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Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces: Threshold Experiences uses the term “threshold” as a means to understand the relationship between Self and Other, as well as relationships between different cultures. The concept of “threshold” defines the relationship between inside and outside not in oppositional terms, but as complementaries. This book discusses the cultural and social “border areas” of modernity, which are to be understood not as “zones” in a territorial sense, but as “spaces in between” in which different languages and cultures operate. The essays in Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces identify the dimension in urban topographies and political spaces where we are able to locate paradigmatic experiences of thresholds. Because these spaces are characterized by contradictions, conflicts, and aporias, we propose to rethink those hermeneutic categories that imply a sharp opposition between inside and outside. This means that the theoretical definition of threshold put forward in these essays—whether applied to history, philosophy, law, art, or cultural studies—embodies new juridical and political stances.
Based on ethnographic explorations in cities across the globe, Topographies of Faith offers a unique and compelling analysis of contemporary religious dynamics in metropolitan centers. While most scholarship on religion still sidelines questions of spatiality and scale, this book creatively draws on perspectives from urban studies to study the spatiality of religion in modern cities. It shows how globalization, transnational migration and urban expansion in big cities engender new religious forms and practices and their spatial underpinnings. Space affects urban religious diversity, religious innovations, decline or vitality. But it also shapes the relationships between religion and social equalities. Spanning distances between New York, Delhi and Johannesburg, the book also engages with issues of secularity and religious vitality in genuinely new ways. Contributors include: Irene Becci, Synnøve Bendixsen, Marian Burchardt, José Casanova, Murat Es, Ajay Gandhi, Weishang Huang, Godwin Onuoha, Samadia Sadouni, Peter van der Veer, and Leilah Vevaina.
Contemporary Chinese rural life is placed in sharp theoretical and practical focus in this book. State-of-the-art techniques and perspectives are combined to take the reader into Xiaocun, a small village on the east bank of the Dianchi Lake in Kunming City. In 2003, the author published the book Crime and Punishment: The Story of Xiaocun (1931–1997), which dealt with disputes, mediation and punishment in the village following the legal anthropology tradition. At that time, neither the villagers nor the author foresaw the vast changes that were to appear a few years later. Their main economic activity then was growing vegetables and flowers; urbanisation was tsunami-like in its speed and impact. Land requisition for urban development was so swift that five years later, in 2008, there was no farmland left. Instead, there were many landmark real estate and development projects. Xiaocun has become the centre of an enlarged Kunming City. Observers, including the Xiaocun residents, are unavoidably shocked at the changes to the physical landscape in the wake of its rapid urbanisation. This book, Topography of Politics in Rural China: The Story of Xiaocun, reports the author's revisits to the village starting in early 2007. In the past few years of research on this village, the author deeply felt that the problems that make people passionate are fully exposed through issues surrounding land and housing. Well written in narrative, this book tells the story of Xiaocun in this new century from the perspective of topography, exploring the peasantry and its relations to the state in more fundamental terms.
This book looks at secular urban space in the Mediterranean city, A.D. 284-650, focusing on places where people from different religious and social group were obliged to mingle. It looks at streets, processions, fora/ agorai, market buildings, and shops.
One of the most popular contemporary authors, Kazuo Ishiguro has so far produced six highly regarded novels which have won him international acclaim and honours, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Award and an OBE for Services to Literature. This Reader's Guide: - Evaluates the various responses to Ishiguro's work, beginning with initial reactions, moving on to key scholarly criticism, and taking note along the way of what Ishiguro has offered - Discusses each of Ishiguro's novels, from A Pale View of the Hills (1982) to Never Let Me Go (2005) - Features three in-depth chapters on Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1993) - Analyses reviews, interviews and scholarly essays and articles in order to situate the novels in the context of Ishiguro's ouevre - Explores themes and issues which are central to the author's fiction, such as narration, ethics and memory. Lucid and insightful, this is an indispensable introductory guide for anyone studying – or simply interested in - the work of this major novelist.
Social and cultural studies are experiencing a 'spatial turn'. Micro-sites, localities, empires as well as virtual or imaginary spaces attract increasing attention. In most of these works, space emerges as a social construct rather than a mere container. This collection examines the potential and limitations of spatial approaches for the political history of pre-industrial Europe. Adopting a broad definition of 'political', the volume concentrates on two key questions: Where did political exchange take place? How did spatial dimensions affect political life in different periods and contexts? Taken together, the essays demonstrate that pre-modern Europeans made use of a much wider range of political sites than is usually assumed - not just palaces, town halls and courtrooms, but common fields as well as back rooms of provincial inns - and that spatial dimensions provided key variables in political life, both in terms of territorial ambitions and practical governance and in the more abstract forms of patronage networks, representations of power and the emerging public sphere. As such, this book offers a timely and critical engagement with the 'spatial turn' from a political perspective. Focusing on the distinct constitutional environments of England and the Holy Roman Empire - one associated with early centralization and strong parliamentary powers, the other with political fragmentation and absolutist tendencies - it bridges the common gaps between late medieval and early modern studies and those between historians and scholars from other disciplines. Preface, commentary and a sketch of research perspectives discuss the wider implications of the essays' findings and reflect upon the value of spatial approaches for political history as a whole.
'Another Country' expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond the city limits, investigating the lives of rural queers across the United States, from faeries in the Midwest to lesbian separatist communes on the coast of Northern California.
In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities.
Lippit offers the first book-length study in English of Japanese modernist fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement--Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi--Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism.