Ecologies of Affect

Description

Ecologies of Affect offers a synthetic introduction to the felt dynamics of cities and the character of places. The contributors capture the significance of affects including desire, nostalgia, memory, and hope in forming the identity and tone of places. The critical intervention this collection of essays makes is an active, consistent engagement with the virtualities that produce and refract our idealized attachments to place. Contributors show how place images, and attempts to build communities, are, rather than abstractions, fundamentally tied to and revolve around such intangibles. We understand nostalgia, desire, and hope as virtual; that is, even though they are not material, they are nevertheless real and must be accounted for. In this book, the authors take up affect, emotion, and emplacement and consider them in relation to one another and how they work to produce and are produced by certain temporal and spatial dimensions.

The aim of the book is to inspire readers to consider space and place beyond their material properties and attend to the imaginary places and ideals that underpin and produce material places and social spaces. This collection will be useful to practitioners and students seeking to understand the power of affect and the importance of virtualities within contemporary societies, where intangible goods have taken on an increasing value.

Sujets

• Index of urban studies articles
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554583126
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Ecologies of Affect

Ecologies of Affect Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope

Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park, and Rob Shields, editors

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book has been published with the help of a grant from t he Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Pub lications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Researc h Council of Canada. We acknowl- edge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ecologies of affect : placing nostalgia, desire, and hop e / Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park, and Rob Shields, editors.

(Environmental humanities) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued also in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-55458-258-7

1. Social ecology. 2. Cultural geography. 3. Geographica l perception. I. Davidson, Tonya K., 1979– II. Park, Ondine, [date] III. Shields, Rob, 1961– IV. Series: Environmental humanities series

HM861.E36 2011

304.2

C2010-906491-7

Electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-55458-312-6 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-55458-348-5 (EPUB)

1. Social ecology. 2. Cultural geography. 3. Geographica l perception. I. Davidson, Tonya, 1979– II. Park, Ondine, [date] III. Shields, Rob, 1961– IV. Series: Environmental humanities series (Online)

HM861.E36 2011a

304.2

C2010-906492-5

Cover design by Blakeley W ords+Pictures. Cover image:Passing Angelby Maria-Carolina Cambre and Lorin Yochim. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Tay lor.

© 2011 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manuf actured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire perm ission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accura tely. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future prin tings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written cons ent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). F or an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800 - 893-5777.

Contents

List of Figures vii

Introduction, by Ondine Park, Tonya K. Davidson, and Rob Shields 1

Section I: Nostalgia 1 “Not everything was good, but many things were better”: Nostalgia for East Germany and Its Politics, by Anne W inkler 19 2 Nostalgia and Postmemories of a Lost Place: Actualizing “My Virtual Homeland,” by Tonya K. Davidson 43 3 Placing Nostalgia: The Process of Returning and Remaking Home, by Allison Hui 65 4 From Disease to Desire: The Afflicted Amalgamation of Music and Nostalgia, by Mickey Vallee 85

Section II: Desire 5 The Tourist Affect: Escape and Syncresis on the Las Vegas Strip, by Rob Shields 105 6 (In)Human Desiring and Extended Agency, by Matthew Tiessen 127 7 Cityscapes of Desire: Urban Change in Post-Soviet Russia, by Olga Pak 143 8 Illustrating Desires: The Idea and the Promise of the Suburb in Two Children’s Books, by Ondine Park 169

v

vi

CONTENTS

Section III: Hope 9 The Virtual Places of Childhood: Hope and the Micro-Politics of Race at an Inner-City Youth Centre, by Bonar Buffam 197 10 Virtual Resurrections: Che Guevara’s Image as Place of Hope, by Maria-Carolina Cambre 217 11 Performing Spaces of Hope: Street Puppetry and the Aesthetics of Scale, by Petra Hroch 245 12 The Spatial Distribution of Hope In and Beyond Fort McMurray, by Sara Dorow and Goze Dogu 271 13 Spectacular Enclosures of Hope: Artificial Islands in the Gulf and the Present, by Mark S. Jackson and Veronica della Dora 293

Conclusion: A Roundtable on the Affective Turn, by Rob Shields, Ondine Park, Tonya K. Davidson, and the Contributors 31 7

List of Contributors 327

Index 331

List of Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

TheOstalgie21coffee mug Replicas of East German candy, DDR Museum, Berlin 22 The East German bathroom, DDR Museum, Berlin 24 Ampelmannstore andFernsehturm, Berlin 36 Kapetanovo, 1930s 46 Baby clothes from Kapetanovo 53 Boys at Gasthaus, Kapetanovo 56 Map of Kapetanovo, 1997 58 The Strip, Las Vegas 108 Casino gambling hall, Las Vegas 110 Abandoned lots and construction projects along The Strip 117 Accepting the desire line’s invitation on two wheels 128 Carving a desired line 130 Okhta Centre: the tower’s position relative to the city 150 Suburbia as a paper doll chain 170 Suburbia glimpsed through the window of a moving vehicle 173 Ubiquitous suburbanization? 174 Rectilinear suburbia 180 “Cookie cutter” suburb 183

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viii

LIST OF FIGURES

8.6 8.7 8.8 10.1 10.2

10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 12.1 12.2 12.3

Suburban encroachment on green field 185 Reformed suburbia? 187 Suburban home in nature? 189 “26th AISF national conference begins” 219 West Bank barrier Che Guevara 221 Mural, Belfast, Ireland 224 Palestine Nakba Commemoration, May 2008 227 Athens, Greece 228 School mural, Gonzales Catán, Buenos Aires 231 Che collage I 236 Che collage II 237 The Little Girl Giant meets the Sultan’s Elephant 250 The Sultan’s Elephant in the streets of London 251 The Little Girl Giant takes a nap in St. James’s Park, London 253 A child swinging on the arm of the Little Girl Giant 257 A long-timer’s map 280 An industry worker’s map 283 A cosmopolitan’s map 286

Introduction

ONDINE PARK TONYA K. DAVIDSON ROB SHIELDS

Places from Which to Think of Place This book was born in a place with nameless streets. Since 1913, the streets in Edmonton, Alberta, have been numbered, denied the quaint street names of shared city imaginaries like Sesame Street, Broadway, Main Street. The meaningful names of other places evoke a sense of place — place myths — that seems to be absent in a city full of nondescript home addresses like 10731 84 Avenue or 10235 123 Street. The capital of an industrial farming, resource- extracting, boom–bust province, a city of cars that appear to commute end- lessly on generic, busy thoroughfares, Edm onton m ay be an unlikely inspiration for theorizing about affective attachments to place. But Edmon- ton is born of and shaped by desire. It is an ecology of affect that is placed by and places desire. Stretching out temporally and spatially, it simultane- ously desires in pastward-gazing nostalgia and future-looking hope, reaches out toward ever-receding horizons and builds up toward city-ness. With a footprint larger than New York City, but a population a frac- tion of its size, Edmonton expands across vast territories. Meanwhile, its core is just beginning to bristle with taller buildings scrambling to meet the desires of a rapidly growing population who seek in Edmonton a place of their own. Much of that population explosion is driven by the oil boom in north- ern Alberta. But whereas Edmonton is rapidly being reshaped and reimag- ined by some desires, other desires take a longer time to transform the landscape, and in the meantime can’t find a space amidst the expansive- ness. When the housing infrastructure couldn’t keep up with needs in the last

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