Enacting Identities in the EU–Russia Borderland

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Smith ◽  
Stuart Burch
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Everyday Performance ◽  
The City ◽  
Theoretical Analyses ◽  
The Eu

Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s theoretical analyses of “nationness” and nationalism in post-communist Europe, this article examines the dynamics of social identity within the nationally contested setting of the Estonian–Russian borderland. Since 1991, the city of Narva (96% Russophone by population) has customarily been defined (both politically and academically) in binary national terms as a “Russian enclave” within a unitary and “nationalizing” Estonian state. An ethnographic approach to the case, however, gives a rather different perspective, pointing to hybridity rather than nationality as the defining characteristic of identity politics within the city. In what follows, we bring to bear the results of extensive fieldwork carried out in Narva during 2006–2008. We first examine how different identity categories (local, national, meso-regional, and supranational) are being officially inscribed within Narva’s sites of memory. Thereafter, we focus on how these discursive-material articulations of place are implicated within the everyday performance of identity amongst the city’s population. Using the novel methodology of photo elicitation, we examine how residents of Narva appropriate but also subvert the identity categories that elites and outsiders (including ourselves as researchers) would seek to impose on them from above. This study (we argue) is significant for its methodological novelty, as well as in terms of giving a more nuanced understanding of Narva’s situation at a time of continued ethnopolitical contestation within Estonia as a whole.

The originality of the “estate topos” in the A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”

2020 ◽  
pp. 262-272
Author(s):  
Anna S. Akimova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Research History ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Peasant Household ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Poor Peasant ◽  
The City

Moscow is the city which united the characters of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”. Kitay-Gorod is the space where the action of the first book is mainly set. In the novel Tolstoy showed in great detail the everyday life of the city and its inhabi- tants. According to the I.E. Zabelin’s research (“History of the city of Moscow”) in late 17 — early 18 th centuries Moscow was like a big village that is why Tolstoy relied on his childhood memories about the life in the small village Sosnovka (Samara Region) describing the streets of Moscow. The novel begins with the description of a poor peasant household of Brovkin near Moscow, then Volkov’s noble estate is depicted and Menshikov’s house. The space of the city is expanding with each new “address”. Moscow estates, and in particular, connected with the figure of “guardian, lover of the Princess-ruler” V.V. Golitsyn, in Tolstoy’s novel are inextricably linked with the character’s living and with the life of the country. The description of the palace built by Golitsyn at the peak of his career is based on the Sergei Solovyov’s “History of Russia in ancient times”. Golitsyn left it and went to his estate outside Moscow Medvedkovo and from there in exile.

scholarly journals The Sensorial Latency of Urban Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dylan Kanagaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
City Life ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Meaningful Experiences ◽  
Everyday Performance ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
The City

<p>Architecture provides the platform for the inherent connections between people and their city to flourish. The urban realm naturally invites diverse people to inhabit and interact together, giving city life its vibrancy. Urban spaces encourage spontaneous interactions between people and with architecture, to produce creative acts of play and liberating moments of leisure. It has been suggested that these events encapsulate the everyday performance of the city and are the antithesis to everyday life. It is argued this performance is often ignored in modern urban design. It has been noted that Wellington’s waterfront offers areas where momentary and impotent engagement can be developed into meaningful experiences.  Simultaneously, the importance and potency of sound within urban spaces may be undervalued. It is often argued that modern cities assault our senses with sounds leading to discomfort and distracted inhabitation, contributing to a lack of engagement. Urban sounds are commonly dampened in public spaces to combat this assault, but with more thoughtful design these sounds can be reinterpreted to augment the innate everyday performances. This thesis proposes that controlling how people experience urban sounds through architecture can create a deep sensory performance that increases engagement, awareness and interaction.  This research explores ways to harness the latent sounds of the city to form meaningful connections between people and their city while providing moments of play and leisure. Once isolated and harnessed, the urban sounds’ unique and intrinsic power can aid the development of urban spaces, thus producing greater significance within the urban fabric. There will be focus on the connection between the senses, performance and the urban context. The opportunity to enable the acceptance of the environment and reflection on their city marks an important role within the urban fabric.  Concurrently, this research explores how an intuitive drawing-led process can integrate and challenge the boundaries of both interior and the exterior urban realm. Other interior architectural strategies, together with soundscape design and urban interior principles aid this interdisciplinary exploration.</p>

scholarly journals Resonance beyond regimes: Migrant’s alternative infrastructuring practices in Athens

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110443
Author(s):  
Mirjam Wajsberg ◽  
Joris Schapendonk
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Migration Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

