Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
African City ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The City ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

Time Never Lines Up like a Street: Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 480-486
Author(s):  
Adélékè Adéèkó
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Organic Production ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Sacred Groves ◽  
African City ◽  
Social Compact ◽  
The Social ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

Africanist studies conventionally restrict considerations of space to its physical dimensions. affective representations in literary writing oppose the village to the city, imbuing the village with comprehensible, but rarely historicized, routines. Until disturbed by uninvited and troubling ideas, institutions, and individuals from unknowable distances and places, the village nourishes existential certainty and sustains spiritual balance. In contrast, the corrupting, bewildering city signals instabilities of all kinds, even in the social sciences. Across the disciplines, while organic production and genuinely reciprocal relations dominate in the village, the insatiable city absorbs without giving back and never offers spiritual renewal. The village half of the spatial dyad represents what is truly African, and folklore, or orality in general, holds Africa's romance together. Its schematic character notwithstanding, the predisposition toward construing space as little more than the thin cover of more vital substances that facilitate self-understanding has produced enduring parameters for interpreting African expressive forms. With convivial marketplaces and festivals, evil forests and sacred groves, village squares and humble homesteads, depictions of the village in novels set at the beginning of colonization have fixed, perhaps permanently, perceptions of the African cultural past in reader's imaginations, and efforts to read these narratives have generated useful, axiomatic insights about meanings of traditional, everyday African life and its ritualized calibrations of the movement of time, its reifications of the social compact, and its coded references to the society's cosmic bearings. he African city has not been that fortunate.

scholarly journals "A Urca é o paraíso dos cegos": mobilidade urbana, acesso à cidade e territorialização

ILUMINURAS ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (37) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Von der Weid
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Visual Signals ◽  
Blind People ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
City Center ◽  
Urban Scenes ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

A cidade do Rio de Janeiro, com quase 12 milhões de habitantes na região metropolitana, é a segunda maior aglomeração urbana do Brasil. O artigo propõe uma reflexão a respeito das relações sociais em espaços públicos estabelecidas nessa cidade entre pessoas cegas e outras pessoas que circulam por ruas de bairros como Centro, Copacabana ou o bairro da Urca. Ao abordar os deslocamentos e as relações sociais estabelecidas ao longo do percurso, procura-se traçar a impressão espacial e urbana de pessoas cegas e o fluxo dos seus itinerários. Como se constroem os trajetos e a ocupação espacial da cidade por pessoas cegas? Qual o uso que fazem dos transportes públicos? Quais são os cenários eleitos, os bairros frequentados e as dificuldades encontradas no caminho? Ao questionar as representações que pessoas cegas fazem dos cenários urbanos, os fatores que promovem e os fatores que restringem sua mobilidade, procura-se também desestabilizar uma compreensão do espaço urbano centrada no olhar. Busca-se incorporar na descrição dos lugares os seus aspectos vividos, os elementos, as materialidades e os sinais não-visuais que possibilitam sua apreensão.Palavras-chave: Cegueira. Corpo. Deslocamento. Cidade. Teritorialização."Urca is the paradise of the blind": urban mobility, acess to the city and territoryAbstractThe city of Rio de Janeiro, with nearly 12 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area, is the second largest urban agglomeration in Brazil. This paper proposes a reflection on the social relations in public spaces established in that city between blind people and other people moving through the streets of neighborhoods like the city center, Copacabana or Urca. Addressing the displacements and the social relations established along the route, the article seeks to trace the urban and spatial impressions of blind people and the flow of their itineraries. How the blinds build their paths and how they spatially occupy the city? What is their use of public transport? What are the elected scenarios, frequented neighborhoods and the difficulties they find in their way? By questioning the representations of urban scenes by blind people, the factors that promote and factors that restrict their mobility, we also seeks to destabilize an understanding of urban space focused on vision. We try to incorporate in the description of places their experienced aspects and the elements, materiality and non-visual signals that enable their apprehension.Keywords: Blindness. Body. Displacement. City. Territory. 

scholarly journals Time, space and the social life new interpretation of cemeteries in the city

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Paulina Tobiasz-Lis
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Field Analysis ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
City Structure ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
The City

The article reveals the issue of time recorded in the urban space, which determines the specific rhythm, continuity and passing of consecutive generations and their social relations. Presented research results focus on cemeteries and appear to be helpful in better understanding of their identity in the city structure, as well as the factors shaping their perceptions by individual people. Qualitative research methods have been applied, in particular: visual materials (photos) analysis and the semantic field analysis. It seems that the use of images and narratives opens up new possibilities for human geography, new sources of spatial exploration. The problem undertaken in the article is important both from the cognitive and practical perspective related to the appropriate shaping of the city space – modern, yet at the same time not rooted out of the tradition and identity of a particular place, where people would feel good, being able to find both a reference to the past and to the future.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Rural migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China: Multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 2245-2260 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Chung
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Rural Migrants ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper investigates rural Chinese migrants’ agency through their multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies. The idea of ‘multi-positionality’ conceptualises a migrant’s mobility between physical locations and shifting social positions. Through individual migrants’ multi-positionality, this study discusses their place-specific social relations and thereby the diverse way to negotiate a living in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. These strategies include simple approaches such as facilitating physical movements between different locations and more sophisticated ones which develop multiple roles with outsiders and native villagers in different localities. While the former allows individual migrants to use their local knowledge to make a living in the context of institutional exclusion and discrimination, the latter further cultivates changes and an upgrade in social relations. Rural migrants' everyday stories are used to unfold an individual’s particular people–place relationship and how he/she has tapped into a place-specific resource to make a living. It does not aim to generalise rural migrants’ experience; rather it seeks to show diversity and complexity. Migrants’ stories are collected through extensive research in a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. Through these stories, not only does this paper articulate the social relations which underlie individual migrants’ shifting positions, but also extends translocal studies on migrants beyond the narrative of physical locations.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

scholarly journals Neighbourhood open spaces for social cohesion

2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 06019
Author(s):  
Rukhsana Badar ◽  
Sarika Bahadure
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Unitary Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Neighbourhood Level ◽  
The City

