farmer’s market. But this is an image that neglects the fact that, for many people, walking is a cheerless, sometimes grim part of everyday life.

A lot of people who come from working-class and low-income neighbourhoods have no choice but to walk. Usually, they have to hit the pavement for economic reasons, such as a lack of funds to own or maintain a car. And others travel by foot as a way to cover the last mile between public transit and where they need to go, whether that be work, school, or the grocery store.

An example of unplanned, down-market walkability is Rochester, New York, where 26% of households do not have access to a vehicle. For those who are promoting walkability that number is an almost ideal goal for a sustainable neighbourhood. Yet, in Rochester, it means that a quarter number of its residents are forced to walk to get to transit and beyond.

The carless neighbourhoods in Rochester do not fit the idealized image of what is supposed to be walkable. For example, they are much more likely to have restaurants that serve fast food than the latest farm-fresh trend. Nor are they likely to have full-service grocery stores or shops that sell anything more than the barest of necessities.

Another example of down-market walkability is located in the industrial estates and business parks of Edmonton, Alberta. In these overlooked spaces, there are dirt paths that cut from bus shelters along highways, through brownfields and across drainage ditches. Some urbanists call these ‘desire lines’, and they form an unplanned trail system that winds between transit stops, job sites and convenience stores.

Desire lines never appear on planners’ reports and developers’ renderings. And their existence is proof that walkability is an afterthought in spaces that are conventionally working-class. Likewise, this is a problem because it shows that those who promote walkability either neglect to study down-market spaces or are too focused on areas where residents have the luxury of choosing to walk.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of walkability. It is a noble objective that can change urban living. But, in practice, it has to take into account working-class people and low-income neighbourhoods. After all, they are the people who are most likely to walk to work and it may well be their neighbourhoods that are undergoing revitalization.

In order for walkability to fully contribute to urban vitality, planners have to recognize that walking is not a lifestyle choice. More specifically, there are immediate gains and successes to be had in working-class neighbourhoods, where up to a quarter of residents already walk. Otherwise, if planners only focus on up-market spaces, their successes in improving health, togetherness, sustainability, and economic growth will only benefit a small, self-selected segment of a city’s population.

 

Poisoning places

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Hamish de Bretton-Gordon draws attention to the effects of chemical weapons on places.  He writes in The Guardian about the March 2018 nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter that affected many others:

What if the Salisbury attack had taken place in a mega city like Sydney? Let’s say for a start the Central Business District is cordoned and unusable for six months. Millions terrified to go into the city and a 35% reduction in business takings, with millions of tourists avoiding visiting.

The World Heritage site Stonehenge is a few miles from Salisbury, visited by millions each year, but most have been avoiding Salisbury. For Stonehenge, read the Opera House. Sydney very nearly saw a chemical attack last year when UK and Australian security services interdicted jihadists trying to use hydrogen sulphide as a weapon on crowds and jet aircraft.

Geographers and epidemiologists have considered “junctural zones” of contact with contagious diseases during the spread of epidemics.  However, the urban aspects of chemical weapons have not been well analyzed and their persistence (Novichok for example is highly persistent in the environment) has not been taken into account for the way that chemical weapons victimize and poison places as well as communities and individuals.  Introducing such toxins into a local environment weaponizes place against selected species.  Place or material objects are not just vectors but need to be understood as part of the lethal apparatus.

Rob Shields (University of Alberta)

The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines. Book Review by Rishika Mukhopadhyay

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The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines
Edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch
Part of the series Place, Memory, Affect
Rowman and Littlefield: 2017

The book, ‘Question of Space’ is a refreshing inquiry into the spatial turn that goes beyond disciplinary boundary. The editors have introduced the book through a prelude rather than a conventional introduction and ended it with a postlude. The use of a prelude and postlude is to establish the playful and fluid nature of ten innovative book chapters written by authors coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. Started off as an accidental book project, the book disrupts the hierarchies of knowledge, and disciplinary enshrinement regarding the subject nature of space. The book unravels the ‘different ways of ‘knowing’ space’ (P: X) and teases out, how spatial thinking, which is often implicit in our practice, process, and writing, is already embedded in our understanding of worlding. Influenced by French thinkers, they envisage ‘space as a practice (‘spacing’)rather than a noun (‘space’)’ (P: XI). Here, space is conceptualized as relational and subjective (following Massey, 2005, 1993). It is also expressed through difference (following Derrida, 2004: 337)and as folds (following Deleuze and Guattari in Doel, 1996: 436).

The prelude acts as a short introductory text for any beginners, new to spatial thought. Here the evolution of spatial thinking in Human Geography as well as in Anthropology, Sociology, Dance and Performance Studies are concisely elucidated. Readers can see the trajectory of spatial thought from Walter Christaller’ Central Place theory in 1933 where space was measured in positivist terms, through law and distance from centre, to its recent manifestation in literary geographies. The milestones of this journey are demonstrated by David Harvey’s Marxist understanding of inequality and justice in city-space, to Humanistic school of thought’s spatial understanding based on the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology. It also addresses Foucault’s theorization of everyday spaces of power and Lefebvre’s representational spaces. Thrift’s non-representational spaces focusing affective and performative spaces are also eloquently explained in relation to space and geography.

However, the inclusion of creative geographies, where space is innovatively reinvigorated, and feminist geographies, which challenges the hierarchies of spaces through the tropes of violence, safety, and access would have added another rich and essential layer to the analysis. Although the authors give a cursory glance at Haraway’s (1988)work, this is missing from the introduction.

The editors have given particular attention to Tim Ingold and Edward Casey’s scholarly work in anthropology, Sociologist John Urry’s work regarding the nuanced nature of Place and Space debate, and Ian Sinclair’s work involving memory, mapping, and language. New entanglement of humanities and space is also touched upon through the new journal of Geohumanities and Literary Geographies. In these discussions, the editors give reference how individual research chapters in the book have been influenced, referred, challenged, and in some cases reinvented these theoretical strands.

The first chapter by David Crouch takes an unusual combination of allotment garden and painting, to challenge the elitist nature of landscape studies. In a community allotment garden, space is intimately performed and experienced through multiple practices, affectivities, meanings, and values. In this chapter, artist Peter Lanyon’s work shows how human and non-human affective atmosphere commingles through memory and space making. He borrows from the theoretical canon of Deleuze and Guattari and Massey to explain this fairly complex occurrence of space, which is relational, multiple, abstract, political, embodied, and many more.

