disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 23: Mapping

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Volume 23 Mapping

4-25-2014

Follow this and additional works at: http://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure Available at: http://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol23/iss1

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Advisory Board

disClosure 23 Editorial Collective

Benjamin Agger, Sociology University of Texas-Arlington

Rachael Hoy, Editor Christina Williams, Editor

James Boon, Anthropology Princeton University

Daniel Cockayne Austin Crane Wes DeShano Zack Hardin Jessa Loomis Marita Murphy Erin R. Newell Alexander Menrisky Lindsay Shade Sarah A. Soliman Sophia Strosberg

Matthew Edney, Geography University of Maine Nancy Fraser, Political Science New School for Social Research Cynthia Feeland, Philosophy University of Houston Sander Gilman, German/Psychology University of Chicago Derek Gregory, Geography University of British Columbia

Jeffrey Peters, Faculty Advisor

Peter-Uwe Hohendahl, German Studies Cornell University

Web Host bepress

Anton Kaes, German University of California, Berkeley Douglas Kellner, Philosophy of Education University of California-Los Angeles

disClosure is a refereed journal produced in conjunction with the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky. Funding for this issue was provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Student Government Association.

Artists may retain copyright over contributions. No part of this work may be reproduced or reprinted without written consent of disClosure or where the artist retains the copyright, the artist.

Dominick LaCapra, History Cornell University Maggie McFadden, Women's Studies Appalachian State University Michael Palmer, Poet San Francisco Marjorie Perloff, Comparative Literature Stanford University Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Anthropology University of California-Berkeley Barney Warf, Geography Florida State University Samuel Weber, German Northwestern

disClosure, editors 213 Patterson Office Tower University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0027 disclosureournal@gmail.com

Jim Winders, History Appalachian State University Irving Zeitlin, Sociology University of Toronto

http://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure http://www.as.uky.edu/socialtheory

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disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory No. 23

Mapping

Table of Contents Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments Rachael Hoy and Christina Williams

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Landing on the Patio: Landscape Ecology and the Architecture of Identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Jenna Goldsmith

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Tapestry of Space: Domestic Architecture and Underground Communities in Margaret Morton’s Photography of a Forgotten New York Irina Nersessova

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Hegel’s Internet Ben Agger

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Six Poems on Sixteenth-Century Maps Jeremy Dae Paden

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Collective Counter Cartography from Prinzessinnengarten, Berlin Gabriel Wulff

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A Posture of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’s Location, Position, and Displacement Aaron Cloyd

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Mapping as Performing Place Aslıhan Şenel

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Exploring Mapping: Discussions with Swati Chattopadhyay and Derek Gregory

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A Schizocartography of the University of Leeds: Cognitively Mapping the Campus Tina Richardson

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the angel of dead & dying towns Jeremy Dae Paden

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Contributors Ben Agger is Professor of Sociology at Texas-Arlington, where he teaches critical theory and cultural/media/Internet studies. His most recent books are Texting toward Utopia: Kids, Writing, and Resistance and, with Tim Luke, the edited volume Gun Violence and Public Life.

Aaron Cloyd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on ecocriticism, environmental literature, and wilderness. His work is forthcoming in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and International Journal of Comic Art. His dissertation is a study of wilderness rewilding in contemporary American literature.

Jenna Goldsmith is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kentucky, where she studies ecocriticism, feminist thought, poetics, and the rich intersections therein.

Irina Nersessova is a PhD student in English Studies at Illinois State University, concentrating on Literature and Culture. Her research interests include psychogeography, displacement, memory, war literature, modernism, and postmodernism. Her work has been motivated by the exploration of the largely neglected topic of the human relationship to space as examined in literature. She received her BA and MA in British and American Literature from Eastern Michigan University.

Jeremy Dae Paden is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Transylvania University. His essays have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, CalĂ­ope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Poetry, and other journals. He is the author of the chapbook Broken Tulips (Accents Publishing) and his poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Adirondack Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, California Review, Louisville Review, pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Rattle, and other journals and anthologies.

Tina Richardson is a late stage PhD researcher and guest lecturer and has been working and writing in the area of psychogeography since 2009 when she set up Leeds Psychogeography Group. She has had a number of articles published, including in the Spaces and Flows journal and the Society of Cartographers Bulletin, and her upcoming edited volume on psychogeography is due out in 2015: Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography.