The global cities of the world are witnessing a visible disconnection of everyday life. In India the Smart City guidelines acknowledge the need to counter the growing social detachment and intolerance by encouraging interactions. They go further in identifying that preserving and creating of open spaces must be a key feature of comprehensive urban development. Most social relations are cemented within open spaces at the neighbourhood level. Previous studies examine the association between the attributes of neighbourhood open spaces and social activity but neglect to view the issue comprehensively. The present study turns to Lefebvre’s Unitary Theory which states that open space is a result of three forces; 1) perceived space which is the physical dimension and material quality identifiable by the senses; 2) conceived space created by planners and other agents as plans and documents; and 3) lived space which is shaped by the values attached and images generated through user experience. For open space conducive to social interactions these three aspects must work in tandem. With this consideration a framework of criteria and indicators is developed and used to measure and compare the open spaces in select neighbourhoods in Europe and India. The investigation thus reveals differences in all three aspects of neighbourhood spaces. It also reveals a discrepancy between the planning standards formulated and employed by the city authorities in providing the spaces and the actual needs of the community. The research aims to address this gap. The study of the Indian cases lays foundation for the use of the framework to measure open spaces in association with social cohesion and thereby contribute to the enhancement of the social infrastructure of the City.

scholarly journals CREATING SOCIOCULTURAL VALUES: THE PROBLEM OF LOCALIZATION IN THE URBAN SPACE

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-68
Author(s):  
Юрий Владимирович Преображенский
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Spatial Interaction ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Economic Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effective Organization ◽  
The City ◽  
Positive Effect

Рассмотрен вопрос о сущности социокультурного пространства и его пересечении с экономическим пространством города. Показано, что наиболее эффективная организация пространственного взаимодействия данных пространств во многом является географической задачей. Предлагается метод изучения социальных практик населения для локализации точек и линий взаимодействия социокультурной и экономической сфер. Рассмотрены практики, в ходе которых создаются социокультурные ценности, положительно влияющие на экономическое пространство города. Обсуждается проблема влияния пешеходных пространств (наиболее насыщенных практиками) на формирование имиджа города. The question of the essence of the socio-cultural space and its intersection with the economic space of the city is considered. It is shown that the most effective organization of the spatial interaction of these spaces is in many ways a geographic task. A method is proposed for studying the social practices of the population to localize points and lines of interaction between the socio-cultural and economic spheres. The practice is considered in the course of which socio-cultural values are created that have a positive effect on the economic space of the city. The problem of the influence of pedestrian spaces (the most saturated with practices) on the formation of the city's image is discussed.

scholarly journals MODAL SOSIAL PEMANTIK UNTUK KOTA KREATIF

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 404
Author(s):  
Tubagus Arya Abdurachman
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Creative Cities ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City ◽  
Dominant Influence

The discussion of this research is the development of creative cities in a country is the result of the efforts of the government and creative actors in the city in the country. Creative city can not be separated from the potential of social capital that is owned by the people in the city. Social capital is a social organization concept that includes network of norms and social trusts that facilitate mutual coordination and cooperation including in developing the regional economy. This research aims to (1) know the contribution of social capital in making a creative city, (2) express the social capital and creativity of individuals and communities to realize creative city, and (3) know aspects of social capital that dominant influence on a creativity of the city. The method of this research is qualitative primary data with technic observation and indepth interview, also secondary data in the form of document and archive analysis from Bandung city as one of creative city in Indonesia. Research is done during 2015-2016. Conclusions this research are (1)Social capital that form trust, tolerance, cooperation, openness, and independence of the community greatly contributes in the creation of creative city because through the braided integration of social capital that forms a norm of behavior binding for its citizens to be creative and does not require material capital,(2)Individual urban creativity formed through the process of socialization of elements of social capital in the life of society to trigger creativity of individuals and society as a whole, and (3) The form of openness, tolerance, and cooperation are the dominant elements of social capital in growing the creativity of individuals and societyKeywords: Creatif city, Social capital

scholarly journals Street Cries and the urban ritornelle

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Jacob Kreutzfeldt
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Northern European ◽  
The Social ◽  
Environmental Relations ◽  
The City ◽  
Fertile Area

Street cries, though rarely heard in Northern European cities today, testify to ways in which audible practices shape and structure urban spaces. Paradigmatic for what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the refrain’, the ritualised and stylised practice of street cries may point at the dynamics of space-making, through which the social and territorial construction of urban space is performed. The article draws on historical material, documenting and describing street cries, particularly in Copenhagen in the years 1929 to 1935. Most notably, the composer Vang Holmboe and the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen have investigated Danish street cries as a musical and a spatial phenomenon, respectably. Such studies – from their individual perspectives – can be said to explore the aesthetics of urban environments, since street calls are developed and heard specifically in the context of the city. Investigating the different methods employed in the two studies and presenting Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain as a framework for further studies in the field, this article seeks to outline a fertile area of study for sound studies: the investigation of everyday refrains and the environmental relations they express and perform. Today changed sensibilities and technologies have rendered street crying obsolete in Northern Europe, but new urban ritornells may have taken their place.

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