Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities

Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities
Author: Christoph Lindner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2009-09-10
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1134016905

What connects garbage dumps in New York, bomb sites in Baghdad, and skyscrapers in São Paulo? How is contemporary visual culture – extending from art and architecture to film and digital media – responding to new forms of violence associated with global and globalizing cities? Addressing such questions, this book is the first interdisciplinary volume to examine the complex relationship between globalization, violence, and the visual culture of cities. Violence – in both material and cultural forms – has been a prominent and endemic feature of urban life in the global metropolitan era. Focusing on visual culture and offering a strong humanities perspective that is currently lacking in existing scholarship, this book seeks to understand how the violent effects of globalization have been represented, theorized, and experienced across a wide range of cultural contexts and urban locations in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East. Organized around three interrelated themes – fear, memory, and spectacle – essay topics range from military targeting in Baghdad, carceral urbanism in São Paulo, and the Paris banlieue riots, to the security aesthetics of G8 summits, the architecture of urban paranoia, and the cultural afterlife of the Twin Towers. Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities offers fresh insight into the problems and potential of cities around the world, including Beijing, Berlin, London, New York, Paris, and São Paulo. With specially-commissioned essays from the fields of cultural theory, architecture, film, photography, and urban geography, this innovative volume will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

Inert Cities

Inert Cities
Author: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0857725793

We usually associate contemporary urban life with movement and speed. But what about those instances when the forms of mobility associated with globalized cities – the flow of capital, people, labour and information – freeze, or decelerate? How can we assess the value of interruption in a city? What does valuing stillness mean in regards to the forward march of globalization? When does inertia presage decay - and when does it promise immanence and rebirth? Bringing together original contributions by international specialists from the fields of architecture, photography, film, sociology and cultural analysis, this cutting-edge book considers the poetics and politics of inertia in cities ranging from Amsterdam, Berlin, Beirut and Paris, to Beijing, New York, Sydney and Tokyo. Chapters explore what happens when photography, film, mixed media works, architecture and design intervene in public spaces and urban communities to disrupt speed and growth, both intellectually and/or practically; and question the degree to which mobility is aspirational or imaginary, absolute or transient. Together, they encourage a re-assessment of what it means to be urban in an unevenly globalizing world, to live in cities built around mythologies of perpetual progress. These new analyses of visual culture's strategic interruptions in global cities allow a more in-depth understanding of the new forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments.

Imagining New York City

Imagining New York City
Author: Christoph Lindner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-02-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0190231750

Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces-such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway-have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, Christoph Lindner also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.

Cities Interrupted

Cities Interrupted
Author: Shirley Jordan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-02-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1474224431

Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of 'interruption' in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments. The idea of 'interruption' addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities. Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.

Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English

Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English
Author: Peter I. Barta
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317564774

This book focuses on literature and cinema in English or French by authors and directors not working in their native language. Artists with hybrid identities have become a defining phenomenon of contemporary reality following the increased mobility between civilisations during the postcolonial period and the waves of emigration to the West. Cinema and prose fiction remain the most popular sources of cultural consumption, not least owing to the adaptability of both to the new electronic media. This volume considers cultural products in English and French in which the explicitly multi-focal representation of authors' experiences of their native languages/cultures makes itself conspicuous. The essays explore work by the peripheral and those without a country, while problematising what might be meant by the widely used but not always well-defined term ‘bicultural’. The first section looks at films by such well-known filmmakers working in France as Bouchareb, Kechiche, Legzouli and Dridi, as well as the animated feature Persepolis. Here the focus is on the representation of human experience in spatial terms, exploring the appropriation of territory cohabited by ‘local’ people, newcomers and their children, haunted by the cultural memories of distant places. The second part is devoted to multicultural authors whose ‘native’ language was English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Spanish (Beckett, Herzen, Voyeikova, Triolet, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kristof, Dorfman), and their creative engagement with difference. A study of the emergence of multilingual writing in Montaigne and an autobiographical essay by Elleke Boehmer on growing up surrounded by English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Zulu frame the volume's chapters. The collection relishes the freedom provided by liberation from the confines of one language and culture and the delight in creative multilingualism. This book will be of significant interest to those studying the subject of biculturalism, as well as the fields of comparative literature and cinema.

There's No Place Like Home

There's No Place Like Home
Author: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1838609709

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The Wizard of Oz brought many now-iconic tropes into popular culture: the yellow brick road, ruby slippers and Oz. But this book begins with Dorothy and her legacy as an archetypal touchstone in cinema for the child journeying far from home. In There's No Place Like Home, distinguished film scholar Stephanie Hemelryk Donald offers a fresh interpretation of the migrant child as a recurring figure in world cinema. Displaced or placeless children, and the idea of childhood itself, are vehicles to examine migration and cosmopolitanism in films such as Le Ballon Rouge, Little Moth and Le Havre. Surveying fictional and documentary film from the post-war years until today, the author shows how the child is a guide to themes of place, self and being in world cinema.

Art and the Politics of Visibility

Art and the Politics of Visibility
Author: Zeena Feldman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1786722941

How does cultural context affect the interpretation of art? What makes artists' work transnational or national in character, and how will their visibility be impacted by either label? Art and the Politics of Visibility questions these dynamics, asking how the dissemination of visual culture on a global scale affects art and its institutions. Taking Shanghai-based artist Yang Fudong's practice as a point of departure, this volume focuses on how politically charged images produced in contemporary art, cinema, literature, news media and fashion become widely consumed or marginalised. Through case studies of artists including Titus Kaphar, Sara Maple, Shirin Neshat, J.M. Coetzee, Barbara Walker and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the book illuminates the relationship between visibility, politics and identity in contemporary visual culture.

Branding Cities

Branding Cities
Author: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2009-01-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135890072

Cultural analysts, social scientists, and media scholars explore the ways in which cities generate competing visions of their use and their future, thereby branding their image for international consumption.

Cities Beyond Borders

Cities Beyond Borders
Author: Nicolas Kenny
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317166000

Drawing on a body of research covering primarily Europe and the Americas, but stretching also to Asia and Africa, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this book explores the methodological and heuristic implications of studying cities in relation to one another. Moving fluidly between comparative and transnational methods, as well as across regional and national lines, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the necessity of this broader view in assessing not just the fundamentals of urban life, the way cities are occupied and organised on a daily basis, but also the urban mindscape, the way cities are imagined and represented. In doing so the volume provides valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of using multiple cities to form historical inquiries.

Toward an Urban Cultural Studies

Toward an Urban Cultural Studies
Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137498560

Toward an Urban Cultural Studies is a call for a new interdisciplinary area of research and teaching. Blending Urban Studies and Cultural Studies, this book grounds readers in the extensive theory of the prolific French philosopher Henri Lefebvre.