The second chapter by Awelani Moyo shows a unique blend of theoretically rich and ethnographically sound analysis of landscape both in and as performance. Through a study of Cape Town’s Infecting the City(ITC) festival in 2009, and through a homeless coloured woman’s transgressive figure, she has dealt with difficult questions of identity, belonging, citizenship, and mapping the cityscape. She merges Lefebvre’s concept of lived and conceived spaces with Tim Ingold’s work on landscape and dwelling to establish geography as an epistemic category which makes the public space inclusionary/ exclusionary.

George Revil’s chapter on sonic spatiality touches a rarely explored area of theorizing spatiality of voice/sound in social and cultural theory. He draws in materials from scholars working in interdisciplinary sound studies to argue for a mediated, embodied, and experiential understanding of space. He mentions how phenomenological approach by anthropologist and media theorist Carpenter and McLuhan in recognizing materiality of acoustic spaces can be influential. The work of Deleuze, Serres, Nancy, and Lefebvre in spatializing properties of sound and rhythm, Bor and LaBelle’s formulation on sonic mediation made the field of ‘vocalic space’ dynamic and imaginative.

Zivkovic’s chapter on the work of feminist and literary scholar bell hooks, as an affective spatial thinker, powerfully addresses the prelude’s lack of attention towards gender and space. She rightly points out that, for the majority of books on space, gender comes as an ‘afterthought or add-on’ (P: 63). Hook’s scathing critique of white feminist theorization, infused with her censure for imperialist capitalism, draws intimate and personal evocations around space. Her writing, much like taking a memory walk in her hometown of rural southern United States, unpacks the politics of location, aesthetics, belonging, and home in a nuanced way. The essay draws attention to Virginia Woolf and Sarah Ahmed, in relation to hook’s writing, which exemplifies a passionate and subjective politics. These works challenge boundaries, ask questions about spatial ownership, and retheorize ‘look’ and ‘wonder’ as methodological praxis.

Ghraowi’s chapter deftly deals with the subject of trauma, memory, and space through a literary reading of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani’s novella ‘Returning to Haifa’. He brings together Freudian psychoanalysis, Bachelard’s poetics of space, Lefebvre’s lived space and rhythmanalysis to express the hypocrisy in humanitarian aid, use of testimony to justify psychiatric victim analysis, eradication of Palestinian subjecthood, and the blurring of past and present in the war-ridden city. The protagonist’s narrative experience, which binds these threads together, at times seems too ambitious but does shed light on these difficult conceptual terrains.

Watanabe’s chapter challenging the western epistemological idea of space and place makes the book truly attentive to the decolonization of knowledge. It is stimulating to see a completely inverted theorization of place by Japanese philosopher Nishida, as ‘nothingness, boundless and therefore universal and encompassing all spaces’ (P: 97). In the dominant academic norm where Western continental thinkers produce theory, and Eastern thought is noted as insignificant ‘experience’, ‘anomaly’ or ‘aberration’, Nisida’s ontology of becoming, barring its allegiance towards Japanese aggression on other Asian countries during the Second World War, requires serious attention from western scholars.

The chapter by Nieuwenhuis takes up the concept of territory in the discipline of International Relations. He questions how we have rationalized black lines on white paper as territories. The chapter grapples with the material basis of territory in relation to the formulation of State, its judiciary, and governance. He asserts, how our ‘cartographic gaze’ has established a connection between line, territory, and State saying ‘without lines there is no territory and without territory there can be no state’ (P: 119). But what happens when we think about territory beyond its horizontal spread but more in terms of its verticality? Can we envisage a relationship which is more ‘abstract, conceptual and ideal’ (P: 119)?

Belibou’s chapter on the materiality of internet cartography and emergence of a twinned reality or ’hyperreal’ nature of virtual, is a very timely piece during the moment of Geography’s digital turn. He tries to map internet through Google maps, as well as the through ‘darknet’, with its most popular browser The Onion Router. The chapter in its succinct way of writing highlights the reconfiguration of the conceptual domain of space and place in creating ‘neogeography’ with theoretical insights from Casey and Malpas.

Conway ventures to illustrate a quite familiar topic in geography, the relationality of space through the motif of films. His illustrious yet illusive writing style with short sections of philosophical underpinning gives spatial thought a textual reflexion.

The last chapter of the book breaks all conventional writing style where Earth exercises her Geo Agency and speaks directly to the geographers through a letter. Author Martin Gren takes the reader through geographies different historical traditions to remind the discipline to be more responsible in the era of Anthropocene.

Overall, the book effectively ushers towards an ontology of space, where space is a discipline in its own right. The way it brings together spatial thought in social sciences and humanities, it calls for a post-disciplinary perspective. It is a compelling read, gives voice to diverse writing styles, thematic genres, and analytical lenses that bring space fully into our epistemology.

Book Review by: Rishika Mukhopadhyay, University of Exeter.

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. 2004. “Semiology and Grammatology”.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 332–39. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Doel, Marcus A. 1996. “A Hundred Thousand Lines of Flight: A Machinic Introduction to the Nomad Thought and Scrumpled Geography of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space14 (4): 421–39. https://doi.org/10.1068/d140421.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping the Futures : Local Cultures, Global Changes, edited by John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner. New York: Routledge.

———. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE Publications.

 

 

Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration. Book review by Gerhard Schönhofer

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Lozanovska, Mirjana (ed.) (2016): Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration. London/New York: Routledge.

With a background of more than thirty years in teaching architectural theory and design, Mirjana Lozanovska – Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Built Environment at Deakin University, Australia – offers a collection of contributions from a wide field of disciplines such as geography, anthropology, environmental studies, history, sociology and of course architecture towards a deeper understanding of what Lozanoska labels as ethno-architecture. In the introductory chapter, she defines ethno-architecture as recognizing “ethnicity as a signifying marker in the context of globalizing processes of aesthetic taste, design and construction” (Lozanovska 2016: 4).

