THE CITY AND LITERATURE
Workshop Four: 11-13 May 2005
URBAN FUTURES
Venues: 116, BG02, SOAS
Project Leaders:
Research Assistant:
Dr Stephen Dodd (Japanese, SOAS)
Dr Katarzyna Zechenter (SSEES, UCL)
Dr Ross Forman
This is the fourth and final workshop of the research project "The City and
Literature", run by Dr Stephen Dodd, Dr Ross Forman, and Dr Katarzyna
Zechenter under the aegis of the AHRB Centre for Asian and African Literatures.
The first three workshops were devoted respectively to "City Limits," "Cities
across Time," and "Urban Bodies." The aim of this workshop is to discuss how
the future of the city is envisaged in different places, cultures, and periods.
Research questions include:
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What is the future for the city in literary and cultural representations?
How is technology altering the conception of the city and its location in
space?
How do cities embody and supersede national or regional identities?
Why has consideration of the urban future often been relegated to science
fiction?
Why is there so much investment in and nostalgia for the small, familiar
towns of the past?
How is the relationship between the city and the citizen evolving?
ABSTRACTS:
Oluwatoyin Adepoju (Comparative Literature, SOAS)
The City as Cosmographic Space
This paper explores the short story “The Stars Below” by the Nigerian writer Ken
Saro-Wiwa in relation to the science fiction story “Tumithak of the Corridors” by
the American writer Charles Tanner within the framework of Plato's Parable of
the Cave in order to demonstrate how writers from very different spatiotemporal
matrices have explored the image of the city as a space within which
transcultural cosmographic frameworks can be imaginatively realised.
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Within these narratives, the city becomes a space through which individual
consciousness is transcended to integrate an identification with the human race
as an expression of the strivings that validate the humanity of the individual.
The distinctions in setting and characterisation between both stories are unified
through their relationship, at a level of deep thematic value, with Plato's Parable
of the Cave which remains aparadigmtic exploration of the relationship between
individual and group consciousness in the quest for truth.
Lizzy Attree (Africa, SOAS)
AIDS, Space and the City in Phasawane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow
By examining how urban and rural economies of sex and power differ, I will
locate AIDS narratives in literature about the city. In researching whether AIDS
re-defines the nation of Africa under new markers and signifiers of experience,
suffering, myths and taboos, I also will examine whether AIDS is seen to be a
local, urban-based phenomenon, forming part of a literary tradition of cityspaces. It is also possible to ask whether AIDS will become an overwhelming
narrative of the future. The literary landscape in Johannesburg, is dissected in
Phaswane Mpe’s book Welcome to our Hillbrow which describes a small
neighbourhood within the urban sprawl of South Africa‚s richest city, a city of
“gold, milk, honey and bile” (p.56). The narrative encompasses the sexual
relations of friends in the city, their movements to the village and abroad, the
markers of sexuality and power are overturned by the importation of disease
from “outside” the accepted fabric of society. I will explore how AIDS redefines
space both in human relationships and within the city, particularly in relation to
modernity and the corruption of the city. The home, the sickbed, the hospital,
the street, the cemetery: are there now “no-go” areas, or neighbourhoods ˆ is
“plague-like” contamination associated with particular places and people, or just
in the air? How are these multiple representations of the city related and
problematised in the text? And how does AIDS overshadow visions of the city ‘s
future?
Delphine Bénézet (Literature and Film Studies, Montreal)
Convergence and Transnationalism in Contemporary Urban Imaginaries
Novelists and artists hardly ever create an imaginary city and its correlated
urban imaginary without acknowledging more or less openly the work of others.
Yet many other phenomena influence their work, such as the environment or the
type of society in which they live. In addition, the international circulation of
cultural artefacts, such as films and novels, definitively transforms the way in
which literary authors imagine and conceive the city. If frontiers between genres
and cultural forms continue to fade with increasing globalisation, what is the
future for the city in literary and cultural representations?
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Two important phenomena help understanding the changes that are actually
taking place: transnationalism and convergence. Transnationalism here refers to
the growing interrelationships and movements between literary and cultural
works originating from distinctive geographical areas. For example, magical
realism, which was originally circumscribed to authors from central or South
America, now permeates what would be considered mainstream literature. But
do these interrelationships and exchanges between culturally diverse
representations imply the disappearance of distinctions? Can similarities
between urban imaginaries be found? Are transnationalism and convergence
threatening the originality of novels written by different authors? Or do these
notions serve as interesting and subversive tools in the hands of highly conscious
and clever artists?
In order to answer these questions, I will limit this analysis to the close
interpretation of two novels: Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita,
Number9Dream by David Mitchell, and to samples of the artist Jody Zellen's
work. These sources are representative of the two concepts I aim to discuss. This
paper will show that convergence and transnationalism are essential concepts in
the analysis of contemporary tendencies in recent cultural and literary
productions. I will also argue that these concepts should be considered to be at
the core of a growing intermediatic urban imaginary.
Li Lian Chee (Bartlett School, UCL)
Hotel Stories: Writing through the Fabric of the Raffles Hotel
This paper examines the relationship between the architectural encounter and
architectural writing/criticism. It asserts the need to bridge the gap between the
intimacy and materiality of such encounters with prevalent forms of architectural
criticism that privilege formal building attributes (for example, building history,
typology, construction techniques, design influences and the architect’s profile).
Consequently, such hermetic strategies exclude specific experiences, emotions
and relationships of different subjects/occupants.
How can the immediacy of the architectural encounter be critically imported into
the architectural text?
The paper looks at a larger research effort to develop alternative modes of critical
architectural writing to reflect the intimacy of encounter. It argues for a
relational and materially embodied approach to architectural writing. Taking an
interdisciplinary stance, it explores the potentials of experimental modes of
writing for architectural theory, history and criticism, and works across feminist
theories, women’s writing, postcolonial studies and recent philosophical ideas on
subjectivity. The paper is structured around the spaces of Singapore’s Raffles
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Hotel, a popular colonial edifice and draws on archival material, architectural
drawings, travel paraphernalia and contemporary observations. In emphasizing
the inadequacy of a formally-biased architectural criticism, it attempts to develop
context-sensitive methodologies, theoretical frameworks and textual formats that
reflect the varied materiality of the architectural encounter.