In migration studies, there is an increasing interest in understanding how migration processes are shaped by different forms of brokerage and mediation. We relate these debates to the everyday struggles of migrants in the city of Athens. In so doing, we propose a shift from the all-encompassing view on infrastructures, that is, as systematic entities of facilitation/control to the infrastructuring practices of migrants. This implies a focus on how migrants create dynamic social platforms, and how these platforms relate to formal infrastructures and industries. We analyse these infrastructuring practices through a conceptual lens of resonance that is sensitive to the constitutive (how things, people and processes are brought together) as well as travelling capacities of these practices (how the platforms shift to other places). With an ethnographic approach, we create in-depth insights into the ways in which migrants mediate im/mobility in the urban environment of Athens through infrastructuring practices. The paper concludes by reflecting on the promises and limitations of the infrastructuring practices as sites of solidarity. We thereby argue that there are many links to make within the mobile commons debate. At the same time, our findings highlight that the transformative potential of infrastructuring practices does not always go along with a clear claim on solidarity.

Bodies That Don’t Matter, but Labor That Does

2020 ◽  
pp. 344-360
Author(s):  
Laavanya Kathiravelu
Keyword(s):  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Migrant Populations ◽  
Debt Bondage ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Temporary Migrant ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
City States ◽  
The City ◽  
Conditions Of Employment ◽  
Male Workers

Singapore and Dubai are hypermodern city-states that host large temporary migrant populations. The majority of this group is composed of low-wage workers, migrant men from India who labor under conditions of structural inequality and extreme precarity. While there is a growing literature that discusses the issues of debt bondage and unfair conditions of employment that these men face, there is far less interrogation of the everyday and embodied forms of discrimination they encounter. In taking a deeply embodied and ethnographic approach to understanding the experiences of low-wage migrant male workers in these two metropolises, this chapter demonstrates how they are subject to multiple tropes that, in totality, seek to marginalize and devalue their work and the more intangible “learning” of the city that they undertake as part of the migration trajectory. As a result, despite extended periods of sojourn, they are never fully incorporated into the urban.

Italian Lizards and Literary Politics I

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Geller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

This chapter undertakes a philology-inspired genealogy of Kafka’s invocation of an exemplary lizard on an Italian footpath in his critique of Max Brod’s novel The Jewesses, wherein Kafka remarks upon its failure to counter the everyday practice of identifying Jewish individuals by the undifferentiated collective singular of “the Jew.” Against assumptions about allegedly common identifications of Jews and lizards and consequent allegations of Kafka’s abjection of Judentum, as in Judith Butler’s cavalier tossing of Kafka’s “lizard” into the pickle barrel of contemporary identity politics and the question of Israel-Palestine, this chapter first situates Kafka’s invocation within his actual encounters with lizards in Italy. It then constellates contemporary ressentiment-laden literary politics and Jewish-Gentile relations through the allusive mediations of Brod’s editing of Kafka’s diary and of Karl Kraus and his vicious denunciation of “Heine and the Consequences.” It then turns to two other possible influences on Kafka’s figuration: Goethe’s encounters with lizards during his Italian Journey and Heine’s in the opening chapters of The City of Lucca in his Travel Pictures. Combining allusions to Eduard Gans and Benedict Spinoza with various physical, genealogical, and mental traits Heine’s construction of the lizards may well be, as the Jew-as-Animal, articulating the Jewish animot.

scholarly journals Post-Aural Story-Telling and the Iranian Flaneurs: A Benjaminian Reading of Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Bakhtiar Sadjadi ◽  
Bahareh Nilfrushan
Keyword(s):  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Urban Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Aspect ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
The City

The city has fascinated the street wanderer as the contemplation of modern life. Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘flâneur,’ originally borrowed from Charles Baudelaire, could be taken as the true legacy of such fascination. There is always a sense of nostalgia being revealed through the flânerie of the city stroller passing through the metropolis, its shopping centers, and boulevards nourishing the mind of the bohemic storyteller with tales of post-aural experience and memory. Adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘flânerie’ in the streets of Paris to those of Tehran, the present paper attempts to explore Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33 in order to demonstrate the post-aural stories of the flaneurs in an Iranian milieu. This article focuses on the modern aspect of the Iranian contemporary society and explores the immediate consequences of modernity on the individual subjectivity of the characters represented in the novel. Considering Dadkhah’s novel as a product of the urban literature of a generation dealing with modernity of the arcades and other lures of the megapolis on the one hand and feeling of nostalgia for their past spirit on the other, the paper simultaneously reveals the close affinity between the subjectivity of the characters and Benjaminian tenets of flânerie and modern storytellers. The flaneurs represented in the novel, by rambling through and about the city of Tehran, are turning to be the storytellers who narrate their ‘post-aural’ experiences. In Yousef Abad, Street 33 the central characters are, as fully manifested in the paper, deeply engaged in the experiences of a modern sense of living while wandering to console their wistful longings despite the everyday challenges.