Instead of on conceptions of migration and integration that strongly rely on nation-state paradigms and assimilation into pre-existing sociocultural contexts, this edited volume aims to offer different perspectives on place-making, global networks, remittances spatial orders and materiality with a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, always drawing from the relation between migration and architecture. Considering architecture as an identity-category and not merely as material or aesthetic manifestation of housing practices is another aim stated by Lozanovska. Central questions of this volume focus on issues such as defining architecture when looked at through the lens of migration, or examining the kind of field one encounters when thinking architecture and migration together.

The volume is divided into three main sections, each featuring four chapters by different contributors. Notwithstanding the variety of methods and disciplinary diversity, the overall narrative and order of the contributions do offer a clear line of argumentation and epistemology. Starting from ethnographic fieldwork, photo-analysis, discourse analysis to qualitative and quantitative methods such as (semi-)structured interviews, this multi-disciplinary collection offers an equally varied selection of methodological approaches. Yet the assignment of the chapters to each section does not appear fully comprehensible, especially concerning section 1 and 3 – “Ethno-landscapes of migration” and “Temporalities of migrant constructions”.The reason for this may be found in the fluid boundaries between both sections and their guiding motives.

As stated in the introduction of her volume, Mirjana Lozanovska aims to take a poststructuralist approach towards ethno-architecture and identity construction. By rejecting a methodological nationalism, and by looking at migration as a global phenomenon, the typical host-guest paradigm with assimilation of the guest into the host-society as the overall aim of integration shall be overcome. As the different contributions focus on a wide range of varying regional and geographical contexts, migration flows towards cities and peripheral areas as well as cultural practices in connection with ethno-architecture, it may appear equivocal for the reader to end up at Lozanoska’s conclusions: Ethno-architecture should be understood as a “compelling evidence that these structures are neither temporary nor transient, nor that their migrant inhabitants, adaptors and makers lack belonging” (Lozanovska 2016: 217).

As Ayona Datta shows in her contribution “’Where is the global city?’ – Visual narratives of London among East European migrants” (chapter 1), the visual representations of the migratory experience in London produced by the subjects of her research mainly show disillusionment of migration, that is “produced from particular physical landscapes of the earlier ‘desired’ city […]” (Datta 2016: 17). Also chapter 3, “Indian-American landscapes in Queens, New York – Ethnic tension and place making” by John W. Frazier reaches contradictory conclusions on e.g. how “place remaking by ethnic groups incites protests from existing residents” (Frazier 2016: 43). Also the abandonment of existing plans for building so-called Indonesian villages in different parts of the Netherlands for the Indischcommunity of mixed Dutch and Indonesian origin due to a lack of financial investments, which Marcel Velinga has dealt with in chapter 8 “A comfortable home – Architecture, migration and old age in the Netherlands”, does offer a different perspective on place-making, belonging, architecture and migration – a perspective different to the one Lozanovska conveys in her conclusion. The multiple settings of each case study – e.g. urban and rural settings, which can differ significantly, as several contributions have shown – are also contributing to a somewhat very extended set of conclusions one could be confronted with.

All in all, this anthology offers a comprehensive overview of a wide range of topics connected to place-making, migration, urban landscapes, ethnicity and housing, as well as temporality and space. The selection of contributions definitely meets the variety of aspects that could be dealt with in the context of the overall topic of ethno-architecture and migration. The entire book is written in a well understandable and accessible language which guarantees that also non-native English speakers can make use of the contents for their work. Scholars from a wide range of fields – not only from architecture or migration studies – may gain profitable insights for topics such as globalization, remittances, the public sphere, security & surveillance, everyday life, materiality & the home, cuisine and multiculturalism in general.

Gerhard Schönhofer, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

The Semiotics of Che Guevara: Affective Gateways. Book Review by Jeongwon Gim

Material culture studies, materiality, reviews, semiotics, virtual, visual

Cambre, Maria-Carolina (2015). The Semiotics of Che Guevara: affective gateways. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

In The Semiotics of Che Guevara: Affective Gateways (2015), Maria-Carolina Cambre focuses on the semiotic significance of images of Che Guevara and its impact on their viral distribution around the globe. Cambre investigates the multiple renderings of the Che Guevara image—appropriations of Alberto Korda’s famous photograph titled Guerrillero Heroico. She considers this image an affective gateway mediating people with different political ideologies in various contexts. In this way, Cambre does not presume the global reach of the image as the inevitable result of a human-led economic and cultural globalization process. Rather, Cambre bridges the gap between a micro perspective on materialities of the “affect” in visual image and a macroscopic view of their impact as a visual phenomenon. Doing so, the author provides us with a more holistic, concrete understanding of the obscured materiality of the abstract, intangible transmission of visual images.

(Cambre, 2015)

The book comprises eight chapters, ranging from a brief introduction to the historical and socio-political salience and branding discourse of the Korda image, to much more complex layers and stages of its actualization of virtual qualities and the discussion of related issues, such as its queer tendency. Chapter two begins with Cambre’s investigation of current controversies surrounding the use of the Guerrillero Heroico image. In this chapter, she delineates its dislocation as a brand, a commercial product, an art-work, and a cultural artifact within and outside of the Cuban context. Building upon theoretical frames from phenomenologists such as Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas and Roland Barthes, in chapter three, Cambre discusses people’s encounters with the image, which often tend to be connected with the idea of “hope.” This idea of hope as an animating motif contributes to the virtual recreation and resurrection of the Guerrillero Heroico. Following Hannah Arendt’s (1959) theory of action, the author introduces ethnographic case studies in chapter four to illustrate actioning and the performative aspects of the image; it has an effect on society by allowing multiple interpretations and being politically used by individuals with different ideologies. In relation to the image’s performativity and openness, in chapter five, the author further situates her discussion in semiotics to explain what she is doing differently. She overcomes the limitations of the reductionism of traditional semiotics, which understands the complexity and simultaneity of visual and social realities through signs operating on a plane that is simplified, rigid, and concrete. Throughout chapter five and seven, Cambre explores Donald Preziosi’s (2003) elaboration of Roman Jakobson’s addition of a fourth sign type: artifice. She connects artifice with the anthropological concept of art and agency suggested by Alfred Gell (1998) to illuminate the role of the image’s virtuality as a drive for social and political changes in the world. By doing so, the author maintains a multi-dimensional perspective on the semiotics of images. Particularly in chapter seven, Cambre emphasizes that Guerrillero Heroico itself is an agency that has generative power—the power of affect—to pull its alternative forms into different places to serve different political ideologies and authorize our “actions” in the future. In the final chapter, the author opens a discussion of the queer tendencies of the image as other possible forms of appropriations and mutation.

