scholarly journals “Here Be Dragons:” The Tyranny of the Cityscape in James Baldwin’s Intimate Cartographies

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Emma Cleary
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spatial Relationships ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Complex Image ◽  
City Space ◽  
Urban Scene ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The City

The skyline of New York projects a dominant presence in the works of James Baldwin—even those set elsewhere. This essay analyzes the socio-spatial relationships and cognitive maps delineated in Baldwin’s writing, and suggests that some of the most compelling and intense portrayals of New York’s psychogeographic landscape vibrate Baldwin’s text. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin’s highly personalized accounts of growing up in Harlem and living in New York map the socio-spatial relationships at play in domestic, street, and blended urban spaces, particularly in the title essay, “Dark Days,” and “Here Be Dragons.” Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country (1962), outlines a multistriated vision of New York City; its occupants traverse the cold urban territory and struggle beneath the jagged silhouette of skyscrapers. This essay examines the ways in which Baldwin composes the urban scene in these works through complex image schemas and intricate geometries, the city’s levels, planes, and perspectives directing the movements of its citizens. Further, I argue that Baldwin’s dynamic use of visual rhythms, light, and sound in his depiction of black life in the city, creates a vivid cartography of New York’s psychogeographic terrain. This essay connects Baldwin’s mappings of Harlem to an imbricated visual and sonic conception of urban subjectivity, that is, how the subject is constructed through a simultaneous and synaesthetic visual/scopic and aural/sonic relation to the city, with a focus on the movement of the body through city space.

Building Small Worlds in Urban Spaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 260-282
Author(s):  
Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Historically Black ◽  
Circular Economy ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
At Risk Children ◽  
Collaborative Community ◽  
The City

Chapter twelve calls for a renewal of the “small is beautiful” movement and explores how the benefits of growing up in a village can be recreated in urban settings. The author presents E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, and its relationship to contemporary concepts, such as sustainability and the circular economy. that focus on sustaining human-scaled communities rather than on growing the GDP. The author describes and compares two initiatives that mobilize the strength of collaborative community to benefit at risk children and youth. The first is set in the city of Naples, in southern Italy, where a parish priest named Antonio Loffredo tapped the energy and aspirations of young people to build a collaborative community cooperative in an inner city neighbourhood called La Sanita’, as an alternative to the lure of organized crime. The second is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), founded in the historically black neighbourhood of New York City by Geoffrey Canada, to prove that black children, given a fair start, could achieve the American dream. While similar in many ways, each initiative was shaped by and reflects the macrosystemic values of the surrounding culture.

City Space, Technology, Popular Culture: The Modernism of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUAN A. SUÁREZ
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Suspension Bridges ◽  
Space Technology ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
High Rise ◽  
City Space ◽  
Charles Sheeler ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Reputedly, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis – the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.

Book Reviews

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Future Perspectives ◽  
Brookings Institution ◽  
Temple University ◽  
City Space ◽  
Census 2000 ◽  
The City

The Urban Revolution, by Henri Lefebvre, translated by Robert Bononno with a Forward by Neil Smith. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, by Andy Merrifield. New York: Routledge, 2002. The Promise of the City: Space, Identity and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought, by Kian Tajbakhsh. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Organizing Access to Capital: Advocacy and the Democratization of Financial Institutions, by Gregory Squires (ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000, by Bruce Katz and Robert E. Lang (eds.). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. Understanding the City, Contemporary and Future Perspectives, by John Eade and Christopher Mele (eds.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002.

scholarly journals City of New York: 104 pages in beautiful natural color

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Power
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
New York ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Unlimited Access ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
American Society ◽  
The City

My roots are showing: as a girl from out around the bay who “idolized New York all out of proportion” – to quote Woody Allen’s Isaac in Manhattan – a sense of aspiration informs this project. Growing up in Newfoundland, I had two tenuous connections to New York: my mother voraciously read the american society bible “Town and Country” and my father travelled to New York twice in the 1960’s to visit his sisters, Mary and Bride, who as young women moved to Brooklyn from Chapel Arm, Newfoundland in the 1940’s. As a child ever envious that my aunts had unlimited access to such a cosmopolitan place, I was drawn to the idealistic notion of New York as a “magic city.” I idolized Mary, a fierce woman who was my template for what I imagined was the archetypal New Yorker: brash, quick-witted, uncompromising. As a child, I witnessed her throw the “chin flick” and it thrilled me. It was such a brazenly profane gesture from an old school God-fearing Catholic. And it was so New York! She remained close to my father until he died from complications due to Alzheimers in 2000. Now 95, and also with Alzheimers, she lives in an old age home in the same Newfoundland town where I drifted through the pre-fab hallways of my high school and plotted my escape to the magic city. But I would never have the cojones to move to New York like Mary and Bride, even though opportunities presented themselves to me. To this day, I remain an outsider: roaming the city with a camera, often strolling by Robert Frank’s house on the slim chance I might find him sitting outside – I hear it’s a habit of his. Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter: I worship them in the same way I worshipped Aunt Mary. Their traces remain on the streets I walk: ghosts that whisper sweetly while I look forward and backward through my lens, caught in a temporal loop, searching for a city that I’m not sure exists, except in my head. New York looms large in the collective imagination and we all have our versions of it. This is mine.