Nir Cohen (Film Studies, UCL)
Reel Dystopia: The Enemy Within in Two Tel Aviv Films of the Early 1990s
This paper examines the nature of dystopia in two Tel Aviv films of the early
1990s, Life According to Agfa (Assi Dayan, 1992) and Amazing Grace (Amos
Guttman, 1992). In particular, it focuses on the ways in which the city conveys
the apocalyptic mode that the films create.
The city of Tel Aviv has epitomized the Zionist dream since its foundation as a
modern garden suburb of Jaffa in 1909. The ideological foundations on which it
is firmly based have represented the Zionist wish for a Jewish sovereignty in a
modern, utopian city. Tel Aviv has adopted an image of a city without a past, a
counter-image to Jerusalem. Whereas the latter is traditionally perceived as a
place of superstition, backwardness, and theocracy, Tel Aviv has long since
laminated itself as the ultimate space of secularism, liberalism and progression.
But when the first cracks in the Zionist-Israeli master-narrative started to appear,
Tel Aviv, through its representations in the arts, and particularly on the screen,
was quick to address these changes. In a series of films made in the 1980s and
1990s Tel Aviv served as the most telling cultural “barometer” of the dying
utopian Zionist narrative.
Both Guttman and Dayan portray Tel Aviv as a diseased city, in which the
unified front of the Zionist utopia is long gone, and the ideals of “futurism” and
“progression” which stood at the heart of the first Hebrew city, have deteriorated
to a depiction of death and madness. Thus, both films offer a powerful allegory
for the decline of Zionism within which exiting connections between modernity
and collective ideas of social progress have become irreversibly unravelled.
Marius Mircea Crisan (Turin)
Some Literary Representations of the Central European City
In my paper, I am going to discuss the image of the Central European city as
reflected in the literatures of this area. The references are to several cities or
towns (even to a few villages) that were once a part of the Habsburg Empire
(references to cities or towns from Austria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine or
Slovenia). I will not analyse the way that a single town / city is reflected in
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literature, but some characteristics of several Central European cities, such as
peaceful interethnic cohabitation, multicultural dimension or the relation
between the capital city and the marginal towns / cities.
I think that the Austrian Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March is a pattern for
many issues of Central European literature. Roth’s model of the city is reflected
in several novels belonging to other literatures from this area. The city is
regarded in Roth’s novel in its complexity, as Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg
Empire, is the residence of some Austrian nobles devoted to the emperor who
still have the nostalgia of their Slovene origin. The places at the edge of the
empire reflect the features of the great city, but everything is smaller. In Roth’s
novel both the distant Ukrainian town and the Slovene village are reflections of
the way that the Austrian city is organized and at the same time, examples of the
multiethnic structure of the Empire. In novels of some Romanian authors such as
Ioan Slavici, Adriana Babeti, Mircea Mihaies, Mircea Nedelciu we find the same
relationship between the main city of the empire and the other cities or towns.
For instance the city of Timisoara has many similarities to Vienna (it is also called
“the little Vienna”) and the Viennese junior lieutenant Lamm, a character of the
book The Woman in Red by Adriana Babeti, Mircea Mihaies and Mircea Nedelciu,
notices the common points; but at the same time this character sees the
differences, as in the city of Banat all the buildings are one floor lower than in
Vienna.
In Central European literature, cities embody both national / regional identities
and multiethnic features. For instance, Ioan Slavici’s novel Mara shows us that
the main character of the book strives on the one hand to keep her Romanian
traditions and on the other her life interrelates with the German merchants who
are her business partners. On the one hand she sends her daughter to learn in a
Catholic monastery, and on the other she does not want to let her marry a young
German Catholic man. But Mara’s daughter, the young Romanian lady Persida,
learns in Lipova (a town of Banat) how to behave in Vienna, after she marries the
son of the Catholic merchant and goes together with him to the greatest Austrian
city. They speak both Romanian and German, and she often speaks German to
him when she wants to feel closer to him. They celebrate both German and
Romanian feasts together and learn each other’s tradition.
The nostalgia for the small, familiar towns of the past is another theme of the
Central European novel: in The Radetzky March, the young Austrian noble feels
nostalgia for the small Slovene town, which becomes (in his dream) a sort of a
pattern for the multiethnic structure of the Habsburg Empire. In the novel
Woman in Red the characters who live in the great cities of the USA cannot forget
the little towns from the West of Romania. In the novel Mara the young
characters will come back from Vienna to Lipova (the small town of Banat). In
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Central European literature, this nostalgia means, in my opinion, a return to
origins.
Dennitza Gabrakova
Shelving the City: Materializing the Past
In the present essay I would like to discuss some aspects of the urban future(s)
through the way they can be mirrored in the urban past(s). As concrete spatial
referents I would concentrate on the spaces, such as the museum, the library and
the cemetery, which all represent a materialization of the past. As specific literary
texts I would concentrate on the texts of Natsume Soseki (“The Tower of
London”, “The Carlyle Museum” and some of the “Spring Miscellani”, which are
staged in the city of London) and Nagai Kafu ("Tales of Paris").
In Natsume Soseki's works, we can see how the city of London, defamiliarized
through the foreign visitor's eye, appears as a fluid spatially unconceivable
entity. The only effective way of re-ordering and grasping this aspect of the
foreign city-London, appears to be from indoor spaces. Thus, “The Tower of
London” begins to work as a reverse condensate metaphor, or concave mirror
image of the city itself. In perceptions of the city through islets of its past, we can
find a close connection between re-staging of fantasies of the past and mere
material objects - relics. A parallel of this perception can be found in Nagai
Kafu's description of the cemeteries around Paris. The above analysis aims to
reveal a first level of the relationship between the city past and future - the way
the representations of the city past work as model of materializing and securing,
and eventually re-staging the vanishing.
By introducing some other passages of the above authors, I will introduce a
second level of the relationship city past-present, this time in the way the
memory of the foreign city is re-shaping the city contours not only in the private
realm of the interiority, but in the material concreteness of such private spaces as
the room or cabinet.
In the concluding part, I will apply the hints gathered from the above literary
analyses, to some instances of museum-ing cities or walling-in cities, as
suggested by some works of cultural studies and philosophy. In this light I will
re-consider such terms as simulacrum, spectacle and other visual experiences of
the city and juxtapose them with the uncanny presence/lack of noncommodified material objects-relics.