In the simplest terms, Cambre’s research begins with the question of “how and why does the image of the Guerrillero Heroico go viral to different places?” The author then connects this question of the reception, adaptation, and circulation of the image with the discussion of “face” in chapter seven. She maintains that Korda’s image of Che Guevara’s face bears witness to certain experiences, such as anti-imperialist and revolutionary activities. However, Cambre does not discuss the significance of “face” or explain how the material properties of “face” specifically help incubate immaterial forces—internal movements, energy, and virtual qualities emergent and realized in our encounters with “face”—to actualize as particular forms of experiences and “actions.” More specifically, Cambre does not indicate her understanding of the concept of “face” in visual images. For example, “face” can be read figuratively and metaphorically as a frontal/critical “aspect” and “appearance” or is understood in “literal” terms—literally the face of humans or objects (Adams, 2000). Although it seems appropriate to say that the author takes the definition of “face” in literal terms in her analysis of the Guerrillero Heroico, it is still important to clearly identify the concept of “face,” to illuminate its materiality and the abstract mechanism that exceeds the totality of certain features and experience.

According to the concept of “face” suggested by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the facial image of Che Guevara can be understood as a landscape, map, or topology, which is abstracted as dominating qualities and norms at a distance and produced as an overcoding of subjects. At the same time, it is deterritorilized at a close-up scale by affording different affective energies such as a fear and hope of subjects (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Thus, the ‘face’ of Che Guevara itself is decontextualized from the body and interior forces and functions as an autonomous entity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This understanding may lead us to more concrete questions about the material properties of face, such as: 1) How does Korda image of Che Guevara impose onto us to assume its face? 2) What are these dominant material qualities of ‘face’ of Che Guevara? 3) More specifically, how does this ‘face’ selectively assemble its fragmented and varying movements and illustrations of different elements such as eyes, eyebrows, mouth, and cheeks and still link them with the elements and experience of the original and other appropriations of Korda image?

Although Cambre discusses artworks or images of the human figure and their global transmission, she seems opposed to an anthropocentric belief in the sociology, geography, or anthropology of art, that institutional gestures and human creativity are what suddenly transform an ordinary image into “art” imbued with cultural and political resonances. As such, in scholarly discussion of the global circulation of visual images, existing literature on globalization has focused on analyzing the role of images as carriers of certain socio-political and cultural needs in the context of evolutionary globalization. As a result, this perspective based on evolutionary functionalism has produced a simplified interpretation of the global distribution of images as an inevitable, unidirectional movement. To overcome the limited interpretations of the phenomenon, the author pays more attention to the properties and potentials of images that assemble people to distribute and connect mobile images to future actions (Miller, 2010).

Cambre also explores the potential of democratic performance in representation and reproduction of Guerrillero Heroico through a multi-dimensional semiotics. This alternative approach to semiotics allows her to consider representation as something that not only stands for other things, but also produces, acts, and is. Building upon this perspective, the author considers ambiguous and disobedient properties of the image as significant elements that reproduce different alternatives of the image and bring possibilities for democratic change. Here her affirmation of the democratic potential of the image is not simply to suggest that images can abruptly and literally make “democratic changes” in the world; rather, it addresses the latent “virtual” power of the image that forms our collective imagining for the future change. The constant reproduction and collective consumption of the image, at a grass-roots level, allows people to collectively engage with certain imaginations of the future and reshape the way we understand politics—which may in turn bring bottom-up changes to the world.

I recommend this book for the following reasons. First, the book promotes a transdisciplinary perspective that interacts with art, sociology, material culture studies, and anthropology. Methodologically, it incorporates phenomenology, semiotics, and arts-based research. The book will also inspire a broad range of students and scholars whose research is concerned with transferable lessons of applications and methods. Second, the book achieves a balance between subjectivity— such as the author’s personal engagement with the research subject—and objectivity drawn from theoretical discussions. The book provides a critical examination of the author’s own subjectivity, recognizing what frames our seeing to better understand the complexity of our reception of visual images. Third, along with the author’s own enthusiasm for the research subject, the case studies and empirical examples from various cultural contexts provided in the book make it easier for the reader to understand the semiotics of images. I recommend this book to students and scholars interested in topics ranging from the semiotics of visual images to reproduction and distribution of images and objects, politics of visual branding, art as revolution, and the ideological and political transmission of arts.

 Jeongwon Gim (University of Alberta)

 

References

Adams, T. (2000). White Walls, Black Holes: The Molecular Face of Contemporary Architecture. Interstices 5: 26-35.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum.

Miller, D. (2010). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity.

 

The time-space economics of renting location assets

economics, gentrification, health, land rent, New York, Topologies, urban

“The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs.”

According to Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Adrien Bilal, an economics professor at Princeton University and PhD student, rather than buying accommodation, possibly to sell at a profit in a few years,  tenants can be thought of as investing in a location asset.  And like any asset, you need to ask “what are you getting out of it?”  According to Lifehacker,

Many people rent in places with a high cost of living for the job opportunities, good schools, cultural offerings, etc. (On a personal note… living in New York not only puts me at the epicenter of the media world, but in close proximity to any number of classes and workshops hosted by experts in every profession imaginable.)

“Buying more of the asset involves moving to better locations that cost more today but give better returns tomorrow, while selling the asset implies moving to cheaper locations with little opportunities,” the authors write.

CityLab breaks down the paper’s argument:

[W]hen you choose to move to a pricier and amenity-laden city, you’re transferring resources into the future—i.e., saving!—by establishing yourself near opportunities for higher pay and human capital, Rossi-Hansberg and Bilal argue. On the flipside, when you relocate to a community with a lower cost of living but fewer economic advantages, you’re pulling resources into the present that you might have gained in the future—i.e., borrowing.