All for the Union

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The City

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

scholarly journals Assuming Responsibility

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Harry F. Recher
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Youth Violence ◽  
Seat Belt ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
State Control ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Chain Link ◽  
A Chain ◽  
The City

When i was growing up in New York City during the 1940s, people (ordinary people anyway) assumed responsibility for their own actions. That was back when falling on an icy sidewalk meant being careless and not that the City had failed in its duty of care; when you could go fishing in the local park without first climbing a chain link fence designed to stop kids from falling into the water and their parents suing the County for negligence; or, when you could ride a bicycle without a helmet and there were see-saws in the park alongside slippery-dips higher than the shoulders of a five year old. I am sure it was the same in Australia. Maybe some of the changes in social attitudes and the proliferation of rules and regulations are good things. Maybe it is good to wear a helmet when riding a bike; it certainly makes sense to use the seat belt when driving in a car and maybe kids should not be allowed to risk life and limb sliding down a 2.5 metre high slippery-dip. What is not good is the increasing refusal to assume responsibility, to be litigious, and the growth of the Nanny State where individuals are denied responsibility for their own actions and we are all dumbed down by the expectation of authorities that we will all behave and respond like the least intelligent, least educated, most anti-social and most physically inept member of society. I find this trend to state control of my freedom to choose what I do, how I do it and when I do it frustrating and annoying; for example, I am not allowed to carry a pocket knife so I can eat an apple for lunch or open a bag of crisps because of an irrational fear of youth violence in Sydney and politicians needing to appear ?tough? on crime. But not wanting to assign or assume responsibility for individual actions has more serious implications; ones that impact significantly on the future of global biodiversity and human survival.

scholarly journals City of New York: 104 pages in beautiful natural color

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Power
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
New York ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Unlimited Access ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
American Society ◽  
The City

My roots are showing: as a girl from out around the bay who “idolized New York all out of proportion” – to quote Woody Allen’s Isaac in Manhattan – a sense of aspiration informs this project. Growing up in Newfoundland, I had two tenuous connections to New York: my mother voraciously read the american society bible “Town and Country” and my father travelled to New York twice in the 1960’s to visit his sisters, Mary and Bride, who as young women moved to Brooklyn from Chapel Arm, Newfoundland in the 1940’s. As a child ever envious that my aunts had unlimited access to such a cosmopolitan place, I was drawn to the idealistic notion of New York as a “magic city.” I idolized Mary, a fierce woman who was my template for what I imagined was the archetypal New Yorker: brash, quick-witted, uncompromising. As a child, I witnessed her throw the “chin flick” and it thrilled me. It was such a brazenly profane gesture from an old school God-fearing Catholic. And it was so New York! She remained close to my father until he died from complications due to Alzheimers in 2000. Now 95, and also with Alzheimers, she lives in an old age home in the same Newfoundland town where I drifted through the pre-fab hallways of my high school and plotted my escape to the magic city. But I would never have the cojones to move to New York like Mary and Bride, even though opportunities presented themselves to me. To this day, I remain an outsider: roaming the city with a camera, often strolling by Robert Frank’s house on the slim chance I might find him sitting outside – I hear it’s a habit of his. Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter: I worship them in the same way I worshipped Aunt Mary. Their traces remain on the streets I walk: ghosts that whisper sweetly while I look forward and backward through my lens, caught in a temporal loop, searching for a city that I’m not sure exists, except in my head. New York looms large in the collective imagination and we all have our versions of it. This is mine.

scholarly journals Being-in-the-City: A Phenomenological Approach to Technological Experience 

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Wasiak
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Body ◽  
City Space ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Technological Experience ◽  
The City

This paper examines dynamics surrounding the negotiation and articulation of the body-technology relationship necessarily characterizing the experience of being-in-the-city. Nowhere is everyday experience more mediated by technology than in the city. Being-in-the-city involves being embodied by technology at levels ranging from micro to macro. Despite the fact that technologies are constantly evolving in city space, relations with technology tend to become quickly normalized — mundane — transparent. Given this normalization as well as the sheer pervasiveness of technology in constituting city space it is important to examine the ways in which technology comes to shape the experiential contexts of everyday life. In urban space, technologies result is new sights to be seen, sounds to be heard, smells to be smelt, textures to be felt, as well as altogether new modes of experiencing the everyday. In exploring the dynamics surrounding the ongoing, multi-layered negotiation and articulation of the body-technology relationship necessarily characterizing the experience of being-in-the-city a phenomenological perspective is adopted. Heidegger’s writing on technology, Merleau-Ponty’s writing on embodiment and perception, and Don Ihde’s writing on the body and technology contribute to a theoretical framework for a phenomenological examination of the experiential implications of being-in-the-city, a technological ecology.

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