A Spectral Spectacle

After Amsterdam’s late medieval Catholic monasteries were surrendered to the Protestant government in 1578, four of these properties were converted into an orphanage, mental asylum, and gender-specific reformatories respectively before the turn of the century. Portals with Dutch Mannerist expressions were installed at the principal entrances as a publicly visible feature of modernisation for the repurposed complexes. This essay is a study of these architectural objects and their socio-political value for the city’s philanthropic campaign that affirmed middle-class power. It argues that the portals, completed with narrative relief panels and didactic inscriptions, were a means for Amsterdam’s authorities to redefine the spectacle of social marginality. Once a concrete sight of panhandlers and vagrants occupying the urban landscape, to the general population underclass visibility became an abstract image of civic discipline. Such an image enabled sequestered and disappeared lives to reappear, with a spectral quality integral to Foucault’s analysis of modern society’s compulsion to stow away indigent bodies. Considering the seventeenth-century Dutch moral geography of moderating wealth through philanthropy, such a ‘spectral spectacle’ paralleled the Baroque theatricality of Counter-Reformation Rome as a spatial experience that advanced a more secular mode of devotion to the community.

Moving toward ‘home’: love and relationships through war and displacement

The processual nature of affinal relationships is well established in Africanist anthropology. This article calls for greater attention to spatial considerations and proposes the concept of movement as an integral dimension of understanding affinal relationships. This observation springs from reflections on how the experiences of displacement and return in northern Uganda have reshaped constructions of ‘home’ in relation to love and intimate relationships. Reflecting on ethnographic research over ten years in northern Uganda where a two-decade-long war (1986–2006) occurred, the article examines movements in relationships between public and private spaces against the backdrop of wider societal movements from the spatial moral geography of camp to home. It reflects on how the spatial dynamics of camps entailed profound disruptions to ‘normal’ gendered orderings of life and how ‘home’ is being reconfigured in the aftermath of war.

Local Television News and Undocumented Migration: a historical and moral geography perspective of the U.S. - Mexico borderlands

Este artigo estende o quadro conceitual da geografia moral para analisar reportagens locais sobre imigrantes não documentados e a imigração durante as décadas de 1970 e 1980 na faixa Arizona-Sonora, de 2.000 milhas, na fronteira dos EUA com o México. Utilizando pesquisa arquivística e análise de conteúdo qualitativa como metodologias, os resultados revelaram a presença de três temas dominantes nos noticiários relacionados à imigração indocumentada: 1) repórteres retrataram imigrantes não documentados de maneira estereotipada e negativa, usando termos como “pobre” e “criminoso”; 2) os repórteres discutiram a questão da imigração indocumentada com lentes nativistas e anti-imigrantes; 3) repórteres destacaram a presença de ativistas comunitários em ações de ajuda a imigrantes sem documentos. Os temas identificados evidenciam geografias morais concorrentes sendo construídas no chão e na tela.

Cultural Disenfranchisement and the Politics of Stigma

This article focuses attention on the pivotal role that stigmatization processes play on both legal and discursive fronts, that is, in justifying restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities and in framing reactionary discourses in support of such measures. It argues that racial stigmatization is the key component in ongoing efforts to exclude Black and Latino citizens from full cultural citizenship in the United States, setting the groundwork for punitive and exclusionary policies aimed at disenfranchising and undermining their political agency. While legal documents record the rights and privileges accorded citizens within the nation’s physical spaces, the politics of stigma, I contend, maps a moral geography: it sets the contours and limits of communal obligation, disrupting affective bonds and attachments that can spur social change. As an instrument of power, stigmatizing processes today are helping to reinstate the kinds of policies and attitudes that the Voting Rights Act intended to redress, engendering a hostile climate for Blacks and Latinos in the United States and threatening hard-won civil rights and political gains.