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

• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 13 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554583485
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for theHumanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, usingfunds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for ourpublishing activities.
 
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
 
Ecologies of affect: placing nostalgia, desire, and hope / 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. Geographical perception. I. Davidson, Tonya K.,1979– II. Park, Ondine, [date] III. Shields, Rob, 1961– IV. Series: Environmental humanitiesseries
 
HM861. E362011 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. Geographical perception. I. Davidson, Tonya,1979– II. Park, Ondine, [date] III. Shields, Rob, 1961– IV. Series: Environmental humanitiesseries (Online)
 
HM861. E362011a 304.2 C2010-906492-5
 
 
Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Cover image: Passing Angel by Maria-CarolinaCambre and Lorin Yochim. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.
 
© 2011 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
 
 
 
 
 
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in thistext, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called tothe publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, inany form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence fromThe Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence,visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Cover
Title
Half-title
Environmental Humanities
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction ONDINE PARK TONYA K. DAVIDSON ROB SHIELDS
Section I: Nostalgia
1 - “Not everything was good, but many things were better” Nostalgia for East Germany and Its Politics ANNE WINKLER
2 - Nostalgia and Postmemories of a Lost Place Actualizing “My Virtual Homeland” TONYA K. DAVIDSON
3 - Placing Nostalgia The Process of Returning and Remaking Home ALLISON HUI
4 - From Disease to Desire The Afflicted Amalgamation of Music and Nostalgia MICKEY VALLEE
Section II: Desire
5 - The Tourist Affect Escape and Syncresis on the Las Vegas Strip ROB SHIELDS
6 - (In) Human Desiring and Extended Agency MATTHEW TIESSEN
7 - Cityscapes of Desire Urban Change in Post-Soviet Russia OLGA PAK
8 - Illustrating Desires The Idea and the Promise of the Suburb in Two Children’s Books ONDINE PARK
Section III: Hope
9 - The Virtual Places of Childhood Hope and the Micro-Politics of Race at an Inner-City Youth Centre BONAR BUFFAM
10 - Virtual Resurrections Che Guevara’s Image as Place of Hope MARIA-CAROLINA CAMBRE
11 - Performing Spaces of Hope Street Puppetry and the Aesthetics of Scale PETRA HROCH
12 - The Spatial Distribution of Hope In and Beyond Fort McMurray SARA DOROW GOZE DOGU
13 - Spectacular Enclosures of Hope Artificial Islands in the Gulf and the Present MARK S. JACKSON VERONICA DELLA DORA
Conclusion A Roundtable on the Affective Turn ROB SHIELDS ONDINE PARK TONYA K. DAVIDSON the CONTRIBUTORS
List of Contributors
Index
Environmental Humanities Series
Titles in the Environmental Humanities Series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Back cover
List of Figures


1.1 The Ostalgie coffee mug
1.2 Replicas of East German candy, DDR Museum, Berlin
1.3 The East German bathroom, DDR Museum, Berlin
1.4 Ampelmann store and Fernsehturm , Berlin
2.1 Kapetanovo, 1930s
2.2 Baby clothes from Kapetanovo
2.3 Boys at Gasthaus, Kapetanovo
2.4 Map of Kapetanovo, 1997
5.1 The Strip, Las Vegas
5.2 Casino gambling hall, Las Vegas
5.3 Abandoned lots and construction projects along The Strip
6.1 Accepting the desire line’s invitation on two wheels
6.2 Carving a desired line
7.1 Okhta Centre: the tower’s position relative to the city
8.1 Suburbia as a paper doll chain
8.2 Suburbia glimpsed through the window of a moving vehicle
8.3 Ubiquitous suburbanization?
8.4 Rectilinear suburbia
8.5 “Cookie cutter” suburb
8.6 Suburban encroachment on green field
8.7 Reformed suburbia?
8.8 Suburban home in nature?
10.1 “26th AISF national conference begins”
10.2 West Bank barrier Che Guevara
10.3 Mural, Belfast, Ireland
10.4 Palestine Nakba Commemoration, May 2008
10.5 Athens, Greece
10.6 School mural, Gonzales Catán, Buenos Aires
10.7 Che collage I
10.8 Che collage II
11.1 The Little Girl Giant meets the Sultan’s Elephant
11.2 The Sultan’s Elephant in the streets of London
11.3 The Little Girl Giant takes a nap in St. James’s Park, London
11.4 A child swinging on the arm of the Little Girl Giant
12.1 A long-timer’s map
12.2 An industry worker’s map
12.3 A cosmopolitan’s map
 
 
 

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 endlessly on generic, busy thoroughfares, Edmonton may be an unlikely inspiration for theorizing about affective attachments to place. But Edmonton 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 simultaneously 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 fraction 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 northern Alberta. But whereas Edmonton is rapidly being reshaped and reimagined by some desires, other desires take a longer time to transform the landscape, and in the meantime can’t find a space amidst the expansiveness. When the housing infrastructure couldn’t keep up with needs in the last few years, visible tent cities in the heart of the city and invisible working homeless scattered throughout the city ephemerally marked their presence (particularly in summer 2007), adding to the ranks of already existing marginalized populations. Undesired, and the effect of desires unmet, the conditions of the less privileged in this first North American “Human Rights City” (see http://www.pdhre.org ) now face the localized fallout of the so-called global economic recession. Perhaps what anchors these fragile, rapid incursions of yearning is a built form that is the nearly ubiquitous domestic architectural style in central Edmonton: 1970s low-rise apartment buildings with unironically kitsch names like “The Branding Place” or “The Shangri-La.” These two names speak to ambivalent desires for imagined other times (when ranching was the supposed mainstay) and places (in this case, a mythical utopian place).
A territory shaped by desires and nostalgic in its built environment, Edmonton also brands itself as a place that produces affective, hopeful attachments. Calling itself the “City of Champions,” “Festival City,” and “Gateway to the North,” Edmonton seems to imagine itself as a place whose hope rests on a glorious past, vibrant present, and expansive future. As the triumphs of Edmonton’s “Champions” (the Grads, Eskimos, and Oilers) have already faded into sports history, they can now be shared nostalgically by all as the basis for a hope that perhaps similar glory days also still lie ahead. 1  “Festival City” is a branding of hope and a seemingly perpetual deferment of pleasure. In a city with eight-month-long winters and temperatures regularly below –40ºC, where plugging in your car to prevent the eng