- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Journal of Urban Cultural Studies
- Previous Issues
- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018
-
-
Writing around Paterson: Critical urban poetics in Williams, Olson and Ginsberg
More LessAbstractWilliam Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg wrote ambitious city poems in the 1940s and 1950s. They were in close contact at the time, reviewing each other’s work in small-circulation journals and exchanging ideas in person and by letter. This article traces the circulation of influence among the three poets and interprets their poems – Paterson (Williams 1992), The Maximus Poems (Olson 1993), and Ginsberg’s ‘Shrouded Stranger’ poems, including ‘Howl’ (Ginsberg 1984; 1994; 2006) – in relation to other forms of critical urban discourse. Specifically, the article suggests that Williams, Olson and Ginsberg recognized the abstract rationality of Paterson Books I–IV as a limitation of the poem and sought to develop alternative approaches. Their responses anticipate critiques of rational-comprehensive city planning and urban renewal by Guy Debord, Herbert Gans and Jane Jacobs. Comparing Debord, Gans and Jacobs’s arguments to representations of the city in Paterson, The Maximus Poems, and Ginsberg’s ‘Shrouded Stranger’ shows the centrality of the city to innovative twentieth-century poetics and suggests that city poetry can be read as a mode of critical urban analysis.
-
-
-
Borders and trajectories: Remapping cities in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films
By Xiao CaiAbstractTaiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien (1947–present) is widely recognized as one of the foundations of the New Wave of Taiwan film. Melding both cultural analysis and urban theory, this article explores how cities are represented by the vision of border in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films All the Youthful Days (Hou, 1983), Dust in the Windy (Hou, 1986), Millennium Mambo (Hou, 2000) and A Time for Youth (Hou, 2005). These films draw a spatial topography that maps Taiwan’s history of urbanization and globalization. In the cinematic representation of space, the border is both the geographical space of the rural transforming to the urban and the cultural space of traditional lifestyles transforming to modernity or postmodernity. Hou Hsiao-hsien describes and represents the city from the vision of a ‘rural observer’ who creates an outsiders’ city map. Following Raymond Williams’ theory of the country and the city, the article then approaches Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film works in dialogue with a range of other theorists (Georg Simmel, Barbara Mennel, Fredric Jameson, Micheal de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Edward Relph, Walter Benjamin, Wolfgang Schivelbusch). Hou’s border worlds enable him to explore change, confusion, alienation and loss. In this way, each of his films can be seen as a microcosm of the changing world in which the rural and the urban open to and interact with each other.
-
-
-
‘Kerist I wish I was a skyscraper’: John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, skyscrapers and the predatory modern city
More LessAbstractJohn Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) is one of the first American novels to significantly engage the figure of the skyscraper in modern New York City. Throughout the novel, Dos Passos employs the physical and symbolic structure of the skyscraper to examine the effects of capitalism on the spaces of the burgeoning metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the text, Dos Passos utilizes skyscrapers to critique the capitalist and overly individualized spaces of the city and the dangers that these spaces pose to the novel’s characters. The critique in the text is compounded by the fact that Dos Passos’ characters find solace neither in the opening vertical spaces of the city nor in the public spaces of the street. In the end, the novel’s characters are faced with alienating and dehumanized spaces in the hostile and predatory metropolis.
-
-
-
An interdisciplinary look at metropolitanisms
More LessAbstractThis review examines the emerging interdisciplinary field of Metropolitan Studies and its connection to recent work in modernist studies and postcolonial studies. Metropolis is a term that has been used to signify a specific type of city formation in each of the above disciplines, however these definitions differ significantly from each other. With urban studies’ recent turn to metropolitan studies as a new, interdisciplinary avenue of inquiry, this essay reviews recent works on the metropolis in each field in order to suggest that metropolis has no stable definition across fields, and that further interdisciplinary engagement with the term is imperative.
-
-
-
Los Angeles is Latin America: Art, driving and the city
More LessAbstractPacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Latin American & Latino Art in Los Angeles thematically linked more than 70 exhibitions and programmes exploring Latin American cultural roots alongside contemporary Latin American and Latinx influences on art in the greater Los Angeles area. The third iteration of an expansive Getty Foundation initiative, LA/LA stretched across Southern California from September 2017 through January 2018. This review essay connects the experience of viewing LA/LA exhibitions with the inevitably intertwined experience of driving in the city. Driving across Los Angeles, the shifting urban landscape reinforced the narratives being dissected in exhibition spaces, which in turn blurred the lines of where LA/LA ended and daily life in Los Angeles began. The review addresses exhibitions at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Union Station. The LA/LA exhibitions provoked questions of borderlands and migrants, cultural histories and traditions, and home and family that extend beyond the walls of the exhibition spaces to permeate urban life.
-
-
-
Digital personal space: From the plaza to the global canopy
By Silvio CartaAbstractThis article discusses how ubiquitous computing, big data and the Internet of Things are changing the form of personal space. The study presented is substantiated by a series of tests conducted in the public space of the Plaza de Los Palos Grandes in Caracas. This square consists of a public library, a square and annexed services. The aim of this work is to visualize the discrete nature of the data cloud that surrounds people in the public realm while they communicate through the Internet. Building on a number of spatial definitions of personal spaces, including Sommer’s soap bubble and Sloterdijk’s notions of sphereology, this study suggests that today’s personal space can be more accurately represented through the form of a global canopy, where invisible vectors intersect without disturbance. This study describes how public activities in the square exceed the physical space of the plaza and extend to larger urban and global scales.
-