I am an unusual case: I rent an apartment and I own a house so I see both sides of this equation.  Our critique of this comfortable view from the American Ivy League, parroted not too critically by a planning website, is that that not everyone can afford to “save” in this sense.  Also being forced to rent rather than buy is reflection of reduced choice and means in general.  It is more likely, in most North American cities, that renting places one amongst other disadvantaged people.  They may be artists on the cusp of a great break, or you might be a founding member of an activist group of the economically excluded, but they are unlikely to be successful entrepreneurs who are looking for workers. (Anecdotally, it is harder to create social bonds amongst residents in large rental apartment buildings, and easier to interact with neighbours on the street, possibly because children and pets add to the density of the web of social interactions and act as social lubricants between households).

Statistically it is much  more likely that tenants have less quality living environments, particularly in relation to childrens’ amenities, are more stressed by conflicts with landlords and unpredictable rent increases, and do not have a major asset that they can borrow against or lever as a means of responding to unexpected expenses and emergencies, opportunity costs such as tuition or even entrepreneurial initiatives.

The strategic question remains unanswered: how to make the situation work for rather than against you.  And, how would this argument fair in the case of suburban locations with long commutes, rural dwellers or urban squatters?  Turning this into an economic geography argument distracts us from other non-market decision factors such as quality of life, the ethnic makeup of the community or aesthetic factors that affect ones’ everyday sense of wellbeing.

This is a practical example of a debate that is both temporal and spatial.  It involves not only the geography of where one lives but of land speculation and rent trends into the future.  We call this elastic 4D field of rental rates, time, location and land price a topology because it combines space and time in more than 3D (non-Euclidean geometry) fluid space where these trends may move against each other to affect an outcome .

Rob Shields (University of Alberta)

 

 

Extended deadline Sept 30: Periphery and Center: Mapping Minor/Small and World Literatures

calls for papers

Call for Abstracts: Extended to September 30 2018.

Special Issue of Space and Culture.

HE Yanli (Sichuan University), Robert T. Tally, Jr. (Texas State University)

The relationship of literature, place and space is a hot topic in the recent decades, as evidenced by the rise of such practices as literary cartography literary geography geocriticism, and spatial literary studies more generally Among those studies, the main debates could be generalized as five perspectives: 1) literary space theories, especially on world, international and national literary Spaces; 2) literary historical maps, atlas, graphs and trees; 3) writers’ mapping texts about real & imaginative Spaces and places; 4) literary maps of writer’s birth, death, and production; 5) theoretical history of spatial turn and the relationship of literature, cartography, geography, geocriticism, ecocriticism.

These debates offer new insights about internationalism, globalization of world literature, and comparative literature studies. For example, Pascale Casanova has discussed the literary space of world literature and national literature, specifically concentrated on shifts in European literary space in the twentieth Century. Franco Moretti has focused on atlas of ninetieth Century European novels and maps of European literary history. Rob Shields draws on Wallerstein’s theory differentiating between center and periphery, the North and South, through spatial and literary history perspectives. Valdes and Kadir’s books includes enormous number of maps devised as tools for locating languages, population density, urban centers and so forth, which give new ways to map comparative literary history. Among their three volumes, Herve Thery’s appendix “The Main Locations of Latin American Literature”, uses five maps to substantiate the concept of “cultural center”. Some maps show the birthplaces of writers who died in the relevant “cultural centers”. Castro focused on the colonial literary space, and the space of Latin American literatures. Robert Tally has built a platform to understand Spaces of American literature, literary cartographies & geographies, spatial/spatiality literary studies, ecocriticism, geocriticism of real and fictional Spaces, geocritical explorations, and space/place/mapping in literary and cultural studies. These are just a few of the critics whose works have spoken to matters of space in relation to world literature in recent years.

Based on these academic achievements, this special issue is aiming at combining spatial studies and literature studies, in order to create the capacity to: a) understand the shifts between literary centers and peripheries from 1827 to 1975, with the flows of minor, small and world literatures; b) clarify the relationship between the conflicts of literary Spaces, spatiality and its related concepts of literatures. Questions to consider include the following:

  1. What kind of literary spaces (center, periphery) nurtured or forced the new terms and concepts of literatures, specifically of Goethe’s “World Literature” (Weltliteratur, 1827), Kafka’s “Small Literature” (kleine Literaturen, 1911) , Michel Ragon’s “Secondary Zone Literature” (Seconde Zone Littérature, 1974), Deleuze & Guattari’s “Minor Literature” (littérature mineure, 1975), and Casanova’s “Small Literature” (petite littérature, 1999)?
  2. Does world literature space = center, minor/small literature’s space =
    periphery, semi-center/periphery = national literature, emigrating literature? То
    what extent did literary Spaces changed with the shifts of Literary Capitals from
    1827 to 1975 (e.g. London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Moscow)?
  3. How to map literary Spaces of peripheries & centers, margins & cores, national & international, dominated & dominating, East & West, North & South through the changing items, histories, anthologies, canons and studies of world & minor/small literatures?
  4. How have political spaces and related geographical places shaped literature productions, distributions, translations, institutions from 1827 to 1975, especially in line with colonialism, World War I & II, Cold War, and Berlin Wall?
  5. How to map a writer’s literary space, with birth & death place? With
    narratives’ place? With nationalities and life traces? With Publishing houses?
  6. How to map national literary space, with writers’ birthplaces, nationalities, or geographic narratives?
  7. How to map Spaces of minor, small literatures, with changing items and concepts in world space? With writer’s marginal identities? With marginal political power and its related cultural capitals? With national geographical territories? With international and national literary awards (e.g. Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize)?

If we could draw a round map of “Literary Spaces from 1827 to 1975: Center-Semi—Periphery”, and a flat map of a “Literary Atlas from 1827 to 1975: Mapping Minor/Small and World Literatures”, which language (Germany French, English, Chinese), what color (blue, pink, red), and what marks (flag, boat, canvas, gun) would we use ?

All submissions will be peer reviewed by Space and Culture (For more information, see Journal tab).

