scholarly journals The Civic Scale: Strategies of Emplacement in Dambudzo Marechera and Ivan Vladislavić

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Liam Kruger

This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated. Alternatively, it proposes that reading at the scale of the city offers a method for circumventing the elision of particularity which occurs when the nation, continent or globe are foregrounded in Western or Western-facing responses to these texts. The paper models what such a “scaled-down” reading might look like, attending to Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger (1978) and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006), and their intricate relationships to the urban spaces of Harare and Johannesburg, respectively. At stake in these analyses are opportunities to identify what Jacques Rancière terms dissensus, or political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 310
Author(s):  
Felipe Cervera

This article stages the silent adventure of watching theatre about Singapore Malays and reading Jacques Rancière in Singapore. The argument blurs the real and the fictional, the voice of the author with the voice of the spectator, Rancière’s voice with the silence of Maya Raisha, a Malay-Muslim girl.  In doing so, the piece seeks to evidence that as a consequence of the regulatory nature of performance in Singapore, more than creating a moment of disruption against the normative sphere, silence evidences the instrumentality that ‘speaking up’ has in the normativity of the city-state. The piece is written as the performative chronicle of an intellectual adventure that took place between 2012 and 2013, when alongside reading Rancière’s work in detail, the author moved to Singapore and watched Teater Ekamatra’s Not Counted (2012) and The Necessary Stage’s Best Of (2012-3).


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 43-72
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Selgas

The purpose of this article is to analyze how a selection of texts by Venezuelan authors Celeste Olalquiaga, Yolanda Pantin and Arturo Uslar Pietri, each produced in different historical stages of Venezuela, represent space as a textual-image. This representation of space as a textual-image portrays both its contemporaneity and a series of effects that stem from memory and the historical configuration of the city, to the suggestion of new ways of seeing and feeling at a given space. To answer this hypothesis, the corpus will be analyzed by articulating theoretical aspects of the visible and the enunciable (Jacques Rancière), and the idea of the generation of images based on the text’s textuality (Luz Horne). Taking these theoretical approaches as a starting point, it will be argued that by remediating Realism the study corpus conveys space as an image that both portrays its contemporaneity, and seeks to condense the affects induced by a determinate space such as the city of Caracas.


Author(s):  
Leander Scholz

Der Aufsatz geht der These nach, daß die Fundierung der politischen Theorie in einer ästhetischen Theorie bei Jacques Rancière eine Aktualisierung der Losung der Brüderlichkeit aus der Französischen Revolution darstellt. Diese Aktualisierung der Brüderlichkeit als »ästhetische Gemeinschaft« erlaubt es Rancière, an den Klassenbegriff von Marx anzuschließen, ohne die damit verbundene Gemeinschaftserfahrung begrifflich bestimmen und damit an positive Merkmale binden zu müssen. Weil Rancière seine Demokratietheorie vor allem als eine Interventionstheorie angelegt hat, soll die »ästhetische Gemeinschaft« im Unterschied zum Klassenbegriff es ermöglichen, eine prinzipiell unabgeschlossene Reihe von politischen Subjektivierungsprozessen zu denken. Um diese These zu schärfen, wird Rancières Demokratietheorie mit der von Jacques Derrida verglichen, der auf ganz ähnliche Weise das Demokratische der Demokratie in einem Streit gegeben sieht, der jenseits von demokratischen Spielregeln stattfindet, die Losung der Brüderlichkeit jedoch für überaus problematisch hält.<br><br>This article argues that the foundation of political theory in aesthetics by Jacques Rancière can be seen as an actualization of the slogan of fraternalism during the French Revolution. This actualization of fraternalism as »aesthetic community« gives Rancière the possibility to operate with the Marxian concept of classes without positively defining the experience of community. Because Rancière understands democracy as the chance for political intervention, the concept of an »aesthetic community« (as opposed to the traditional concept of classes) allows him to posit an endless process of political subjectification. To sharpen this argument, the article compares Rancière’s understanding of democracy to Jacques Derrida’s, who also focuses on a democratic struggle beyond democratic rules, but is very skeptical about the slogan of fraternalism.


Author(s):  
Paul Niell

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (24) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Chirsty Beatriz Najarro Guzmán

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-784X.2015v15n24p23Entre a realidade e sua representação imagética, intervém a subjetividade de quem capta essa realidade, cujas condições intelectuais, sociais e culturais se articulam para a configuração analógica e dessemelhante do rosto imagético, conforme as considerações de Jacques Rancière sobre a natureza das imagens. Nesse sentido, não só se contesta a existência de um discurso único sobre um evento histórico, mas também a univocidade de tal evento. Levando isso em consideração, o documentário 1932: cicatriz en la memoria (2005), dirigido por Carlos Hernríquez Consalvi, para o Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (MUPI) de El Salvador, apresenta uma narrativa que compreende o levante popular e etnocídio cultural de 1932, como a semente do Partido Comunista (PC) salvadorenho, ao mesmo tempo em que na entrelinha se tece uma contra-narrativa, cuja linha de pensamento vai no sentido contrário, colocando o indígena como protagonista, contestando o discurso oficial sobre os eventos.


Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.


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