She has been featured on a BBC Radio 4 program and also in the British press in regards to a psychogeographical talk she presented on the musician Nick Drake.

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Aslıhan Şenel is an architect, design studio tutor, and lecturer at the Istanbul Technical University (ITU) Faculty of Architecture. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at ITU, she completed her PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL in 2008 with a thesis titled “Unfixing Place: A Study of Istanbul through Topographical Practices.” She has organized international student workshops and contributed to publications such as Politics of Making, First Year Works (ITU), Besides Tourism, and Quaderni 3: Urban Representations. Her recent research and practice involves architectural representation with a focus on performativeness, collaboration, and participation.

Gabriel Wulff is undertaking practice-led PhD research at University of Brighton, focusing on design and sustainability in the context of urban agriculture. This focus is informed by research into community gardening initiatives and these initiatives’ models of sustainability as emerging, open, reflexive and non-normative. Gabriel has 10 years of experience as an activist and practitioner as a guerrilla gardener, sustainability campaigner, permaculturist and garden organizer, working as an associate with architects PlanProjects and landscape artists PiP. Trained as an ecologist and then as a designer, Gabriel lectures on the Sustainable Design MA at University of Brighton. Gabriel's work has won awards from AIGA in North America as well his most recent work being published in text books in the UK and USA. He has presented his work at the Designers Accords in the UK and recently chaired a design salon at the V&A on food and the city.

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Collective Members Rachael Hoy is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research examines late 19th and early 20th century American literature spatially and materially, considering the forces shaping identity and the power mechanisms at work in the changing landscape.

Christina Williams is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research examines the intersections of 19th century American literature and law.

Daniel Cockayne is a PhD student in the geography department. His research is concerned with technology and digital media startup firms in San Francisco. In terms of social theory Daniel is interested in post-structuralist French thought, in particular the writing of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and more contemporaneously Bernard Stiegler and feminist thought taking up these ideas, including the writing of Judith Butler, Liz Grosz and Rosi Braidotti.

Austin Crane is currently a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. He completed his MA in Geography at the University of Kentucky in 2013. His research, set in Ukraine, focuses on the political geographies of humanitarianism, migration and borders and is concerned with the spatial production of security and insecurity.

Wes DeShano is a first year PhD student in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. He works at the intersection of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism, and is particularly interested in how agency is recuperated through human—nonhuman interactions in postcolonial contexts. His research also adopts this framework when examining a broad range of social theory issues, including human rights discourse.

Zack Hardin is currently completing his MA in History at the University of Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Louisville in 2013 with his MA in English and in 2011 with his BS in Social Studies Education. He is currently researching the history of Louisville civil rights.

Jessa Loomis is a doctoral student in Geography at the University of Kentucky.

Jessa is an economic geographer who utilizes feminist approaches to understand processes of neoliberalization, spaces of work, capitalist economic restructuring, and the everyday practices of “making do.”

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Marita Murphy is an MA student in the University of Kentucky's Department of Geography. Her work engages with current global conflicts, investigating the relationship between security, policy, and conceptions of violence.

Erin R. Newell received her MA in English from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include postcolonial and Anglophone literatures, particularly Indian and Caribbean responses to and retellings of canonical texts.

Alexander Menrisky has a BS in journalism from Ohio University and will complete his MA in English literature at the University of Kentucky in May 2014.

He is enrolled to begin doctoral study in the fall of 2014.

Lindsay Shade is an environmental justice activist and Geography PhD student at the University of Kentucky. Her activist research examines the effects of mineral titling practices and subsurface resource speculation on land use and livelihoods in northern West Virginia and northwest Ecuador.

Sarah A. Soliman is an MA student in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Sarah's research lies at the intersection of social and religious geography and is concerned with converts to Islam and issues of community, lived religion, and embodiment. Sarah earned her BA in International Relations with a focus on the Middle East from the University of Cincinnati.

Sophia Strosberg is an MA student in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. She conducts research at the crossroads of animal studies and epidemiology in order to map out a concept of posthuman health.

