The Afterlife of Things

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-225
Author(s):  
Sreedeep Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Global Models ◽  
The City

This chapter studies the afterlife of the discarded lot more closely in a metal junkyard located in Mayapuri, Delhi. It elaborates why the consumerist landscape needs to fetishize the ‘new’ and encourage compulsive discarding. It maps the trajectory of the discarded and simultaneously analyze the consumers’ changing relationship with the obsolete. It claims that junkyard is a liminal space between usefulness and the lack of it, or use and reuse, where things constantly move and change hands. It also observes how life is induced into the apparently lifeless and value is extracted from waste in ‘operation theatres of inorganic transplants’ by migrant labourers in the margins of the city. It asserts that these operations are directly in conflict with mainstream global models of consumption that rest on doctrines of ephemerality. It also argues how imposed norms on obsolescence produce more discards and reduce the demand for waste, making obsolescence intrinsic to consumer culture.

scholarly journals Between field and home: notes from the balcony

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110205
Author(s):  
Shruti Ragavan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Dairy Farms ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Village ◽  
The City

Balconies, windows and terraces have come to be identified as spaces with newfound meaning over the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns. There was not only a marked increase in the use of these spaces, but more importantly a difference in the very nature of this use since March 2020. It is keeping this latter point in mind, that I make an attempt to understand the spatial mobilities afforded by the balcony in the area of ethnographic research. The street overlooking my balcony, situated amidst an urban village in the city of Delhi – one of my field sites, is composed of middle and lower-middle class residents, dairy farms and farmers, bovines and other nonhumans. In this note, through ethnographic observations, I reflect upon the balcony as constituting that liminal space between ‘field’ and ‘home’, as well as, as a spatial framing device which conditions and affects our observations and interactions. This is explored by examining two elements – the gendered nature of the space, and the notion of ‘distance and proximity’, through personal narratives of engaging-with the field, and subjects-objects of study in the city.

scholarly journals Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees: The liminal world of Paris in 1919

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 192-203
Author(s):  
Sofia Permiakova
Keyword(s):  
Original Publication ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Modernist Studies ◽  
The City

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban phantasmagoria or the urban palimpsest, this article focuses on Paris, then in the midst of the 1919 Peace Conference, as a liminal space and site of Bakhtinian carnival. This framework advances an understanding of the poem as a complete and complex work of art. The article argues that the peculiar structure and formal organization of the poem, and its relation to the reality of Paris in 1919 and beyond, turns the poem into a liminal space of its own, thus doubling the city it speaks of.

The City Imagined

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Barron ◽  
Rhys H. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Church Leadership ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Organizational Practice ◽  
Multiracial Congregations ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

The concluding chapter reviews the three major concepts discussed in the book—racialized urban imaginary, managed diversity, racial utility—and how they relate to the analysis of the congregation and to each other. Drawing on examples from across the chapters, the conclusion shows that a set of images about what is authentically urban, and that urban-ness is connected to African Americans as well as consumer culture, inform the actions of the church leadership and the church members. In order to realize their imaginary, church leaders hope to foster a diverse congregation, but they want to manage the diversity so that they do not become seen as a “black church” or threaten the leaders’ authority in the congregation. The utility of using racial identity to accomplish these goals is a common organizational practice. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the prospects for multiracial congregations and American religion.

The Great Chicago Waiters’ Strike

2014 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 1079-1098 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Garb
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Urban Labor Markets ◽  
The City

In the 1890s, restaurant and hotel waiters in Chicago formed a biracial labor organization that successfully challenged their employers. The Culinary Alliance, a rare example of biracial unionism in the late nineteenth century, was produced by, and helped to shape, a dramatic reorganization of urban space with the emergence of corporate capitalism and consumer culture in the city. The Alliance’s rise and demise demonstrates the ways urban space was a powerful force in the complex interactions between race and gender relations in urban labor markets.

scholarly journals The politicisation of diversity planning in a global city: Lessons from London