For more information about this special issue, contact: yanlihe@scu.edu.cn and yanheli1111@163.com

Abstract Submissions to: yanlihe@scu.edu.cn and copy to yanheli1111@163.com and to spaceandculture.ku@gmail.com

Full Papers will be submitted via https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sac

Call for Proposals: The Politics of Visibility in Public Space

calls for papers, public space, visual

Deadline for Abstracts: September 16, 2018
Special issue for Space and Culture

Ceren Sezer / Delft University of Technology, Urbanism, the Netherlands
Freek Janssens / University of Leeds, School of Geography, United Kingdom

The visibility of individuals or groups in public space is a conceptual tool useful to assess the ‘public’ character of space, allowing to examine the local socio-spatial conditions for recognition, civic participation, safety and surveillance. Visibility is understood as the condition of seeing and being seen of individuals or groups, who are identifiable as diverse through their cultural, sexual, and/or other type of manifestation.

In this special issue, we investigate the politics of visibility in public space in terms of the relations between various socio-spatial practices that construct, claim, improve, suppress, or control visibility.  The main questions that we ask are:

1. What conceptual frameworks are useful to examine the relationship between visibility and public space?
2. What are the ethical, methodological and other challenges of studying visibility as an explanatory framework of urban inquiry?

We aim to bring together an interdisciplinary collection of high-quality papers based on original empirical research on this topic. Interested contributors are invited to submit a 500-word abstract to visibility2018@gmail.com. The abstract should include:
– Title and key words;
– Author(s)’ name, current affiliation and e-mail address;
– Research questions, methodology, findings of the research;
– Maximum five key references;
– Short bio and a list of recent publications by the author(s); and
– If applicable, two related images at a good resolution (min. 200dpi).

The deadline for abstract submission is September 16, 2018. After preliminary review by the guest editors, the selected authors will be invited to submit a full paper by September 30, 2018 . The deadline for submitting full papers is February 3, 2019 . The selected papers will proceed for blind peer review process with Space and Culture.  See Journal tab for more information.

For more information contact:  visibility2018@gmail.com

 

How little you know about me, Seoul Korea. Exhibition Review by Jeongwon Gim

aesthetics, Exhibition, Uncategorized,

From the beginning of this year until now, South Korea has received significant global attention with their current events such as Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and renewed dialogue with North Korea. Acknowledging this urge to blur territorial and cultural boundaries, there seems to be an increased tendency in Korea to promote social and cultural activities that help citizens re-think the concept of “boundary.”

Within this changing context, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul is currently holding exhibition <How Little You Know About Me> as the first project of MMCA’s 2018-19 exhibition series about the keyword ‘Asia’. The exhibition explores the new ways of understanding and re-imagining ‘Asia’ through which enable us to develop new perspectives of perceiving the world.

– Dates: Apr. 7th, 2018- Jul. 8th, 2018
– Venue: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul
– Artists: 15 Artists/ Teams, around 20pieces
– Curated by: Joowon Park

Yogesh Barve, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)

Yogesh Barve, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
MAP office, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
MAP office, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
MAP office, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
MAP office, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
MAP office, 2018 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)

Jeongwon Gim (University of Alberta)

Informal Markets, Livelihood and Politics. Book Review by Karthik Harinath

Strategy, street politics, , , , , , , ,

Book Review of Informal Markets, Livelihood and Politics. Routledge, 2017

By: Karthik Harinath (HDR)

Even as ‘informality’ has become a valuable point of study when it comes to the developing world, so much so that any study of the Global South is “inconceivable” without using the concept (Goodwood, 2016), street vendors haven’t exactly found favour as a point of analysis. Although the last couple of decades have triggered scholarly interest in street vending in India, very few studies have taken the form of a monograph. Even as Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria’s Slow Boil (2016) provides an ethnographic account of street vendors in India, it was limited in its scope because Shapiro chose to base it on the city of Mumbai alone. It is this lacuna in the sociological understanding of street vending in India that Debdulal Saha’s Informal Markets, Livelihood, and Politics: Street Vendors in Urban India aims to fill. As a scholar of development economics and labour studies, Saha’s extensive work covering 10 cities across India’s varied linguistic and cultural diversity offers a wealth of quantitative data collected from the ground, along with a reasonable amount of qualitative data, to provide unique insights into the lives of the most visible form of informality in India today.

In informal Markets…, Saha explores the lives of street vendors in urban India to study their “strategies of survival and sustenance” (Saha, 2017, p. 1). Several aspects of these strategies are explored, including the structure and characteristics of informal markets in India, the politics and survival strategies surrounding public space, the precarity and vulnerability of street vendors, the negotiations and collective bargaining that vendors undertake both successfully and in vain, and the challenges of legislating this domain of informality in contemporary India. Two heuristics that are prevalent throughout the book are the instrument of bribery – its modus operandi, uses, and flexibility – and vendors’ access to credit. Even as their use seems repetitive at some points in the text, Saha manages to add minute details at each instance in order to provide more insight to the tussle between the vendors’ informality and the state’s indifference to their struggles.

Saha’s stance on the debate between formality and informality, which he addresses in the introduction and the first chapter, sets the tone for the book. For Saha, it is the lack of employment opportunities in the formal sector that pushes people into undertaking informal jobs (Saha, 2017, p. 55). He points out on several occasions that the profession of vending needs little capital, education, and skill. Even as he cites copious data to suggest that the size of the informal sector in India outstrips that of the formal (almost to a ratio of 9:1), Saha argues that informality is a failure of formalization. It is no wonder then, that he is in favour of regulations from the state to reign in informality. However, Saha is also appreciative of the possibility that policies and regulations could be disconnected from ground realities. Taking the case of bribery, for instance, he documents how extensive the network of bribery is in several cities across in India. It cuts through several layers of bureaucracy and is a fact that is taken-for-granted by both the vendors and the officials they interact with on a daily basis. Looking into the Street Vendors Act (2014) and its provisions, Saha remains unconvinced that it could, even as it aims to provide licences to vendors at some cost, fully root out bribery. However, he provides no solution to fill this gap between the intent of the state to formalize and the potential issues in its enforcement.

Methodologically, Saha’s focus has been on collecting extensive data on various variables across 10 different cities in India. Data varies from basic parameters such as gender, religion, social group, marital status, age distribution etc. to more contextual ones such as the types of products sold, credit providers, storage conditions of unsold products, customers’ perspectives on vending. Around 2,000 vendors have been surveyed across 10 cities, making this body of data the first of its kind. While quantitatively robust, Saha’s analysis of this vast body of data falls short of expectations. For instance, when talking about the setup and composition of the Dadar market in Mumbai, Saha mentions how the market begins at 4 am daily as a wholesale market, mostly patronized by both brick-and-mortar retailers and vendors. He moves on to note how roughly four hours later, the impromptu wholesale market converts itself into a retailer’s market, welcoming regular officegoers and other individuals. Unfortunately, this routinized shift in practices of a working group is left under-analysed, with the continuities and discontinuities left unexplored.

