Postindustrial Waterfront Redevelopment and the Politics of Historical Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Long Beach ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Waterfront Redevelopment ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract How have cities reorganized attention to their waterfronts after the decline of urban seaports? What kind of cultural record attends this reorganization? This article investigates the politics of historical memory at several sites of postindustrial harbor redevelopment since the 1960s. It locates the aesthetic sensibilities of waterfront renewal in a scattered network of comic tableaux in literature, art, and moving images, including the documentaries of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, the sitcom Arrested Development, and a mural at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. Like fragments of Benjamin’s dialectical image, these scenes bring together the allegorical ruin of the urban seaport with comic efforts to inaugurate its future as a commercial esplanade, as if virtualizing and intensifying those two phases of Benjaminian historiography (early modern allegory and nineteenth-century commodity). Intermittently, where this dialectical image begins to be realized, these sites have erupted in acts of de-monumentalization by anticolonial and alter-globalization activists. The article locates fragments of this dialectical image in seaports including Rotterdam, Baltimore, Barcelona, Long Beach, and Genoa, studied under the names given to their harbors by developers: Europoort, Harborplace, Port Vell, Rainbow Harbor, and Porto Antico.

The Distant Past as Mirror and Metaphor

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-134
Author(s):  
Diana R. Hallman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Grand Opera

Historical settings—especially those from the medieval and early modern periods—were central to the aesthetic of grand operas of the 1830s and 1840s. This historical aesthetic is clearly evident in the four works that are the subject of this chapter: La Reine de Chypre, Charles VI, La Juive and Les Huguenots. The enormous popularity of these historical settings reflected a more general fascination with the distant past among early nineteenth-century Europeans, a fascination that was also manifest in genres such as the historical novel. But the music and drama of grand opera also mirrored contemporary events, reflecting the tensions that were shaping the rapidly changing social and political dynamics of the present.

Latin America, colonial thought in

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter B. Redmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The 1960S

Colonial refers to Spanish and Portuguese sovereignty in America from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 up to the emergence of modern Latin American states in the nineteenth century. The intellectual life of the colonies and their mother countries at that time falls into two phases: traditional and modern. The traditional phase includes the siglo de oro, or the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a time when literature and the arts flourished, along with Scholastic philosophy, jurisprudence and theology. During the eighteenth century, traditional thought gradually gave way to modern movements, particularly from France. The universities founded in the mid-sixteenth century, notably those of Mexico and Peru, as well as colleges and seminaries, were impressively productive in the area of philosophy. The pressure of events such as the clash between European and Native American cultures in the sixteenth century and the struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth century brought about numerous nonacademic works with philosophic content. Authors wrote in both Latin and Spanish or Portuguese and often knew native languages, such as Nahuatl and Quechua as well. Many operated in several different areas, such as the nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, who wrote a book on logic in Latin, which has since been lost. Students studied philosophy first, then specialized in medicine, law, or theology. The core philosophy curriculum was logic, natural philosophy or physics and metaphysics. In the eighteenth century Scholastic logic, similar to what has come to be known as formal logic, was weakened and natural philosophy began to incorporate experimental science. The bulk of philosophy was affected by modern thinkers such as René Descartes. Eighteenth-century savants were critical of Scholasticism and later Latin American intellectuals tended to disavow the entire colonial past. However, historians since the 1940s have stressed the currency of modern scholarship, especially in science and since the 1960s have been rediscovering the sophisticated philosophy of the Golden Age.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Scholarly Contribution ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.

Vor- und Nachgeschichte Bild und Zeit bei Walter Benjamin

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-212
Author(s):  
Cornelia Zumbusch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Hidden Agenda ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Time

Abstract Benjamin’s approach to the history of the nineteenth century as a prehistory (Vorgeschichte) of modernity relies on his concept of the dialectical image. Starting from Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust’s narrative endeavor as the evocation of images that have not been seen before, this essay tries to situate Benjamin’s dialektisches Bild in new contexts. Examining Benjamin’s interest in Goethe’s Urphänomen as well as implicit references to Lessing’s concept of fruchtbarer Augenblick or Cassirer’s idea of symbolische Prägnanz, this essay stresses not so much the important but often considered aspects of discontinuity and destruction of chronological time, but tries to trace a hidden agenda: the affinity of Benjamin’s dialectical image to genetic processes.