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Editors’ Preface Rachael Hoy and Christina Williams In the case that is captivating me at the moment, the First World War, it's very clear that on the western front, the apparent stasis of trench warfare was brought about not by the fixity of the map at all, but by a series of advances and counter-advances which depended upon, in fact were choreographed by, a constantly updating map basis. That is to say, maps were constantly redrawn, overprinted, and distributed.

—Derek Gregory Representation is about control—somebody’s control—and there is no representation that is not about control.

—Swati Chattopadhyay

The twenty-third edition of disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory presents the theme of “Mapping.” The journal itself is a map—a representation, both visual and textual—of how this particular topic is viewed across disciplines.

By intimating that this journal is a map, we don’t wish to impose the traditional power dynamics that mapping implies. Instead, we hope to present the opportunity to explore the ways to define maps, their methods for use, the possibilities for counter-use, and the different technologies that create them.

In this issue, you will find scholarly articles that probe these and many other topics. While each of the contributors presents a unique view of mapping, they all point away from the fixity of maps and towards the ongoing processes of how materials, people, and everyday life can map and counter-map. As graphic representations are integral to the idea of mapping, it is especially germane that this issue marks our online debut. The digital platform has provided the opportunity to publish supplementary graphic representations, as demonstrated by the contributions of Tina Richardson, Aslıhan Şenel, and Gabriel Wulff. In addition to these vibrant visualizations, the creative works of Jeremy Dae Paden poetically interrogate the stories and histories behind the creation of such maps.

The Spring Lecture Series of the Committee on Social Theory gave our Collective an opportunity to discuss many issues of mapping with leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. The interviews with Drs. Neil Brenner, Swati Chattopadhyay, and Derek Gregory explore topics such as binaries, urbanization, technologies, networks, flows, and warfare. Their insights highlight the myriad ways that we can look at mapping. Authority no longer lies with the map-maker, but the map-user.

So, chart your own course.

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Acknowledgements disClosure is first and foremost a collective endeavor. In just a year, we have made big changes by debuting a new digital home for our journal. We could not have done this without the dedicated efforts of Adrian Ho, Director of Digital Scholarship at the University of Kentucky Libraries, and our team at bepress.

Their work to help us build a more accessible and effective platform has introduced us to a wider audience that will only continue to grow.

The opportunity to learn the editorial process was invaluable, and we are deeply grateful for the trust of our advisors as we all traversed new territory.

Marion Rust, Director of the Committee on Social Theory, Lisa Cliggett, Interim Director of the Committee on Social Theory, and Jeff Peters, Faculty Advisor to disClosure, provided integral guidance and support for our work to digitize the journal and launch the 23rd issue. Additionally, we would like to thank Eir-Anne Edgar, the Social Theory Research Assistant, for her hard work in bringing our back issues online, making our journal fully accessible to those near and far.

We would also like to thank the editor of disClosure 22, Richard Parmer, for his support and advice.

To our editorial collective—thank you for your dedication and commitment. This issue is really your creation, and it has been a privilege to work with you.

Last year’s ST 600 course, entitled “Mapping,” co-taught by Drs. Jeremy Crampton (Geography), Susan Larson (Hispanic Studies), Jeff Peters (French and Francophone Studies), and Jenny Rice (Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies) was the guiding theme for this year’s issue. We’d like to thank these professors and our visiting scholars, Derek Gregory, Neil Brenner, Tom Conley, and Swati Chattopadhyay for their contributions and for starting the conversations presented in this issue.

Finally, thanks to the contributors. We are excited to present and publish your work.

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Tapestry of Space: Domestic Architecture and Underground Communities in Margaret Morton’s Photography of a Forgotten New York IRINA NERSESSOVA Illinois State University Margaret Morton’s photographs of New York’s homeless demonstrate how urban space impacts the psyche and directs behavior. The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City was published in 1995 and Fragile Dwelling, which captures the shanties built on the streets of New York, was published in 2000. Morton’s books pair photographs with stories of communities that reinterpret the subject of home through the use of discarded materials. The Situationist International (SI) views on psychogeography and material production will guide interpretations of the work of these specific communities of the homeless in 1990s New York. Situationist International theory will also be applied to Morton’s role as a photographer, the city as public space and tourist attraction, and the work and experience of domestic architecture.