Nevertheless, what Informal Markets…misses out on the sociological analysis of its extensive data, it makes up for in terms of its analysis of what Saha identifies as an inextricable and politically crucial aspect of street vending in urban India: the notion of public space. Saha’s discussion on public space, its links to both the everyday aspect of vending, and the more surreptitious links to bribery, and survival strategies of vendors with several actors are the strongest parts of the book. In a chapter dedicated to public space, its politics, and the survival strategies that vendors are forced to adopt, Saha develops the idea that the public space occupied by the vendor – be it legally or illegally – is her “capital” (p. 104). Siding with the long line of Marxist thought that associates social relations to public space, Saha argues that a vendor exercises two kinds of bargaining with the space she occupies – economic and social. Economic bargaining is defined as the capacity to negotiate over rates of interest on borrowing with credit providers and the rates of bribery on offer to civic authorities. Social bargaining, on the other hand, is also seen to be crucial, as it is the basis on which the vendor builds social relations with different actors such as customers, other vendors, and moneylenders. The sole consideration available to the vendor is the public space she occupies. Noting how the state denies the vendors any legal rights over the space they occupy, Saha also points out to the blatant corruption in practice, by citing an example of a market in Mumbai where civic officials have been charging unofficial rent from vendors, thereby indirectly legitimizing the vendors’ occupation of that space. At this juncture, he raises the crucial question of whether the state would do well to legalise vendors’ usurpation of public space in order to control their rapid growth and earn a legitimate income. Fieldwork across 10 cities, however, underpins Saha’s scepticism towards a solution, at the root of which is an extensive analysis of bribery as a socially networked phenomenon. Saha expands upon the types of bribes, the relationship between the products sold by the vendor and the nature of the bribe, the role of intermediaries (individuals, typically gang members used by state officials to collect bribes), and the demand-driven process of bribe payment. This leads him to conclude that the entire network of bribery acts under the radar of senior-level bureaucrats. The conclusion not only demonstrates that the ones working on policy measures are unaware of the way their own subordinates treat vendors, it also challenges Lipsky’s concept of “street-level bureaucrat” (Lipsky, 1980).

In summary, Debdulal Saha’s Informal Markets… stands tall as one of the foremost sources for data relating to street vendors in India. With 2,000 vendors interviewed, Saha manages to compile a source that is bound to be useful for researchers for several years to come. However, the book’s limitations include its lack of depth in analyzing certain well-identified phenomenon. Additionally, with the book being published just a few years after the promulgation of a landmark legislation relating to street vending, some of Saha’s access points to vendors have been negated. Nevertheless, Informal Markets, Livelihood and Politics: Street Vending in Urban India is an invaluably important contribution to research on street vendors in urban India.

Bibliography

Anjaria, J. S. (2016). The Slow Boil: Street Food, Rights and Public Space in Mumbai.Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Goodwood, T. (2016). Urban Informality and the State: A Relationship of Perpetual Negotiation. In J. Grugel, & D. Hammett, The Palgrave Handbook of International Development(pp. 207-226). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service.New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Saha, D. (2017). Informal Markets, Livelihood and Politics: Street Vendors in Urban India.New York: Routledge.

Karl Marx 200: I contemplate… Thoughts by Nihal Perera

capitalism, class culture, culture, materiality, mobilities, reading, , , , , , , ,

He has made an immense contribution to our understanding of the world. He expected us to know him through his work; to worship him is to lose his teachings. I am glad that I too learned a lot from him.

He is immensely popular, perhaps more than John Lennon who claimed to be more popular than Jesus Christ. Yet there is no one Marxism; it is quite diverse. As I crossed several cultural boundaries, I was fortunate to get exposed to a few variations.

As one of the greatest critical thinkers of our time, he questioned everything. Perhaps, he expects us too to be critical of his own work; i.e., to critically build on it.

He was the greatest European anti-systemic thinker, who thought outside the box. Transcending the theory-practice duality, he approached his work from the standpoint of praxis; he learned history in order to change it because it was unjust. He saw that the society is not one, but made of classes and is in conflict (than consensus). His work laid the foundation for social history.

He probably does not expect us to remember what is in Das Capital, an examination of 19th c. European capitalism, but to further develop the synthesis of his work: The Communist Manifesto.

To learn from a great person is not to import that persons time-, space-, and culture-specific findings (the model or the diagram), but to learn from her/his process of investigation and thinking; i.e., to carry out investigations inspired by her/his work, but within our own culture, time, and space, and find avenues to make a difference.

Despite violence caused in his name, his work was perhaps driven by the kindness that opted to liberate the exploited (than an animosity towards capitalists). His thinking was not limited to the working class too. He talks about many classes, especially during the French Revolution.

Most useful for my own work (especially People’s Spaces) is his understanding that the working class people (and the subjects of society) are not victims of capitalism, but “survivors.” They produce value and could change the system. They are agents of change.
Maybe our historic role -according to him- is to be partners of the revolutions that people carry out than look for people to follow our revolution.

Seeing the ongoing transformations perhaps requires a new vision (intellectual glasses). The (broader) agents of social change may not wait for outside leadership (the vanguard) and self-appointed representatives.

Nihal Perera is Chair and Professor of Urban Planning at Ball State University and the founder and Director of CapAsia, an immersive learning-by-doing semester in Asia based on collaborative projects with Asian universities.

Further Reading: https://marx200.org/en

 

Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Book Review by Juan Guevara

aboriginal, animals, Anthropology, bare nature, ecology, Environment, Ethnography, Gender and Sexualities, Hydrocarbon/Oil Economy, materiality, Person-Environment Relations, semiotics, , , ,

Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin with the Chthulucene London: Duke University Press. 2016.

