scholarly journals “Real Men Mark their Territory!” Spatial Constructions of Masculinity in Joe Pieri’s Autobiographical Narratives

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 47-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Souhir Zekri

The history of Scots-Italian “male” encounters has an air of violence and brutality, one epitomized from ancient times by relentless “Picts” defending their lands from Roman invasions and by fearless mercenaries of the middle Ages protecting Italian cities. Such a peculiar waltz of animosity and loyalty created a deeply ingrained bond between the two cultures, until the first waves of rather “harmless” Italians started coming to Scotland, particularly to Glasgow, since the nineteenth century. These immigrants have irreversibly influenced the spatial and social infrastructure of the city, mainly through their connection with the catering business and the consequent establishment of ice-cream cafés and fish and chip shops. Now, they have to defend and “mark” their territory again. This essay is concerned with the autobiographical stories and memoirs of Joe Pieri, a Glasgow Italian fish and chip café owner, whose main events take place in the 1920s and 1930s. The main argument of this essay is that spatial narration in Pieri’s accounts influences the construction of his and other masculinities. By examining four of his autobiographical works, I consider how these narratives spatially construct a wide variety of masculinities through their various defence and adaptation strategies in the poverty- and delinquency-stricken Glasgow of the period.

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
D.X. Sangirova ◽  

Revered since ancient times, the concept of "sacred place" in the middle ages rose to a new level. The article analyzes one of the important issues of this time - Hajj (pilgriamge associated with visiting Mecca and its surroundings at a certain time), which is one of pillars of Islam and history of rulers who went on pilgrimage


1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-421
Author(s):  
Ghulam-Haider Aasi

History of Religions in the WestA universal, comparative history of the study of religions is still far frombeing written. Indeed, such a history is even hr from being conceived, becauseits components among the legacies of non-Western scholars have hardly beendiscovered. One such component, perhaps the most significant one, is thecontributions made by Muslim scholars during the Middle Ages to thisdiscipline. What is generally known and what has been documented in thisfield consists entirely of the contribution of Westdm scholars of religion.Even these Western scholars belong to the post-Enlightenment era of Wsternhistory.There is little work dealing with the history of religions which does notclaim the middle of the nineteenth century CE as the beginning of thisdiscipline. This may not be due only to the zeitgeist of the modem Wstthat entails aversion, downgrading, and undermining of everything stemmingfrom the Middie Ages; its justification may also be found in the intellectualpoverty of the Christian West (Muslim Spain excluded) that spans that historicalperiod.Although most works dealing with this field include some incidentalreferences, paragraphs, pages, or short chapters on the contribution of thepast, according to each author’s estimation, all of these studies are categorizedunder one of the two approaches to religion: philosophical or cubic. All ofthe reflective, speculative, philosophical, psychological, historical, andethnological theories of the Greeks about the nature of the gods and goddessesand their origins, about the nature of humanity’s religion, its mison dsttre,and its function in society are described as philosophical quests for truth.It is maintained that the Greeks’ contribution to the study of religion showedtheir openness of mind and their curiosity about other religions and cultures ...


Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
James A. Palmer

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.


1897 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-549
Author(s):  
M. Gaster

More marvellous and more remarkable than the real conquests of Alexander are the stories circulated about him, and the legends which have clustered round his name and his exploits. The history of Alexander has, from a very early period, been embellished with legends and tales. They spread from nation to nation during the whole of the ancient times, and all through the Middle Ages. Many scholars have followed up the course of this dissemination of the fabulous history of Alexander. It would, therefore, be idle repetition of work admirably done by men like Zacher, Wesselofsky, Budge, and others, should I attempt it here. All interested in the legend of Alexander are familiar with those works, where also the fullest bibliographical information is to be found. I am concerned here with what may have appeared to some of these students as the bye-paths of the legend, and which, to my mind, has not received that attention which is due to it, from more than one point of view. Hitherto the histories of Alexander were divided into two categories; the first were those writings which pretended to give a true historical description of his life and adventures, to the exclusion of fabulous matter; the other included all those fabulous histories in which the true elements were smothered under a great mass of legendary matter, the chief representative of this class being the work ascribed to a certain Callisthenes. The study of the legend centred in the study of the vicissitudes to which this work of (Pseudo-) Callisthenes had been exposed, in the course of its dissemination from the East, probably from its native country, Egypt, to the countries of the West.


1966 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 82-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough

Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.


Author(s):  
Keith Reader

This book explores the history and the vicissitudes of one of Paris’s most extraordinary areas, the Marais. Centrally located on the Right Bank, this neighbourhood was from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century the most fashionable in the city, headquarters of the nobility who endowed it with resplendent architecture. The Court’s move to Versailles and the Revolution of 1789 led to the quartier’s decline, so that in the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth it was in parlous shape, its fine buildings run down and often severely overcrowded. It escaped wholesale destruction in the post-War frenzy of modernization largely thanks to André Malraux, who as Culture Minister fostered the restoration of the area. Malraux’s efforts were, however, not immune from criticism, sometimes seen as a form of socio-economic cleansing with concomitant fossilization, and thus emblematic of the problems faced by a city which has always been torn between the preservation of its past and the need to adapt to social and historical change. The book focuses particularly on literary, cinematic and other artistic reproductions of the quartier, of which it attempts to provide a comprehensive overview, and foregrounds particularly its importance as home to and base of two highly significant minorities – the Jewish and the gay communities.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


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