Raoul Granqvist (Modern Languages, Umea, Sweden)
The City Bus as a Cultural Icon: The Matatus of Nairobi
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Both as a complex popular culture configuration and a sociological city
phenomenon, the Matatu bus epitomizes the essentialdom of what constitutes
Nairobi city life. Any traveller to the city has been intrigued by its aggressive
presence in the streets and at the bus stops and no Nairobian remains halfhearted or indifferent when asked about its role in his or her daily life. The fact
that this vehicle and its entourage provoke so many divergent feelings and
arguments is ample evidence of course that for most people this operation
exceeds the primary role as one of Nairobi’s major means of transport and
communication. As an integrative cultural or interactive city phenomenon, it
holds a complexity of meanings; it ‘speaks’ the language of the urbanite and it IS
itself both a language and a medium. The Matatu concerns physically and
mentally practically everybody in the city, young and old; it reflects and is
refracted in most art forms and a variety of cultural domains. In this presentation
I will try to demonstrate ways in which it performs this dual part of being both a
carrier of meanings and a meaning in its own right. Examining the Matatu in his
way is like viewing a book both for its literary qualities and its esthetical form(at)
and reception history. As a text of a kind, it criss-crosses the visual, the auditory,
the literary, and the performative.
I distinguish three discursive modes through which the Matatu discourse is
represented in culture texts. It is the Matatu bus as a) an ideological text, b) a
moral text, and c) a youth culture text. This means, for instance, that as an
ideological figuration the bus may occur in literature, in graffiti, in comics, in
music forms, or in any transaction that combines such areas and others. It is a
polymorphous city text. For the purpose of this conference I will mainly deal
with literary representations examining their varied functions in Nairobi popular
fiction and novels such as Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Frances Harding (Africa, SOAS)
Transgressing Personal and Public Spatial Boundaries in Nigerian Video Movies
The Nigerian video-movie projects images of the urban environment as threatening spaces. It
suggests that individuals can gain access to personal wealth of the sort which is evidenced in
the urban environment through offering as sacrifice, other vulnerable human beings.
Collectively, the video-movie industry condemns this practice as a means to prosperity but
only after exhibiting an enticing array of material wealth - cars, clothes, houses, and a degree
of behaviour and relationships - secretive, murderous and sexual - that is seen as appropriate
to, and/or typical of, wealth and its use.
In this paper, I suggest that the presentation of urban space in these video-movies is as an
arena for the practice of violence. I consider four spatial arenas: the public space, the home,
the car, the private individual and suggest that the personal space of the individual can no
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longer be considered private but has become a public item susceptible to pre-meditated
violence whether in the private home or in various public and semi-public urban spaces.
The home video-movies genre form part of a discourse in which its processes of
creation can be seen as the 'play form of technology' and whose narratives follow
basic rules which can be endlessly repeated to provide new yarns with different
characters and different locations. However, like much 'play' — whether the
word is used to connote a drama or the games and imaginings of children — it is
also a rehearsal for a future. The play of children and the plays that are staged
dramas, create a forum in which different possibilities for action are exhibited.
The rules developed, agreed to and exhibited at this stage enable ideas of
sharing, of fair play and of the voluntary nature of engaging in rules for the
wider good — even when it means 'losing' the game — to be absorbed. If the
video-movie industry is the 'play form of technology', the future reality of the
urban space being rehearsed through their narratives and images is a violent and
transgressive one.
Eunju Hwang (Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, Essex)
Modern Primitivity in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Super-Cannes
J. G. Ballard shows that modern humans become more primitive with urban
technology unlike modern humans’ expectation. It is not surprising that the first
symptom of agoraphobia is shown in the late 19th century with sudden growth
of cities. Georg Simmel and Anthony Vidler notice that, the city, which is initially
made for the better life and happiness, actually makes people unhappier and
more primitive, and technological progress seems to be futile. In the luxurious
high-rise apartment block, in Ballard’s High-Rise, the social hierarchy is naturally
divided by the floor, as the highest penthouse means the highest class. This welldesigned building causes mayhem when there is technological malfunction. The
residents begin to show anxiety such as extreme self-isolation or violence. In
Super-Cannes, people who live in the super modern high tech complex engage
themselves in crimes such as robbery, paedophile sex and murder for mere
pleasure. Here, I would like to demonstrate that the psychology of characters is
not the cause of the urban disaster but it is imperative to understand the inner
psychology communicates with the outer landscape. Human beings neither fully
control their psychology nor surrender to the external landscape. In his novels,
Ballard shows that modern human beings continuously try to survive in the
situation adapting themselves to the new environment. However, I would like to
show that odd psychology of Ballard’s characters as positive since they are
voluntarily reacting to the new threat and vigorously looking for the way out.
The relationship between crimes and city will be also discussed.
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Leila Kamali (English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick)
‘Many Places at Once’: Memorial and the Mediated City in John Edgar Wideman’s
Philadelphia Fire
Philadelphia Fire, published in 1990, addresses the events of 1985, when a
Philadelphia row house was bombed by a police helicopter and 11 people,
including five children, were killed. The victims were members of an antiestablishment group called MOVE, who lived at the heart of the city, yet
repudiated traditionally ‘civic’ identifications and mores.
This novel, by African-American author John Edgar Wideman, wrestles with the
dilemma confronting any narrative which addresses historical events – whilst
narrative is vital in order to remember history’s victims, the search for a story can
easily compromise accurate representation of society’s most vulnerable. This
need for a narrative which memorialises, and which also represents everyday
experience, embodies a struggle, engendered by modernity, between what
Walter Benjamin has termed ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ memory.
While, according to Harry Harootunian, “the places of history are the cities”, the
struggle to find a narrative position which does not compromise historical truth
is intensified in this novel by the many narrated versions of the city offered by
television, by film and by history books, which can undermine any would-be
narrator’s subjective connection with the city and its life. These multiple fictions
based on the city serve, in turn, to form an urban experience which particularly
lends itself to mediation, so that the subject struggles to experience the city which
does not contain and perpetuate multiple imprints of its mediated or
fictionalised selves.
