Conceptualización teórica y referentes para la conservación del patrimonio paisajístico histórico-cultural en América Latina

el objetivo de este artículo es sustentar la conceptualización teórica y referenciar los fundamentos vinculantes y no vinculantes en la conservación de los paisajes históricos culturales para los territorios latinoamericanos. La revisión sobre las declaraciones en convenciones internacionales, tanto en Europa como América Latina, sobre las temáticas del paisaje histórico, paisaje cultural y conservación del patrimonio, abren una perspectiva de entendimiento sobre la concepciónde ideas y referencias clave que, junto al desarrollo de constructos conceptuales, guían hacia una fundamentación de nuevos caminos para la interpretación y fundamentación de la conservación del patrimonio paisajístico latinoamericano.Abstract: The main objective is to support the conceptualization and to reference the binding and non-binding documents to conserve Latin American cultural historical landscapes. The review on the declarations in international conventions, both in Europe and Latin America, on themes of historical landscape, cultural landscape and heritage conservation, they open a perspective of understanding on the conception of ideas and key references that, together with the development of conceptual constructs, they guide to think on new paths for the interpretation and basis of conservation of Latin American landscape heritage.Key words: Latin America; Culture; History; Landscape heritage; Historical-cultural landscape.

Aesthetic Styles and the Occupation of Space in the “Places You’ll Pray” Photo Series

This paper analyzes a series of photographs that feature Muslim Americans praying in various public locations. In the “Places You’ll Pray” series, photographer Sana Ullah employs attractive settings along with framing, lighting, angle and colors to emphasize that the Islamic practice of prayer is not only an act that induces feelings of tranquility but also a beautiful practice that belongs within American public spaces. Through the policing of the sensory realm, the complex experiences of Muslims are generally over-simplified or made invisible in the media. This article explores how Muslim creators use aesthetics to shift the larger sensory realm of what is considered attractive, beautiful and valued in American society. As these photos circulate through social media and other digital spaces, Ullah and the photo subjects use the occupation of physical and digital spaces to assert that Muslim lives and Islamic values belong in the American landscape.

In search of America’s old covered bridges

America’s first documented wooden covered bridge was erected at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1805. Hundreds were constructed within two decades and at least 10,000 by the later 1800s. As settlers moved West, broad rivers were crossed with inventive structures incorporating timber trusses ingeniously developed by carpenters. Called covered bridges because of the roof and siding needed to protect the timber trusses, they became ubiquitous features on the American landscape. Over the past two centuries, most covered bridges were lost to flood, ice, arson, lightening, decay, as well as “progress,” replaced by “modern” iron, concrete, and steel spans. Of some 700 covered bridges remaining, many are mere replicas of their original forms no longer supported by timber trusses. Genuine historic bridges remain largely from the last half of the 1800s while civic boosterism has led to claims of earlier dates with often questionable authenticity. This essay presents three wooden covered bridges constructed in the 1820s along a 10-mile stretch of the Wallkill River in New Paltz, New York. Of the three, only Perrine’s Bridge, constructed first in 1821 and covered in 1822, is still standing with intact Burr timber trusses. Perrine’s is an iconic structure with exceptional heritage value because of authentic re-building and restoration in 1834, 1846, 1917, and 1968. Using documentary records, this essay establishes an accurate intertwined chronology for the three bridges, detailing nineteenth century building practices and contentious mid-twentieth century struggles pitting preservationists wanting authentic restoration against those wanting removal.

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

This book examines the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth-century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural world that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, midcentury bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promulgated in a variety of popular literary genres, all of which focused on landscape description and inculcated readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed “minor” or have even been forgotten in our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include those from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe) to major authors of the period who are now less familiar to us (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller) to those who are now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

“Both in and Out of the Game, and Watching and Wondering at it”

Contributor Bursztajn-Illingworth treats Lee’s montage as an example and critique of the Whitmanic montage tradition Sergei Eisenstein describes. Bursztajn-Illingworth turns to the response Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too,” gives to Whitman, a poem that is as much a protest as it is a declaration. Bursztajn-Illingworth regards Hughes’ poem as a precursor to Lee’s opening montage. She relates Lee’s recurring use of direct-facing photographs of black subjects that constitute something of a formal portrait to Hughes’s moves that gives voice to those in America who may not otherwise have one. Bursztajn-Illingworth contends that Lee sets his portraits against an American landscape that refuses to give way to one experience. The land belongs to each of those Lee places in the center of his frame. In this way, Lee providing his audiences a sense of black presence in America, even if that presence stands outside the main narrative of the larger film.