Concrete Monsters of the Welfare State: Discussions of Brutalist Architecture on Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122110193
Author(s):  
Max Holleran
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Welfare State

Brutalist architecture is an object of fascination on social media that has taken on new popularity in recent years. This article, drawing on 3,000 social media posts in Russian and English, argues that the buildings stand out for their arresting scale and their association with the expanding state in the 1960s and 1970s. In both North Atlantic and Eastern European contexts, the aesthetic was employed in publicly financed urban planning projects, creating imposing concrete structures for universities, libraries, and government offices. While some online social media users associate the style with the overreach of both socialist and capitalist governments, others are more nostalgic. They use Brutalist buildings as a means to start conversations about welfare state goals of social housing, free university, and other services. They also lament that many municipal governments no longer have the capacity or vision to take on large-scale projects of reworking the built environment to meet contemporary challenges.

Nexus of self-organization: the expansion of collective responsibility networks among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yiying Pan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Local State ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Regional Diversity ◽  
Labor Relationship ◽  
The City

Abstract This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.

Medical Martyrs: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Early Modern Inquisitorial Persecution of Spanish Physicians

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Keitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
National Identities ◽  
History Of

Abstract This essay examines the discourse on medicine and the Inquisition in nineteenth-century Spain. It traces how liberal reformers selectively appropriated aspects of the history of Spanish medicine in the service of their contemporary political and scientific agendas, and how in doing so they contributed to the formation of new professional and national identities.

THE AESTHETIC SIGNIFICANCE OF DRAWINGS ON LOCATION AND WATERCOLORS BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF DAGESTAN GRAPHICS OF THE 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-76
Author(s):  
Timur Saidovich Gamidov
Keyword(s):  
Fine Art ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Pencil Drawing

The article analyses works on location in the heritage of Dagestan masters of fine art. The article reveals the ideological, substantive and aesthetic significance of pencil drawing on location and other types of graphics. Examples of works by famous artists of the 1960s, which differ in brightness and novelty of execution, are giv-en.

Revisiting the relationship between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain from the manufacturer’s perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Ann Compton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Drawing Board ◽  
Public Exposure ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Two Sectors

The mid-nineteenth century critical discourse compartmentalized art and industry by crediting each with specific powers. Manufacturing was identified with the development of technologically advanced processes, materials and products, while fine artists were given authority over the aesthetic aspects of industrial design. The idea that the two sectors had separate areas of responsibility has proved extremely enduring, and continues to influence our perceptions of Victorian manufacturing. This article contributes to the wider task of re-evaluating the relationship between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain by examining the role of design in potteries and art metalworking firms from the manufacturer’s perspective. It shows that contrary to the picture painted by Victorian critics, design was central to the ambitions and commercial operations of manufacturing businesses. Crucially, decisions about the recruitment of design staff were shaped by the close connection between the creation of new products at the drawing board, and their fabrication in the workshop. Since each branch of manufacturing had its distinctive characteristics, there were significant practical, aesthetic and commercial advantages for manufacturers in employing experienced designers who knew the trade, and were fully conversant with production practices. Unless a professional sculptor joined a firm, they were unlikely to have this inside knowledge, which made commissioning one-off designs from artists a riskier proposition. Manufacturers found that one of the best ways to get around this was to make reductions of sculptures, and initial demand for statuettes in Parian suggested they would be profitable for all concerned. In the end, the market did not live up to its early promise, but the publicity given to Parian statuettes compensated manufacturers and sculptors. Overall, it was this increased public exposure for art manufactures that was the prime benefit of the mid-nineteenth century critical discourse for the industrial sector.

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