The author demonstrates the importance, particularly for the middle-class,
educated narrator, of connecting with a truly living city, which is neither closed
off in the dead language of the Western historical narrative, nor interrupted by
endlessly multiplying fictions of itself produced by visual media. It is only by
allowing space for the unheard voices of the disenfranchised, in particular those
of children living in poverty or who have been killed, that the narrator can hope
to avoid implicating himself in a narrative industry which profits from suffering.
Wideman’s concept of ‘Great Time’, based on an African understanding of
interdependence between the past, present and future, offers an alternative to
what Harootunian sees as modernity’s “fixity of the past and its capacity to yield
a historical knowledge that can reveal how the present developed from it”.
Wideman’s narrative works to allow the voices of the city’s living and dead to
suffuse his language, an exercise which requires the narrator’s ‘framing’ to
become as unobtrusive as possible, in order to reflect events as both transient
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and recorded, and to overcome any supremacy of narrator over narrated, or
present over past.
Shannon Kelly (Academic Studies, British Columbia Institute of Technology)
Blueprints of the Future City: Complex Dreams of Time, Space, and Identity Viewed
through the Lens of Transgressing Lyrics
My paper proposes the city as a location for intersection and transgression:
where space, time and identity are manifested, challenged, and transcended. This
is the nature of the future city: the city that, be it real or “virtual”, be it the legacy
of the great cities of our past and present or new territory yet unfounded, will
continue be at the forefront of social and cultural rhythms, debates, and re-births
in future decades. Humanity relies upon “the city”, for it is here that we choose
or are forced to encounter one another; it is here that boundaries of time and
space and identity are wedged so closely together they cannot coalesce but
blend. It seems to be this very press of diversity, collectivity and complexity that
makes some long for the illusory “simplicity” of small towns, which makes
viable future visions of the city rare except imagined in sci-fi and other works of
art.
What is the identity of the city? It is here that civic authorities, vested interests,
and advertisers will each, in turn, endeavour to impose their answers to this
question on the city's citizens as a collective; it is here that the citizens
consciously or unconsciously co-opt or resist; more-often-than-not resist, I argue:
for the limited imaginations of these tiny discourse authorities cannot span,
cannot imagine, the true potential of their citizens, all our pasts, presents, and
futures, the weights and complexities of our variegated collective histories, the
translucent fibres of our dreams; and so our voices rise, whispered or shouted or
casually raised over a pint, to contradict the narrow visions of our betters.
In this paper I view the future of the city through the lens of the transgressing
lyrics of the orator and theologian Martin Luther King Jr. and the seminal rap
group Public Enemy, and hold these models up as potential drafting tools for the
blueprints we might undertake. For African Americans the landscape of their
nation and of their cities in particular has been a troubling and inescapable
contradiction: places of hope and condemnation, suffering and escape; and so it
should not surprise us to find a recurring theme of space, time, and identity at
once evoked and transcended in some of the lyrics of their great oral traditions.
Both sets of lyrics I examine - King Jr.'s as a framing historical milestone, Public
Enemy's in detail as the key prototype I propose for envisioning our future share common concerns with reconciling two problematic aspects of our living
together “as one” in shared communities: the historical record, which is for some
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heavy with the weight of injustice, and the collective identity, whose mainstream
articulation is so often barren of diversity and exclusive in its monochromatic
vision. Yet both speakers are able to take these two expressive tropes and turn
them in their tracks: to reconcile bitter past with bright future, to replace
homogeneity with an assertion of complex collectivity. They do so through a
sophisticated and imaginative linking of past and present/ narrator and
narratee, and it is this model which, I suggest, mirrors the trangressive potential
of our cities: the simultaneity and interactivity of the city forces our participation
in more complex identity, more complex memories, more complex dreams of our
collective future. Painfully, violently, reluctantly, with moments of energy and
sincerity, we lurch forward towards a future vision of collectivity; but if we could
do so with a more conscious sense of future, if we could draft those blueprints
more apt to pencil in diversity and complexity, what spires and domes we might
raise!
Wisam Mansour (English Literature, Faith, Turkey)
The City under Occupation in the Narratives of Sahar Khaliefeh
Sahar Kalifeh, a Palestinian academic and novelist, explores in her narratives,
among other things, the impact of occupation on the day-to-day lives of
Palestinians in their cities and villages. In her 1985 Sun Flower, Khalifeh vividly
portrays the city of Nablus from the perspectives of three female characters:
Sa’diye, Rafeef, and Khadra. Each of these women belongs to a social class, and
they see the city under occupation from their situatedness.
In Sun Flower, the city features very prominently in the discourses of the
narrative. Nablus, occupied in June 1967, is innocent of any form of progress
under occupation, but then it was so before the occupation. However, the city
and its population are demonised by the occupation machinery. In a paragraph
reminiscent of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Khalifeh poetically depicts the
wasteland of occupation and its impact on the city: “June brought us Bulldozers
with infernal jaws, swallowing the land and the rock and the trees and the
people.” (My translation.) Ironically, under occupation, technology and its
manifestations, when available, are used to demonize the populace and oppress
the city. As a result, we observe Rafeef’s adamant refusal to stop at red traffic
lights as a symbolic rejection of both technology and imposed order.
Though occasionally and sweepingly the narrative reveals glimpses of nostalgia
for moments that date to a pre-occupation period of the history of the city, the
characters in general harbour negative sentiments about the city and its dwellers.
As a result, the relationship between the city and its inhabitants is that of hatred,
disgust, and a weird form of love informed by siutatedness, gender and
disposition. Sa’diye, for instance, desires to desert the city. She labours day and
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night, and puts her honour and reputation at stake to buy a new piece of land on
the hills overlooking Nablus. She wants to be outside Nablus, above Nablus, yet
not that far away from it. Eventually her attempts to leave the city are thwarted
by occupation.
The paper will examine in depth the positive and negative impact of occupation
on the growth and dimensionality of the city and its populace and will delve into
the dialectic relationship between occupiers and occupied in the promotion and
demotion of the city in question.
