A Man of Our Times: Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣbahānī’s Pioneering Vision of Male Love

The ghazal chapters of Muḥammad b. Dāwūd al-Iṣbahānī’s poetry anthology Kitāb al-Zahrah include 109 brief poems attributed to baʿḍ ahl hādhā al-ʿaṣr (a Man of Our Times). Ibn Dāwūd has conventionally been assumed to be the author of these poems. The “Man of Our Times” poems stand out among ‘Abbāsid ghazal because of their focus on justice, their appeals to reason, and their depiction of brotherly friendship (ikhā’) imbued with passionate love (hawā). Moreover, their repurposing of motifs from the poetic canon, such as the lover’s desert wanderings and nature’s lamentation in sympathy with him, adds to their tone of erudition. This gives the impression that the relationship they describe is an intense friendship between educated men of similar age. As with other early ʿAbbāsid bodies of ghazal, the poems can be categorized according to rhetorical function. For the “Man of Our Times” poems, these subcategories are 1) personal messages, 2) aphorisms, 3) petitions for justice, 4) alienation narratives, and 5) urban narratives.

Tracks to gay elsewheres: cultural attachment and spatial imaginaries

This article considers how cultural narratives of queer migration to urban centres are understood through media and cultural references that mark specific non-urban places and times. Through an analysis of queer migration narratives in Smalltown Boy (1984), a song and music video by UK band Bronski Beat, and Boytown (2012), its suburban Sydney reimagining by artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham and DJ Stephen Allkins, I argue that the interconnections between visual, media and cultural artefacts are not merely an additive way to understand queer cultural geographies but rather signal intertwined geographic and aesthetic registers. In Boytown, the explicitly gay lyrics and imagery of Smalltown Boy are paired with other songs and music videos that connote queerness but also directly relate to suburban images of youthful alienation. The attachment to urban narratives and images is supplemented by this distinctly suburban attachment. In this article, I argue that conventional statistical figurations of changes to gay ghettoisation and now well-established critiques of queer urbanity are usefully combined and expanded by considering cultural attachment. This article demonstrates the generative intersection of creative geographies and geographies of sexualities attuned to the queer suburban.

Manufacturing urban identities: The emergence of Auckland’s and Wellington’s ‘character’ in New Zealand tourism film

Since its inception, New Zealand film production has often been characterized by a strong focus on the promotion and marketing of local scenic locations. However, over the last few decades and simultaneously with New Zealand’s rapidly increasing urbanization rates, urban narratives have gained prominence in the cinematic representation of the country, gradually becoming important aspects of national tourism marketing campaigns. This article first provides an overview of New Zealand tourism film’s dynamics of production and recurring themes and narratives from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. It then focuses on Toehold on a Harbour and This Auckland – tourism films produced by the government-led New Zealand National Film Unit and released respectively in 1967 and 1966 – and identifies a turning point in the manufacturing of local urban narratives and in New Zealand urban tourism marketing. My critical and textual analysis of these two case studies notably relies on the examination of archival documents related to their production and on an interview with This Auckland’s director Hugh Macdonald. It ultimately shows how the emergence of ‘cities with a character’ as a tourism marketing tool was in fact a carefully planned, articulated and years-long government-driven strategy.

A search for new urban narratives in the era of globalization: The case of urban sociology in Japan

This article aims to describe the recent changes in urban sociology in Japan, especially by focusing on dominant urban narratives and their historical background. Japanese cities have rushed through a compressed modernity since the early 20th century. The sweeping crisis in the 21st century can be regarded partially as one of its consequences. New urban crises such as disparity and poverty, loss of habitat, internal populism, and various risks are emerging. At the same time, various challenges unique to cities are also rising. Incremental and contingent restructuring has been urged through a process of both merging and colliding of ‘the persistent’ and ‘the newly generated’ factors inside of cities. How do we imagine a sustainable form of cities through repositioning them in an uncertain future? More incisive urban research is now demanded to explain the relation between the social, political, cultural, and material factors in a city.

Spaces of Dependence and Emancipation in Architectural and Urban Narration, a Case Study: Plac Żołnierza Polskiego and Plac Solidarności in Szczecin

Central and Eastern European countries were subjugated to the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century. In this new political environment, defined as the period of dependency, the concept of space gained a new denotation as a space of dependence, in both social and physical terms. The political changes that took place after 1989 enabled these spaces to be emancipated. In this work, we aim to delineate the complex relationship between architecture and politics from the perspective of spaces of dependence and their emancipation. Through a case study of two squares, plac Żołnierza Polskiego (the Square of the Polish Soldier) and plac Solidarności (Solidarity Square) in Szczecin, we gained insights into the processes and strategies that promoted their evolution into spaces of emancipation within architectural and urban narratives. Szczecin’s space of dependence was created by an authoritarian state that had a monopoly on defining architecture and urban planning in the country and the state as a whole. In a process orchestrated by economic factors, as well as the scale of architectural and urban degradation, the squares under discussion have transitioned from spaces of dependency to spaces of emancipation. As a result, an architectural-urban structure characterized by new cultural and identity values has been created.