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-916 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Raco ◽  
Jamie Kesten
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Investment ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Physical Development ◽  
Global City ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Global Models ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

This paper explores the politics of diversity planning in one of Europe’s most socially and economically divided and globally oriented cities: London. The analysis draws on Latour’s writings on modes of politicisation to examine the processes and practices that shape contemporary urban governance. It uses the example of diversity planning to examine the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of urban politics. It shows that on the one hand diversity is represented in pragmatic, consensual and celebratory terms. Under prevailing conditions of contemporary global capitalism, the ‘what’ of diversity has been politicised into an agenda for labour market-building and the attraction of ‘talented’ individuals and foreign investment. However, at the same time this celebratory rhetoric represents part of a wider effort to deflect political attention away from the socially and economically divisive impacts of global models of economic growth and physical development. There is little discussion of the ways in which planning frameworks, the ‘how’ of diversity policy, are helping to generate new separations in and beyond the city. Moreover, despite claiming that policy is pragmatic and non-ideological, the paper shows how diversity narratives have become an integral part of broader political projects to orientate the city’s economy towards the needs of a relatively small cluster of powerful economic sectors. The paper concludes with reflections on the recent impacts of the vote for Brexit and the election of an openly Muslim London Mayor. It also assesses the broader relevance of a Latourian framework for the analysis of contemporary urban politics.

scholarly journals Gothic Spaces and the Tropical City: reading The Crocodile Fury, Haunting the Tiger, Life’s Mysteries

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sathyabhama Daly
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Spiritual Beliefs ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The City

Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992), K.S. Maniam’s Haunting the Tiger (1996), and Shirley Lim’s Life’s Mysteries (1995) articulate the ambivalence of interpreting the cultural beliefs of the Malays, Chinese, and Indians of the former Malaya with the evolving spiritual beliefs of Christianity and Catholicism influenced by British colonisation. In Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury the ghosts of the colonial past vie for power with the demons of Chinese cultural beliefs in a convent situated in the liminal space between the jungle and the urban environment. The convent is a “civilised space” with the jungle as an encroaching wilderness haunted by Chinese gods and the female vampire ghost Pontianak of the Malay cultural tradition. Similarly, Maniam’s short stories in Haunting the Tiger situate the supernatural and the abject in the liminal spaces between the city and the jungle to express the metaphorical exile experienced by the Indian and Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. The trope of liminality is most evident in Shirley Lim’s short stories in Life’s Mysteries where the domestic and urban space of culture are viewed through prisms of imprisonment and disempowerment. The authors uncover the psychological and social exile experienced by colonised subjects through the gothic themes of shadows, darkness and the underworld.

scholarly journals Lost in space: Gold Coast characters wandering home(less)

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-200
Author(s):  
Kelly Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Dynamic Process ◽  
Socioeconomic Disadvantage ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Tourist Destination ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Work Routines ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Gold Coast is a multiply liminal space, often represented throughout mainstream media as a holidayworld in which to escape everyday life and structured work routines. Represented as a tourist destination and space for transitions – as a space in which to get lost or lose one’s self – Gold Coast locals are misrepresented as everyday tourists, criminals and dole bludgers, essentially wanderers floating around and through the city limits. Local literary fictions capture this sense of alienation among Gold Coast locals. Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet (1992), in particular, complicates local wandering, with the text representing her runaway protagonists not as living a leisurely existence but rather experiencing the idea of homemaking as a kind of labour necessitated by socioeconomic disadvantage. In this realist narrative, Savage’s depiction of adolescent homelessness advances under-represented views of the multifaceted city while dispelling tourist myths about the Gold Coast as a youthfully unburdened site. Meanwhile, the disenfranchised boys of Amy Barker’s Omega Park (2009) see themselves as aliens in their home city and wander as a means of distancing themselves from a place in which they are trapped. This interdisciplinary investigation of narratives of wandering on the Gold Coast reveals belonging as a dynamic process of placemaking and homemaking, and a privilege of post-colonial habitation and socioeconomic comfort.

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