Maria del Mar Ramón Torrijos (Humanities, University of Castilla-La Mancha,
Toledo, Spain)
The Fragmented City in the Postmodern World: Cultural Tensions and Existential
Emptiness in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
This paper explores the role of the city as the postmodern urban space which
emerges as substitute for human identity when mankind has lost all purpose,
hope and meaning. In the postmodern world the individual’s fragmented self
merges with the city, which responds to the emptiness of pop culture presenting
itself as a collection of fragments or collage of disparate elements, showing
reality as an irrational and senseless succession of events.
Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho creates a disturbing portrait of the
postmodern urban culture, depicting New York in the 1980s as a mere image of
artifice while dramatizing the consequences of the excess of current American
consumer culture. The contemporary crisis of value takes places in the urban
culture of the postmodern city, which appears through countless references --that
include movies, television shows, pop songs and brand names-- conveying a
satirical picture about the excessive consumerism and violence that characterized
the 1980s. Cultural tensions are particularly manifested in the main character, Pat
Bateman, who is a twenty-six years old handsome Wall Street broker
representing the latest incarnation of the American myth of success and also a
meticulous psychopath who has the same exquisite taste for clothing and dining
as he has for killing, representing the duality of the modern-day monster.
The city represents the emotional bankruptcy of the character who is utterly lost
and intensely alienated, depicting absurdity and nothingness. Thus, familiar
elements of existentialisms as a mixture of both Sarte and Camus --alienation and
anxiety, meaninglessness, increasing awareness of the absurd and of
nothingness- can be tracked in the portrait that Ellis offers of the postmodern
city. The role of the city as the symbolic space which works as hyperbolical
metaphor of the contemporary human existential dilemma will be the starting
point of this paper.
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Maria Ng (English, Lethbridge, Canada)
Representing Vancouver: City of ‘Chinatowns’
The stereotypical image of Chinatown has been, and continues to be, in part a
legacy of literary imagination. From Sax Rohmer’s popular Dr. Fu Manchu series
at the beginning of the last century to SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990),
this small urban neighbourhood has been equated with a people of great
diversity and long cultural history. However, this persistent racialized
stereotyping is readily deconstructed by the reality of a city such as Vancouver,
which has approximately 25% residence of Chinese ethnic background.
Analysing both early writings and recent literature on the so-called Chinatown,
this paper suggests that, with globalization, rapid changes in immigration
patterns, and the rise of China in the world stage, culminating in Beijing 2008,
both urban historians and writers need to reconceptualize the space in which
ethnic minorities, be they Chinese or other groups, concentrate in a city.
Hieu Nguyen Ngoc (Urban Studies, UCL)
How Property Rights Restructuring Connects with Urban Order in Hanoi
This paper explains the urban development order in transitional context as an
outcome of restructuring the property rights. Under the fast growing and
transitional context of Hanoi, the performance of development control, which
represents urban order, was described as a changing of property rights structure
within urban hierarchies and reassigning of property rights in different
neighbourhoods. The survey with different methods approaching households
and experts in two districts and various agencies in Hanoi has showed a strong
relationship between development control performance and residual claims
created by assigning property rights among parties in development relationship.
This outcome has supplied evidence to explain the urban development order
with a property rights approach in a transitional economy, as well as a basis for
improving the development control system in Hanoi.
Key words: development control, property rights, development order,
transitional economy, planning, urban hierarchy, management performance,
residual claim.
Anna Notaro (Television and Digital Media, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Going Digital: How Technology Is Shaping the Future of Urban Literature
Manhattan has been a muse for countless authors, artists, musicians and
filmmakers. Now, as several recent projects demonstrate, New York is also
inspiring digital artists, who are using the Web's multimedia capabilities to
combine text, graphics, audio and video into interactive cityscapes. The paper
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will survey a few of such projects, before focusing in particular on the one by
Thomas Beller, who uses a virtual map of New York as a navigation device. His
web site “Mr. Beller's Neighborhood” is based on satellite photographs of
Manhattan, the city has been divided into nine sections, and each neighborhood
has red dots marking specific locations that are linked to stories by Beller and a
few others about events connected to each spot. Interestingly, in an e-mail
message, prior to the launch of his site Beller maintained that: “Launched is not
the right word... It suggests up and out, a rocket ship going into space. My
direction is the opposite. I'm burrowing, digging, dusting off. .. Mr. Beller's
Neighborhood' is an archaeological site as well as a Web site. It's a narrative that
sprawls in many directions, and it is a work in progress.” In soliciting
contributions for the site, which he is updating every other day he added: “Work
is coming in from the famous and the obscure, the living and the dead. Of
course, the dead are of a bit more interest than the living, in purely literary terms,
but then that's usually the case.”
In 2001 a selection of stories, which had first appeared on the web site, was
published in a collection entitled “Before and After: Stories from New York”.
Some of the voices to be found in its pages are those of well-known writers Michael Cunningham, Jeannette Winterson, Phillip Lopate, Luc Sante, Megan
Daum, Sam Lipsyte, Thomas Beller himself ˆ more interestingly though, many
more are from people who may not even consider themselves writers, but who
were tempted by the ‘Tell Mr. Beller A Story’ button on his web site.
In conclusion, the paper’s main theoretical framework is rooted in contemporary
debates about what is generally known as “digital revolution”. Computer and
software development have given birth to a whole new field of digital texts,
which are not bound to the book as a medium. These texts can be read from
computer screen, or increasingly, from different reading devices, so called ebooks. It is my contention that digital textuality opens an infinite field to expand
literary expression, especially when it comes to the city (urban metaphors are not
surprisingly abundant when describing the Internet).
Digital textuality can be used in many ways in literature. So far the most
common way has been to treat digital textuality as an alternative medium for
literature, there is, however, literature which uses digital textuality much more
effectively. They integrate aspects of digital dynamics as part of their signifying
structure and widen the range of literary expression, The stories published on
Thomas Beller’s web site represent an attempt towards this direction.
Digitalization touches the whole field of literature, directly or indirectly, more or
less strongly. Still, this is just the beginning, and the transitory nature of the
present situation has resulted in spectacular prophecies and speculations
regarding the future of literature. Speculations are important, naturally, as there
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 15
is no future without visions, but we need also to stop for a while now and then
and reflect. This paper aims exactly at offering some reflections upon possible
directions in the way technology is shaping the representation of one of the most
fascinating cities in the world: New York.