Staying with the Trouble compiles Donna Haraway’s latest thoughts.  In the book, Haraway calls for the need to reflect and think on the possibilities for facing the era post-Anthropocene, the era of, what she calls, the Chthulucene. The book is divided in eight chapters that can be presented in three parts: the first 4 chapters of the book are mainly ‘theoretical’ and serve to conceptualize String Figures-SF, Tentacular Thinking, Sympoiesis and the Chthulucene; the second part (Chapters 5, 6, and 7) provides practical examples of becoming-with other species and elements to show how the Chthulucene can shape and transform our human ways to relate with other species and the planet (Terrapolis in the Chthulucene); the last part builds on science fiction (Speculative Fabulation-SF) and storytelling as a way to present the forms the Chthulucene may have (Proctor, 2017). Response-abilities is one of the main and most important elements of the book alongside with String Figures-SF, Becoming-with, Tentacular Thinking and Sympoiesis; these concepts are explored in this review.

I am not particularly engaged in Haraway’s work. However, in this book, I observe how the author engages with Northern aboriginal perspectives, Feminist theory, Biology, Ecology, and Postmodern theory. I found intriguing the way the Nomad is presented in the process of becoming, that for Haraway is always becoming with other species. The book has the merit of exercising imagination and for bringing some Northern Aboriginal wisdom to thinking the post-Anthropocene.

For Haraway, the Chthulucene is an era (with no time nor history) in which human race will confront its arrogance and ‘superiority’ and humbly make kin with the biological critters coming from the under-ground. The Chthulucene is the era in which humans will make kin with tentacles, spiders, bacteria, different ways of perceiving, living and dying, and becoming-with in n-dimensional time-spaces.

I observe that some concepts of the Chthulucene, especially its n-dimensional time-spaces and becoming-with, are inspired in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming. In her conceptualization of the Chthulucene, Haraway forgets Deleuze’s exploration of the Tick in Difference and Repetition to deconstruct and dissolve the static and unity of the self, to open up the possibilities of becoming. The Tick relies on different structures outside of itself, at the organic level, to perceive the world (Posteraro, 2016). The idea of the Tick is explored by Deleuze inspired by the work of von Uexhüll. Von Uexhüll suggests that each living cell perceives and acts but also “has perceptual or receptor signs (Merkzeichen) and impulses or effector signs (Wirkzeicheri) which are specific to it” (von Uexhüll, 1934, pp. 322-323). From this idea, von Uexhüll (1934) argues that “perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt” (p. 320).

What is really important in von Uexhüll’s work for this book review is the acknowledgement of n-dimensional time-spaces of the Umwelt. This category is relevant in Haraway’s book but not well developed. The recognition of n-dimensional perceptual spatio-temporalities in each “soup bubbles (perceptual and effectors living cells) which intersect each other smoothly, because they are built up of subjective perceptual signs” (von Uexhüll, 1934, p. 339), plus the way in which time regards a succession of moments by different subjects are key elements of the Umwelt. This is indeed related to the entanglements of species and the actual existence of n-dimensional time-spaces that Haraway suggests for the futuristic Chthulucene.

Continue reading Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Book Review by Juan Guevara →

Strauss, Rupp and Love: Cultures of Energy. Book Review by Moni Holowach

energy, Environment, Ethnography, United States/USA

Strauss, S., Rupp, S., & Love, T. (Eds.). (2013). Culture of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

You do not even have crack its spine to correctly anticipate its contents. The cover of Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies features anthropomorphised electrical transmission towers across lush hills and plains.  They suggest that energy—in the form of fossil fuels and electricity—gives shape to modern human life.

Cultures of Energy: A Conversation Starter

This collection of sixteen theoretical and ethnographic accounts bridges the gap between culture and energy systems. This book’s global but narrow scope will expand your notion of energy and bring visibility to the often invisible energy sources that we rely on daily.

This book, edited by three American anthropologists, “explores cultural conceptions  of energy as it is imagined, developed, utilized, and contested in everyday contexts around the globe” (p. 10). From pointing out the many interpretations of the notion of energy in New York, to observing how communities in rural Peru finally feel connected to the world through electrification, to viewing coal mining as a culture and a livelihood in Wyoming, and to revealing conflict in the Gulf of Mexico over deepsea oil drilling, this book delves into the myriad ways that ‘energy’ interacts with cultural, economic, and political systems.

The book is well-structured with an easy-to-read tone. It is divided into five thematic sections, which offers a cohesive structure and flow to the compilation. A casual “conversation” between the authors concludes each section to highlight key points. Together, these features would make for an excellent undergraduate or graduate level resource, as the book can be read out of order, used for selected chapters or topics, or could be quickly grasped using the conversation pieces. Courses in anthropology, sociology, or science technology studies could draw from many implicit themes within the book, such as the (im)materiality and (in)visibility of energy.

The other benefits (and weaknesses) of this book involve its scope. First, this book’s use of ethnographic accounts creates a contemporary focus. In regard to the interplay of energy and culture, the authors do not focus on how we got here, where we are going, or what we should do. Instead, its  stories are largely about right now. This allows the readers to gain an in-depth snapshot of the multiplicities of energy and their affects today, but while sacrificing historical context to get in all that detail.

Similarly, the book aims for a global scope but falls short. First, out of sixteen chapters, six focus exclusively on topics within American borders, and four more largely involve American relations o=r western perspectives. Thus, the authors’ global focus takes a western turn. Unfortunately, they skip out on Asian countries entirely. Finally, the ‘conception of energy’ used in this book stems largely from fossil fuels and renewable energy technologies. Although they address a diverse range of sources—wind, biomass, oil and gas, and coal—this scope is narrowed again by the contemporary focus. In comparison, Ian Morris’ How Human Values Evolve: Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels (2015) offers a historical look at how energy has shaped human values. Unlike, Cultures of Energy, Morris applies a more general conception of energy, where energy comes from foraging,agriculture, and fuels. Although Morris’ macro-theorizing is quite grandiose compared to the well-focused insights from Cultures of Energy, these two books are not in contest. Rather, they would pair nicely for a more well rounded understanding of energy and culture. Overall, Cultures of Energy’s narrow focus best allows readers and students to expandt heir understandings of energy as it plays out today from a western perspective. It will be sure to spur conversations by making visible one’s own daily interactions with energy systems.

Moni Holowach, University of Alberta, Canada.

References

Morris, I., Richard, S., Spence, J. D., Korsgaard, C, M., & Atwood, M. (2015). How Human
Values Evolve: Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.