The underground and aboveground homes are designed by taking material fragments and lining up the pieces in a cohesive manner that corresponds to the splintered identity’s attempt to conform to the notion of a unified and solid self.

This self-representational architecture is a visualization of human connection to space. Because shelter is an essential part of sustaining oneself, identity is closely tied to one’s place of home, and because no place is guaranteed to be a permanent home, this aspect of identity is consistently fragile. The homeless community’s complete involvement in home building is also the process of understanding that a home is not permanent, yet the act of constructing these homes can define a person through his or her creative response to instability.

Although the self symbolically comes together as homes are built out of scrap materials, the reality of the ephemeral nature of these homes destroys the chimerical possibility of identity wholeness when city officials demolish the homes or close off the tunnels. Homelessness is not truly the condition of not having a home. Because the homeless indeed have a home they build on the streets or in the tunnels, their condition is more accurately described as the absence of a stable home. Defining oneself through such terms is flawed because such stability does not exist for either the homeless or the housed. The two are not a binary; rather, both encounter varying degrees of stability. The fragility of home and identity is universal, but with the homeless population, the vulnerability is far more apparent. For this reason, the displaced best represent the universal relationship between space and the splintered identity.

Situationist International and Material Production

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To discuss Morton’s pursuit to record urban New York life, I apply twentieth century Marxist ideas developed by the Situationist International. Her commitment to anti-capitalism, psychogeography, and participation in the dérive builds upon situationist ideas and provides a framework for further exploration of the urban environment. From 1957 to 1972, the group Situationist International articulated the significance of everyday life through analysis of commodity fetishism and the cultural condition of the spectacle.1 The term “spectacle” is used to comment on society’s reliance on consumption through image promotion; therefore, in a society of the spectacle, individuals understand themselves by means of mass media. Human relationships and contact are thoroughly influenced by images of commodities people are made to feel they need, and the accumulation of commodities evolves into that of spectacles because people can no longer directly experience reality. Everything is a representation, and images dictate what people desire to have. Situationist International’s concern with the capitalist order, as described by founding member Guy Debord in 1957 in “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency,” is that “Capitalism is devising new forms of struggle (state intervention in the market, growth in the distribution sector, fascist governments); it is relying on the deterioration in workers’ leadership; it is masking the nature of class oppositions by means of various reformist tactics.”2 On a global scale, Debord not only views this as a way in which capitalism maintains the society it has created, but also argues that the people of anti-capitalist countries must question power instead of accepting reforms. Without the abolition of capitalism or any oppressive order, the workingclass continues to struggle within the boundaries imposed on them by the system in place.

In place of material production, which often exploits the environment, Morton’s interviewees use space as a creative guide. They build on space using found materials and personal items in ways that do not treat the environment as a commodity. Morton’s New York-focused photography is an example of how the Situationist International philosophy is pertinent to discussing the conflict between the society of the spectacle and the reality of homelessness within it.

Through a series of films and publications, SI made evident that the spectacular society is passive, and, as a result, the group contributed to the Paris riots of May 1968. The riots addressed the group’s concerns with the oppressive state and educational system, and this event attests to the relationship between concentration on space and search for social justice. This relationship stems from the knowledge about society one obtains through observing space. While Morton’s projects are not a direct reference to SI, her photographs of New York poverty are a response to the society of the spectacle and are consistent with the SI investment in the power of the proletariat. By taking a city that is a site for

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mass-marketing and depicting communities that have been pushed out of the consumer image of New York and out of adequate New York life itself, she proves that spectacles take place at public expense. To locate the New York that exists beyond the spectacle, Morton employs the situationist method of exploring the city.

Situationist International’s goals were to eliminate the division between art and life and to examine everyday life in its entirety. A symbiosis between art and life is apparent in the environment’s influence on human emotions, so the dérive (also referred to as the “drift”), a technique for exploring spaces, is employed by situationists to understand the environment’s psychological impact.

The dérive takes place without previously formed notions about the environment, and the one who practices the drift is aware of the environment’s effect on one’s behavior, and such alertness to psychogeographical components of the drift separates the participant of the dérive from the casual wanderer.