Marcus Clarke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Mccann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Commercial Viability ◽  
Cultural Legitimacy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City ◽  
Natural Life

This chapter looks at Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1870–1872), which is considered as his enduring contribution to Australian literature and to a broader literature of empire. The peculiarly citational quality of the novel is barely intelligible without understanding the way in which Clarke came to situate himself in relationship to both colonial literary culture and to an emerging European canon. His acute sense of having to balance cultural legitimacy against commercial viability lends his work an unusual degree of self-consciousness in regard to the processes of commodification and the regimes of cultural capital that were having an enormous impact on the development of mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne, the city in which Clarke lived and worked. Ultimately, a novel like His Natural Life reflects the desire to reproduce the popular textual forms of the metropolis in the everyday experience of the colonies.

scholarly journals Review of Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut by Ghassan Moussawi (Temple University Press)

Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Flahive
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Temple University ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Historical Condition ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
The City

Ghassan Moussawi’s Disruptive Situations challenges the exceptionalist representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) experiences in Beirut through a focus on the everyday queer strategies and tactics. Moussawi analyzes the everyday practices of LGBT interlocutors navigating al-wad’ (the situation), a term that refers to the normative order of disruptions, precarity, and instability that permeate daily life across contemporary Beirut. Al-wad’ simultaneously features as a historical condition of perpetual instability bearing on daily life in Beirut, as well as a lens to analyze the practices of everyday life for Moussawi’s LGBT interlocutors. Moussawi’s inductive ethnographic approach charts the strategic use of identities, visibility, and “bubbles” or sources of solace in order to challenge exceptionalist representations of Beirut and LGBT experiences in the city. Moussawi critiques these reductive representations as “fractal orientalism”, a reductive representation that embeds hierarchies and exclusion through geographic associations, such as in fashioning Beirut as the “Paris of the Middle East”. Beirut becomes charming and “cosmopolitan” in a way that is similar to, but not quite, the same as Paris. Moussawi’s focus on queer daily practices against the backdrop of al-wad’ shows the limitations of these reductive representations in an effort to reimagine queerness, subjectivity, and politics.

scholarly journals Beyond Picturesque Decay: Detroit and the Photographic Sites of Confrontation Between Media and Residents

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Zebracki ◽  
Brian Doucet ◽  
Toha De Brant
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
The City

This article contributes to scholarship on urban visual culture by advancing understandings of how visual imageries may become (online and off-line) sites of confrontation between dominant media perspectives and the lived experiences of urban citizens. Based on participatory photography amongst local residents in Detroit, this article provides transformative insights by contrasting sense makings of Detroiters with dominant media portrayals of a “decaying” city. Residents were asked what images they would use to “see” and represent the city. Photo elicitation interviews revealed interlaced lived experienced and narrated reminiscences of local life and the material urban fabric beyond the prevailing narratives of mere neglect and abandonment. This study develops further knowledge of how photography can simultaneously operate as a critical socio-spatial research subject and an empowering tool for research participants. Through shifting the hegemonic locus of media agents toward residents’ positionalities, findings indicated potentials for redressing the misunderstood spaces of the everyday life of ordinary people.

scholarly journals The Sensorial Latency of Urban Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dylan Kanagaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
City Life ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Meaningful Experiences ◽  
Everyday Performance ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
The City

<p>Architecture provides the platform for the inherent connections between people and their city to flourish. The urban realm naturally invites diverse people to inhabit and interact together, giving city life its vibrancy. Urban spaces encourage spontaneous interactions between people and with architecture, to produce creative acts of play and liberating moments of leisure. It has been suggested that these events encapsulate the everyday performance of the city and are the antithesis to everyday life. It is argued this performance is often ignored in modern urban design. It has been noted that Wellington’s waterfront offers areas where momentary and impotent engagement can be developed into meaningful experiences.  Simultaneously, the importance and potency of sound within urban spaces may be undervalued. It is often argued that modern cities assault our senses with sounds leading to discomfort and distracted inhabitation, contributing to a lack of engagement. Urban sounds are commonly dampened in public spaces to combat this assault, but with more thoughtful design these sounds can be reinterpreted to augment the innate everyday performances. This thesis proposes that controlling how people experience urban sounds through architecture can create a deep sensory performance that increases engagement, awareness and interaction.  This research explores ways to harness the latent sounds of the city to form meaningful connections between people and their city while providing moments of play and leisure. Once isolated and harnessed, the urban sounds’ unique and intrinsic power can aid the development of urban spaces, thus producing greater significance within the urban fabric. There will be focus on the connection between the senses, performance and the urban context. The opportunity to enable the acceptance of the environment and reflection on their city marks an important role within the urban fabric.  Concurrently, this research explores how an intuitive drawing-led process can integrate and challenge the boundaries of both interior and the exterior urban realm. Other interior architectural strategies, together with soundscape design and urban interior principles aid this interdisciplinary exploration.</p>

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