Myriam Perregaux (Contemporary English Literature, Geneva/English, Trinity
College, Dublin)
City of the Future?: Two London Chronotopes
One of the major contributions of postcolonial scholarship to the study of
literature has been to call attention to the importance of space as discourse and
metaphor. But how has this interest influenced forms of writing that are not
considered postcolonial? This question is especially important if one is interested
in the way in which London is represented in contemporary fiction as the city
has a long literary history with postcolonial writing, from the 1950s onwards
(one can think for instance about Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, George
Lamming’s The Emigrants, V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, or, more recently,
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth, etc). How then is London imagined in contemporary novels
that are not directly inscribed within this tradition? Is an intertextual dialogue
taking place between these texts and those written from a postcolonial
perspective, or do they present an image of the city that articulates it within
closed and essential discourses? And what do these novels suggest about the
future of London?
In this paper, I discuss two novels, which propose contrasting responses to these
questions: Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd, and City of the Mind by Penelope
Lively. In order to analyse the images of London they construct and to
understand how they position the city in relation to its past, present and future, I
look especially at the types of chronotope they provide. The chronotope,
according to Michael Bakhtin, directs to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Forms of
Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel 84). Hence, the analysis of this literary
trope allows me to pay particular attention to the ways in which space and time
are articulated within the narratives, and to consider whether they propose
dialogic or monologic—to use two other Bakhtinian concepts—representations of
the city that stand for possible Londons of the future.
Ana Filipa Prata (Comparative Studies, Lisbon)
The Encounter of/in the Postmodern City: An Analysis of Some Late 20th-century
Portuguese Urban Chronicles
According to some scholars (Italo Calvino, Renato Cordeiro among others),
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 16
dystopia characterises post-modern cities. Since the modern era’s utopian values
seem to be no longer valid in our time, urban space accentuates a progressive
disbelief in its future, a fact which is in part a result of a loss of the social and
human values which were at city’s foundation.
The city, as a point of potential encounters, is the privileged space for the
meeting with the Other. This encounter is not only an encounter with the Other
as an individual, but also with the space. In the post-modern city, the encounter
is becoming increasingly problematic, either at interpersonal level (the encounter
fails most of the times, becoming mis-encounter) either at a level of reading the
city - a more enigmatic task. The urban disorder and degradation tend to alienate
the citizen. The nostalgic feeling for small old cities is constant and crosses the
written works about the city of Lisbon, background of the texts I propose to
analyse.
Departing from the analysis of some urban chronicles by late 20th-century
Portuguese writers, such as José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes e Maria
Judite de Carvalho, I intend to discuss the different forms of understanding the
encounter in contemporary urban space and the relationship between city and
citizens. The relationship between genre and theme will be central in this paper.
The chronicle, as a literary genre based on everyday reality, will permit on the
one hand, to explore the features of the interpersonal encounter which take place
in these texts, and on the other hand, to understand the perception/encounter
that the narrator, inheritor of the modern flâneur, establishes with the space.
The discourse of these writers, punctuated by uncertainties, often questions the
city’s future, especially in what concerns the mutual relation between the citizen
and the space he inhabits. Although the chronicle does not provide answers
about the urban future, it is a genre that for its “responsive” characteristics reacts
against the present situation. Furthermore, the chronicle is an invitation to the
reader to think about his position in the urban space, now and in the future, in
order to really inhabit (in the sense used by Heidegger) the city.
Ranka Primorac (New York University in London)
Future in the Past: The City and 'Patriotic History' in Zimbabwean Novel
The paper proposes to relate the concept of the city to the concept of the passage
of time as imagined and represented in the Zimbabwean English-language
novels which may be related to the notion of history currently disseminated by
the official mythology of Zimbabwe’s ruling party. As is well known, the
Zimbabwean government led by Robert Mugabe experienced the first serious
challenge to its hegemony in 2000. As a response to this challenge, it instigated a
violent take-over Zimbabwe’s privately owned agricultural land. This process
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 17
led to the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy and an increase in political
repression. It is, however, officially represented as the pinnacle of Zimbabwe’s
history as an independent nation: the final instalment of a protracted and
glorious liberation struggle. The official narrative of a continuing anti-colonial
war entails a reinscription of the nation’s past: among its key components a
mistrust of cities and a certain understanding of the passage of time. The paper
will examine the construction of urban futures in selected 1980s and 1990s novels
which rehearsed and paved the way for the now hegemonic ‘patriotic history’ –
works by Edmund Chipamanuga, Rodwell Machingauta and Charles
Samupindi.
Aida Musulyevna Souleimenova (Japanese, Institute of Oriental Studies, Far
Eastern National University, Vladivostok)
The Experience of Literary Monuments in Honour of Japanese Poets
The Japanese are well-known for their traditional high-spirited attitude to the
national arts - theaters Noh and Kabuki, poetry tanka and haiku, ikebana, tea
ceremony, etc. Previously, the experience of uniting some arts into local objects,
the unique manner has increased interest among the foreign researchers of art
history. In the process of constructing such objects like steles, "poetic stones",
gardens, Japanese show the real sense of beauty (biishiki) in the choice of these
monuments' place, architectural views, the character of inscriptions. Creators of
so unusual monuments follow laws of traditional multilateral approach to fine
arts. Not being an expert in the field of architecture and interior, I should like to
present some inscriptions on the monuments in honor of the poetess Yosano
Akiko (1878-1942) as the example of relationships between these monuments and
amusement areas around them.
Japanese literary monuments (kahi or kuhi) devoted to poets differ from those in
Europe and America. Having an enormous experience of watching monuments
to Russian poets inhabitants of post Soviet cities and villages don't have a
slightest idea about the poetry itself. Japanese steles with texts make readers to
create a new world around the poem. This world, the infrastructure around the
monument, is the quintessence of Japanese poetic sense and the reflection of the
New Era in the urbanistic landscapes. The target of these objects is to find the
intersections points between the past and the future, the surrealistic world of the
poetry and the real life of ordinary people.