The Role of the Urban Photographer Before the dérive is used to describe the urban photographer’s function in the context of situationist theory, the history of the dérive must be addressed. The precursor of the dérive is flânerie. The flâneur, or one who practices flânerie, is a mercurial character, who plays roles ranging from a dandy stroller to a careful observer who studies social space. He is a nineteenth century figure developed by Charles Baudelaire and later given significance within Marxism by Walter Benjamin. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin expanded on the flâneur role through his observation of the Parisian arcades, which were intended as a site for conspicuous consumption.3 The arcades stand in contrast to the places Morton visits in her study of space because the arcades are examples of the type of locations used to promote cities as tourist destinations. In the context of Benjamin’s work, the flâneur is male, and no female equivalent (or flâneuse) exists because women in public space in the early twentieth century are prostitutes and other working-class women. They are not perceived as privileged, active observers who search for social meanings in the space they occupy.

Susan Sontag, in theorizing the role of photography as of the 1970s, sees the camera as a tool employed by the flâneur, describing the artist as “an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’“4 Susan Sontag’s flâneur is a wanderer with the artistic purpose of recording through photography. Walter Benjamin scholar Graeme Gilloch describes the flâneur as impulsive and likely to give in to whims: “To surrender oneself to the pleasure of distraction, to allow oneself to be led by fancy and caprice, is the fundamental basis of the heedless wanderings of the

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dawdling flâneur. To lose oneself requires practice, because it demands that one overcome imposed prohibitions and inhibitions.”5 While Sontag’s voyeur and Gilloch’s easygoing flâneur contrast with the conscientious and sensitive reflections of urban photographers, the act of overcoming inhibitions plays a key role in Morton’s willingness to journey into tunnels and abandoned streets. The situationist revision of the flânerie better describes urban photographers and their method. Unlike the stroll of the flâneur, the dérive is the walk of the everyday pedestrian, and the participant in the dérive abandons social status and can be male or female.

The dérive applies not only to the photographer’s study of the city streets and tunnels but also to their inhabitants’ observations, as their efforts to survive in the city become a method of understanding the environment’s effect on their internal life. In The Tunnel, Morton captures the underground society of people with a collection of photographs and interviews. Her photography confronts public unfamiliarity with the transitory lives of the homeless in 1990s New York.

In observing tunnel dwellers’ efforts to create homes, Morton also captures outsider attempts to destroy these homes. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” when discussing the photographer Eugène Atget, who was known for documenting the streets of Paris, Walter Benjamin states: “It has quite justly been said of Atget that he photographed [deserted Paris streets] like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.”6 Benjamin sees the photographs of Paris streets as a challenge to the viewer. When Morton travels underground and documents abandoned tunnels the way Atget captured deserted streets, she shows that what appears to be forgotten is space that is very much alive, cared for, and necessary for its inhabitants. Morton’s evidence incriminates those who do not respond to the forced removal of the homeless and their self-created homes, and her documentary form of photography suggests that the apparently mythical existence of marginal societies contributes to public apathy.

Gradually, Morton’s work breaks down the mythical and illusory qualities of the conception of underground life by satisfying mainstream society’s curiosity and refusing to embellish the group’s search for a home in New York. Morton begins her storytelling and collection of images at the north gate, where a man named Bernard narrates his purpose in the tunnels by commenting on aboveground life as distracting from the individual self: There’s a certain level of consciousness required of a man. And one can’t perfect that in functional society. You have to basically be separated and apart from it. And I guess that’s why I’m going through what I’m going through. I’ve been put into a hell of an environment to try to perfect this.

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But by the same token, it’s a perfect environment. It’s all about one’s focus and one’s will to be. And everything is challenging.7 His analysis of life aboveground is consistent with SI criticism of the spectacle as a filter for human interaction. Because underground life is not dedicated to images or accumulating commodities, Bernard uses this space to achieve the level of consciousness he believes is necessary.

Shortly after moving into the tunnels in the mid-1980s, Bernard met Bob, a volunteer cook at All Angels’ Church, who told him about the option of living underground. In the tunnel, Bob built a home and did not have to fear being mugged; however, despite describing his experience in the tunnel as one of security, in his last lines, he explains that this life consumed him: “The tunnel’s not bad. The tunnel’s a good place if you want to find out who you are. But when you find out who you are, you have to move out or the tunnel will eat you up like it ate me up for several years. Like I say, I built everything up around the tunnel.

