Manchukuo voices: re-interpreting a monumental space in Northeast China (1932–1945)

This article revisits Japan's empire-building in Northeast China through the construction of and reactions to the Daidō hiroba 大同広場 (Plaza of Great Unity) in Shinkyō, showing how Chinese and Japanese challenged the top-down attempt for building a totalitarian empire. These re-interpretations and definitions of Hiroba unveiled the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of Manchukuo society that cannot be fully grasped in a nation-state framework. Moreover, their voices challenged the previous depiction of such imperial monumental space as the physical materialization of imperial governmentality but a contested site where individuals challenged the official vision of Manchukuo. This article examines documents ranging from governmental documents to works of literature in both Chinese and Japanese. Compared to Japanese planners' vision of the Hiroba as a site of governmentality, visitors and local residents held differing interpretations of this space: some Japanese disapproved the attempt to reframe the urban space by a totalitarian regime, and many Chinese redefined the meaning of this “utopian” urban space to accord with their own tradition and everyday life.

FORMATION OF UKRAINIAN MEMORIAL AND MONUMENTAL SPACE IN CANADA

The article is devoted to the study of the process of formation of the Ukrainian memorial and monumental space in Canada. The study is based on written (information leaflets, programs of events, materials from the Government of Canada, documents of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine [CP(b)U]), pictorial (photo images of monuments), electronic (materials from the official websites of Ukrainian embassies in Canada and Canadian embassies in Ukraine, public associations of Ukrainians in Canada) sources. They showed that in Canada, more than twenty monuments are dedicated to the iconic subjects of the Ukrainian history. They are located in five provinces – Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, which are places of compact residence of Ukrainians. It is shown that the monuments are dedicated to important events of national history, namely: emigration, the Holodomor, as well as prominent writers and poets. Six memorials commemorate the victims of the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, and four monuments honour the figure Taras Shevchenko. All, except one memorial, were installed in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The culmination of the activity of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada took place at this time. The initiative to erect monuments in most cases belonged to the Ukrainian community. Funding was provided by private donations, which indicates the existence of an internal need to create their own symbolic space. The unveiling of each monument was accompanied by the mass of people, and Canadian high-ranking officials were often present, which demonstrates the organic fit of the Ukrainian memory into the all-Canadian one. It is noted that several monuments were donated to the Ukrainian Canadian community by the Soviet government on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Such actions testified to attempts to expand the Soviet Union’s influence on the Ukrainian diaspora. Thus, the community of millions of Ukrainians in Canada has not only preserved its language, religion, and traditions, but also outlined the visual space of its own history through the installation of monuments. This strengthened their self-identification with the Ukrainian people and their ethnic homeland.

THE GATE COMPLEX OF PLANCIA MAGNA IN PERGE: A CASE STUDY IN READING BILINGUAL SPACE

Urban landscapes in the Roman world were covered in written text, from monumental building inscriptions to smaller, more personal texts of individual accomplishment and commemoration. In the East, Greek dominated these written landscapes, but Latin also appeared with some frequency, especially in places where a larger Roman audience was expected, such as major cities and Roman colonies. When Latin and Greek appear alongside each other, whether in the same inscription or across a single monumental space, we might ask what benefits the sponsor of the monument hoped to gain from such a bilingual presentation, and whether each language was serving the same function. This paper considers the monumental entrance to the Pamphylian city of Perge as a case study for exploring this relationship between bilingual inscriptions and civic space. By surveying the display of both Greek and Latin on this entrance, examining how the entrance interacted with the broader linguistic landscape of Perge, and considering the effects that each language would have had on the viewer, I show that the use of language, and the variation between the languages, served not only to communicate membership in both Greek and Roman societies but also to delineate civic space from imperial space, both physically and symbolically.

Ruin dynamics: Architectural destruction and the production of sedentary space at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution

Monumental architecture in Levantine sites such as Jerf el-Ahmar, Göbekli Tepe, or Jericho appears to play an important role in place-making practices and in the organization of a possibly hierarchical sociopolitical life at the very beginning of the Neolithic. This paper focuses on an underdeveloped aspect of this phenomenon: all these buildings were ritually destroyed in a highly spectacular and costly fashion. Their ruins were purposefully curated and accumulated. Far from being static remains, these structures are the meaningful result of the dynamic re-production of monumental space and of its inscription in the landscape. Understanding these actions calls for decentering the dominant vision of architectural valuation associated primarily with ideas of “creation” or “heritage.” Architectural destruction, I shall finally claim, may well be more significant than construction for understanding the Neolithic consolidation of sedentism in the Near East.

The Production of Space in Latin Literature

This volume addresses, through a range of different authors and genres, Latin literature’s psychogeographical engagement with space. The volume’s title alludes to Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace of 1974, a seminal work in what is now called ‘the spatial turn’ in the humanities. Lefebvre stresses that space is to be included among the sites of hegemonic power and ideological contestation in a society and should not simply be thought of as a neutral container for human action, the setting in which it takes place. The contributions to this volume focus mainly on movement, or the mobile subject, in the experience, and making, of space rather than on the fixed monumental space within which that subject moves and acts. The contributions cover a broad terrain, both temporally (from Catullus to St Augustine) and generically (lyric, epic, elegy, satire, epistolography, historiography, autobiography, antiquarianism). They discuss the distinctively Roman experiences of space, and their intersections with empire, urbanism, identity, ethics, exile, and history. From a range of different angles they consider the specifically literary modes of the engagement with space in different genres and authors and pay special attention to the ideological stakes of this engagement.

Monument to anti-monumentality: the space of the National Museum Australia

This article explores the space of the National Museum Australia as a complex interplay between different spatial levels, and the way in which this interplay enables the NMA to foreground internal tensions architecturally. I am also interested in the way these internal tensions contribute towards creating representations of spaces as politically charged. I argue that the space of the NMA should be read as riven with tension between monumental space and what I refer to as protean monumental space. The tension between the monumental and the protean monumental is always already entailed within the spatial practice and spatial representation of producing the NMA’s space. This tension is internal and central to the museum itself, yet it is a tension that leads to a production of a ‘third space’ that is already predicated by the other two, or is revealed by the experiencing body of the museum visitor.