Bozena Shallcross (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago)
Collectives, Communities and Collections: The Case of East Central Europe
My presentation presents a critique of two recent works on nostalgia (Boym and
Scribner) in order to delineate certain shifting aspects of the post-communist
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 18
metropolitan space (such as mushrooming flea markets, depot museums, gated
communities, and "dzialki"--a "glamorized" East European version of
shantytowns) as a compensatory response to urban growth and technology, a
nostalgic desire for a more personalized and clearly delineated space and a
restoration of the past as lived before the systemic change. My project will
explore both literature and the material culture world.
Vlad Strukov (London Consortium, Birkbeck)
Cultural Citadels: Representations of the City in Contemporary Russian Literature and
New Media
In my paper I will focus on three major themes in representation of the city in
contemporary Russian literature, film and new media:
 Juxtaposition of Moscow and S.Petersburg in the context of their
cultural and imperial projects
 Reliance of the Russian culture of the 19th century in the definition
of the modern city
 Deterritorialisation of the Subject and immergence of the City as
the virtual Other
I will draw examples for my argument from the novels by Sorokin, Pelevin, and
Radov as well as Sorokin’s film “Moscow”, and Oleg Kuvaev’s digital
photographs and Masiania flash animation project (Kuvaev is a St. Petersburgbased computer graphic artist, web-designer and photographer).
All of these reveal genuine interest in urban environment, in general, and
specifically their preoccupation with universal human conditions and cultural
clashes of the twenty first century: for example, the clash between domestic and
foreign; between local and global; between tradition and innovation; between
youth / energy / motion / determination and senescence / fatigue / immobility
/ detachment.
New media present the space as a specifically city endeavour (place as a character),
providing opportunities for repetition, playback, segmentation and adaptation as
a determinate of narrative causality (place as a performativity), combining screen
story-telling and animated clips as a time-space relationship (place as an
intersection of image definition), and incorporating experience and language as
discourses (place as a categorization).
In general, the city is always a deformed, twisted urban space whose
representations help to construct a notion of national identity. Representations of
daily life help to create the national milieu, national subjects are revealed
through national objects. One of the most important features of this kind of space
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 19
is dirt. Here dirt is a symptom of locale: in cultural terms it is an entity that
contradicts identification, classification, and systematization, and in social terms
it signals class opposition to the norm, a protest and provocation. It is not only
conventional dirt, the tangible dirt of objects, but also Masiania’s verbal dirt,
which reveals itself as a symptom of pollution behaviour.
A (dirty) word becomes a commodity; and through the word-object people learn
to identify themselves with a particular group, whether class or nation.
Linguistic experiments entail an appropriation and remolding of the Russian
language to suit local conditions.
The ability to define what is authentically Russian is a central claim to value and
is itself an issue in mass culture from the 1990s to the present. Authenticity is
reproduced, to some extent filtered, and reconstituted through a process of
authentication, recognition, and circulation.
Shino Toyoshima (Korean, SOAS)
Making Home Abroad: Writing the Community’s History and Becoming Citizens in
Colonial Korea
After centuries of isolationism, Korea opened its door to the outside world with
the signing of the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. The Treaty brought Korea onto the
international stage, as well as paved a way for Japanese penetration into the
peninsula. As a consequence of the Treaty, mass of groups of Japanese migrants
headed for Korea. They began to settle in Treaty Ports and rapidly expanded
into other inland regions. As the population grew, modern towns began to
emerge, to see formation of Japanese settler communities in all parts of Korea.
This paper explores a case of Japanese settler community in colonial Korea,
focusing attention on the ways in which people sought to construct their home
abroad. It examines the works of literature concerned with the community’s
history, in which various attempts were made by the settlers at different
moments of colonial period to define their place in a search for legitimacy for
their presence in Korea. Settlers came from various places in Japan, and carried
with them different local and class identities. The writings show that settlers
were often confronted with regional tensions, while at the same time struggled to
seek and maintain Japanese national identities in the face of ‘foreign’ ethnicity
and its cultures. Nonetheless, underlie a sequence of these struggles are their
zeal for becoming a distinctive entity and to recognise the place as their home.
Through narratives of progress and community contributions as well as writing
and rewriting of myths, people were promoted to share a sense of belonging in
view to establishing a community. Proceeding to mid 1930s, situation gradually
changes as the administration, now perceived as an established community,
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 20
publishes an official history and emphasises its members to acknowledge
themselves as ‘citizens.’ This paper seeks to present the shifting phases of
settlers’ multiple identities and some accounts of the process of community
formation in colonial context.
Karin Walland (German and English Studies, Vienna)
The City and Science Fiction: The Motif and its Functions
The future development of the city has often been relegated to science fiction,
which could, on the one hand, be regarded as narrow-minded because the genre
is still on the periphery of literary research and seen as inferior or trivial, at least
in German-speaking countries, and is therefore very comfortable, On the other
hand, it enables the predestined genre for future developments to deal with a
further interesting motif.
Analyzing the city as a motif of science fiction means an approach through
cultural studies, not simply literature. Literature may be taken as a basis for a
deeper insight into the subject matter, but a combination with disciplines like
sociology, architecture, future studies and communication technology is
necessary—even to have a look at the topic from a literary perspective.
The terms “city”, “state”, “city state”, or “metropolis” do not seem to be
sufficient anymore; categories are more and more difficult to maintain as borders
seem to vanish and definitions intermingle. They cannot be accepted as final
because they are often not applicable when it comes to the genre of science
fiction—as they have developed from concepts of literature like utopias. What is
a utopia? A metropolis? A state? The question is if these terms can really
remain separated, or if the concept of a future city does not imply a mixture of
definitions as well as a utopian or dystopian (or both) approach anyway—which,
of course, again depends on defining these words.
Science fiction is interesting to look at in general because it can provide a glimpse
of what the future may hold for us. It is about developments, which will have an
impact on us, society, daily life. It is an opportunity to reflect on consequences
because things really happen. Even though technology is an essential part of
science fiction, it finally deals with people and how they cope with their
surroundings—no matter whether this is a city or a different planet. This genre
is very useful to create an awareness for future issues and trains the ability to
think about and prepare for possible changes.
The city as a motif of science fiction appears in various functions, including the
whole range from the safe future place to be because of technology to a crowd of
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 21
empty ruins left by any civilisation, from man-eating deserts of concrete to
puzzling labyrinths of endless rows of houses.