Now I have to learn to build it around myself.”8 It is critical to appreciate that Morton introduces life in the tunnel not solely as a political portrait of poverty, but as a psychological space for its inhabitants. By ascribing internal significance to shelter, she sets up the discussion of homelessness in terms of its psychological aspects rather than as a strictly economic issue. Seeing poverty exclusively as an economic problem takes its pervasiveness in humanity for granted because it ignores how the notion of homelessness can also be extended to talk about the mental state of refuge. For Bob, refuge is the tunnel as both a place and as a way of thinking that prevents the outside world from causing him harm. It liberates him, yet his freedom is complicated by extreme isolation and poverty, which reveals that although a connection with the environment is conducive to human agency, it is not the systemic change that is necessary for the well-being of the working-class. By letting Bob describe how the tunnel consumes people, Morton averts romanticizing underground life with her book.

Psychogeography as Rejection of Imperialism The resistance toward an abstraction of the city that Morton demonstrates can also be observed in Simon Sadler’s The Situationist City, which examines Situationist International’s recognition of the psychology of space: “By analogy, the situationist city was at odds with the Corbusian vision of people at ease in an ideal urban landscape, a place where the struggle with nature, with the body, with space, and with class had inexplicably come to an end … In psychogeography all the struggles were acute again, making a nonsense of the Corbusian fantasy of the city as something abstract, rational, or ideal.”9 The situationist struggle with developing a method that comments on urban space without accommodating an idealistic perspective of the city parallels Morton’s photography as a creative

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project that does not limit the discussion of a social issue to a rendering of hardened, inured tunnel residents.

Sadler compares the situationists’ exploration of the city with imperialist travel around the globe. Both sought out the exotic with the belief it would advance society, yet Sadler also argues that the situationists’ desire to possess the city was more than the fetishization of the space. Urban exploration was not designed to exploit the city; instead, when the drift was adopted for city examination, situationists such as Guy Debord began creating maps they believed would humanize city space. Rather than enforcing order the way typical maps would, these maps promoted intimacy with the city and depicted “the surrealist disorientation of the drifts around Paris by scattering the pieces of map and the arrows showing their routes.”10 Traditional cartography claims absolute, objective knowledge of spaces, and commenting on the difference between situationist mapping and conventional maps, Sadler states: “Rather than float above the city as some sort of omnipotent, instantaneous, disembodied, all-possessing eye, situationist cartography admitted that its overview of the city was reconstructed in the imagination, piecing together an experience of space that was actually terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal, and cultural.”11 The outdated method of exploring the city was taken apart by the situationists the way New York’s underground residents disassembled conventional journey around the city.

Because the urban economy is heavily dependent on consumerism and tourism, the exploration of a city is guided by the authorities’ definition of what the city consists of. The government authority and the business authority will treat both the resident and the visitor as a tourist if the journeyer shows potential to be a worthwhile consumer. A tourist’s map will guide a visitor to theaters, restaurants, shopping centers, and museums. Meanwhile, every unprofitable location is treated as an abyss on traditional city maps. Here, the journey of the flâneur and that of a tourist are contrasted when the intent of the exploration is taken into account. The flâneur’s desire to observe is driven by the need to understand and connect with the space, and while the flâneur and the tourist think of exploring the city as a similarly enjoyable adventure, the tourist has nothing invested in the impact a city has on identity.

The tunnel epitomizes a neglected and undesirable location, yet in doing so, it provides a monastic refuge for its residents. For example, resident Manny describes a sense of security (not unlike the aforementioned inhabitants) in the tunnel by recalling an instance of nearly being attacked but escaping because no one would follow him into the tunnel: “I feel safe in the tunnel because I don’t care how big you are—even if you have a gun or a weapon—if you don’t know where you’re going or if you never been in there—it has no light, no types of light.”12 The absolute darkness of the tunnel prevents danger from entering it, which explains how it is possible to have the highest feeling of safety in a place that is perceived as most dangerous.

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Seeking out peace in the tunnel by expecting fear of the unknown to prevent criminals from following the tunnel dwellers partially defines the psychological relationship the inhabitants have with space. In a situation like Manny’s, this relationship is an understanding of outsiders’ reactions to urban places. The knowledge of outsiders’ perceptions is developed through the exploration of the city and through Manny’s own oneness with his environment.