In my talk, I will give an introduction to the city as a motif of science fiction and
fantastic literature with a short look at literary history and will discuss the
problem of definitions and talk about the possible functions of the city as a motif
of this genre, with examples from German- and English-speaking authors.
Laura Winton (Independent Scholar, US)
‘Skyscraper Titans’ and ‘The City’: A Performance
One of the issues facing American cities today is that of gentrification and
consequently, homogenization of culture. There is an increasing intolerance
toward those who live “on the margins” whether voluntarily or involuntarily:
the homeless, artists, families and individuals below the poverty line, etc. Cities
are either left to disintegrate, and consequently those marginalized populations
are abandoned, or the cities are “rehabilitated” in order to make them more
palatable to the upper and middle classes and to reverse the trend of suburban
flight. The result of the latter is that marginalized communities then become
further marginalized as they are swept out of sight, further and further away
from the epicenter or hubs of city life. Often we see the flow of suburban flight
significantly altered wherein the marginalized are driven to suburbs and the
upper classes are returning to the cities.
My work as a writer and performance artist often deals with these issues and I
would like to bring a performance of my work to the conference. As a performer,
I work both in straightforward spoken word and in a hybrid of spoken word and
theatre, closer to what in the UK is considered “Performance Writing” rather
than the poetry slam approach. In that regard, I often perform with musicians,
perform with other writers and actors in simultaneous readings and voiceovers,
or as a soloist work with video and audio voiceover. For his particular
conference, I envision a basic performance with voiceover and live performance
of the text, movement, and video as well.
I have two pieces I will perform. The first is a long poem entitled “The City”,
written in nine movements, that is a elegy or meditation on these very issues of
gentrification and marginalization within cities. The second is a piece of creative
nonfiction, Skyscraper Titans which, among other things, looks at the inhabitants
of the city as a form of zoo life to be observed and provide entertainment for
those who work in the city or come there for recreation but would not chose to
live inside the city.
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 22
By way of a biography, I am a writer and performance artist living Minneapolis,
Minnesota. My poetry, short fiction, and manifestos have been published in
dozens of print and online journals, including an upcoming issue of Women and
Performance, 391, Melting Clock Review, Lost and Found Times, and many others.
My spoken is being featured as part of a public art installation within the new
light rail train system in Minneapolis. My performance and research work
dovetails in the pursuit of the liberation of the imagination as a political act in
response to the increasingly overwhelming Debordian spectacle.
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 23
Malcolm Wollen (Architecture, Pennsylvania State)
Markets and Memory: A Reconstructed Narrative of North Meridian Street,
Indianapolis
This paper will address the growth and change of North Meridian Street in
Indianapolis, Indiana. The paper will explore the appropriation, destruction and
exploitation of public memory by new forces in the economy as well as efforts to
defend memory. In particular, it will treat the ironic role of capitalists who
undermine the neighborhoods of their own class. Finally, it will discuss how
changes in the economy eroded public rituals and social practices among the
elite and prompted new architectural approaches to home design.
We understand ourselves and our environment through stories. Some cities offer
a story of creation and development like a good myth. These cities are virtual
texts that have the potential to be more palpable and vivid than the printed
word. Many of these cities take hold of an urban idea which, given the right
economic conditions, takes off and possesses the imagination of residents and
visitors. The idea undergoes transformation, but the train of development can
still be legible. Boston’s Beacon Street and Common are an antecedent to The
Public Garden and Commonwealth Avenue. Napoleon’s Rue de Rivoli is the
genesis of Hausmann’s boulevards. Most often in American cities, however, the
narrative of development is barely legible. When new forces of technological and
economic change come to bear, city residents face a critical decision whether to
defend an urban idea shaped by different circumstances or to allow new forces to
run their course. This decision is rarely a clear one and we end up with a
fractured narrative. With effort, however, these narratives are not completely
unreadable. First there is the tendency of capitalist ventures to cloak themselves
in the image of what came before. Second, there is the examination of the latest
stages of development for clues of what came before. Finally, novels and short
stories by local authors can reconstruct the vanished city through real narratives.
Indianapolis, Indiana, is no exception to this pattern. Most of the great landmark
buildings of the Nineteenth Century are gone. The list includes a courthouse by
homegrown architect Frances Costigan and a statehouse by Town and Davis.
Those buildings that have enjoyed untouchable status are dedicated to the
memory of war. That is the apparent extent of collective memory in the
downtown. However, Indianapolis was, and arguably still is, a “city of houses”.
They were always the source of pride and identity. Booth Tarkington, a
nationally celebrated local author, brings this domestic culture to life in The
Magnificent Ambersons. He explains how the residents of Midland City, a fictional
version of Indianapolis, took great pride in the Amberson mansion as the climax
of any tour of the city. Within this culture as well as that of the real Indianapolis,
memories of domestic life assume far more importance than memories of
commerce. This manifests itself best in the history of North Meridian Street,
City 4 Workshop Abstracts 24
Indianapolis’s story of creation and development. Beginning in the early
Nineteenth Century, the largest houses of the most prominent citizens were built
on this street. As the city moved northward and the larger houses began to be
torn down, the response of the residents was to rebuild the same neighborhood
further north on the same street, even favoring the same side of the street for the
largest houses.
In this accidental way, the leading citizens stumbled on a tradition that became
the most distinctive idea of the city. The economy and taste of each era left its
mark on each segment of the street. It was sustained through the Gilded Age
and progressively exploited by a developing real estate market in the early
Twentieth Century. Finally, it peaked in the 1920s when the demand for large
houses exploded, resulting in a sequence of houses a mile long. At the same time,
flight from mixed uses, increasing automobile traffic and the insatiable real estate
market took its toll. The wealthy were willing to take a stand by passing the first
zoning ordinance in the city. What remains of the street today reveals the
ongoing tension between the traditions of the elite and the efforts of developers
to push the boundaries of exploitation. This is one of the ironies of the early
Twentieth Century, explored by Tarkington in The Magnificent Ambersons, that
economic and technological change tended to undermine the culture of the same
class that invested in those changes. For this reason, the last stages of this urban
tradition become largely symbolic. The ‘Open House’ and the isolation of young
women, customs that went hand in hand with this old tradition, vanish. The
houses continue to represent a sense of public engagement, though the owners
no longer practice the customs that assured that engagement.