When Sadler explains the drift, the situationist attempt at urban exploration is comparable to that of the tunnel dwellers: As its name implied, psychogeography attempted to combine subjective and objective modes of study. On one hand it recognized that the self cannot be divorced from the urban environment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city. The reader senses Debord’s desperation to negotiate this paradox in his “Théorie de la dérive” (Theory of the dérive), a key document first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les lévres nues in 1956 and republished in Internationale situationniste in 1958. The drift, Debord explained entailed the sort of “playful-constructive behavior” that had always distinguished situationist activities from mere pastimes. The drift should not be confused, then, with “classical notions of the journey and the stroll;” drifters weren’t like tadpoles in a tank, “stripped of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” but were people alert to “the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” capable as a group of agreeing upon distinct, spontaneous preferences for routes through the city.13 Prior to settling in the tunnel, the residents had extensive knowledge of the aboveground space, which is how they are able to travel back to gather food and materials for their homes. Their familiarity with the tunnel itself is much like the situationists’ awareness of the various routes and their effort to use this awareness to bond with the city.

This attempt at developing a social geography (or recognizing a social geography already in existence) is further evident in Larry’s story. He is a friend of Bernard’s who was unable to stand the chaos and the violence in the shelter system and settled in the tunnels. He references the aboveground shanty towns of New York when discussing his choice against building a shanty: “You never know what’s going to happen there in the structure. This is a solid structure. And there’s not a lot of traffic here like you find up above this. On the streets there’s too much traffic and there’s too many things that can endanger your life.”14 There are two entrances where Larry lives and the other gates are locked, so because a person does not end up in the tunnels unless they specifically intend to live there, the outside world is not feared the way it is when one lives on the streets, in a shanty, or in a shelter. Since the tunnel is shelter from the conflicts above, the

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residents’ choice to live underground demonstrates that the social problems above ground have forced them into an alternate sphere. Larry’s experience demonstrates one of the central points of psychogeography. Sadler further explains how the motivation behind psychogeography was to recognize the sociological conflicts in urban space: Psychogeography thus produced a social geography of the city, especially important at a time when social geography was still struggling to emerge from the shadow of academic geography. Against academic geography’s “scientific” taxonomy of the physical factors that supposedly determine the character of a space, social geography theorized space as the product of society. It was an approach pioneered in the late nineteenth century by the former Communard Reclus, who recognized in geography “nothing but history in space.” Situationists were naturally inclined toward the goals of social geography, which opposed academic geography’s reduction of the city to “the undifferentiated state of the visible-readable realm” (to use Lefebvre’s disdainful phrase) and to the homogenization of the conflicts that produce capitalist space.15 The tunnel responds to space as the product of society by taking in the residents who have been failed by that society. The move underground aids in evading the reality that the pragmatic perception of space is dominant aboveground. The move is also a critique of the consumerist society’s failure to apply psychogeography, which would cause the society to reject the use of space as a tool in promoting excess consumption because it reveals societal conflicts in which wealth exists alongside poverty’s pervasiveness. With a theoretical approach to urbanism out of the picture, parts of the city’s population had to seek out alternative systems of survival.

A theoretical approach understands that survival is not an uncreative enduring of homeless life. The people living underground reach out for psychological peace and for artistic expression, and the artwork underground reinforces that the tunnels cannot be reduced to space for only primal survival.

The artwork in this tunnel includes an imitation of Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory and graffiti of the sculptures Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David.16 In her acknowledgements, Morton credits the art to Chris (recognized by his signature “Freedom”), who has been creating murals in the tunnels since the 1980s. The presence of art in the tunnel establishes the underground society as comprehensive. Similar to how underground families and community responsibilities demonstrate a functioning way of life, the graffiti represents the presence of Humanities, which further demonstrates a complete society.

Art is a display of talent manifested in hidden places, which mirrors the subterranean nature of the dwellers’ lives. One of the residents, Marcos, described

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the tunnel as like living in an art museum.17 The art dismisses any assumption about the tunnel as a pallid location for ghostlike residents. By helping the reader let go of the idea of the tunnel as eerie, Morton is more convincing in discussing the peacefulness that is underground and absent in the dwellings built in the streets. While most residents discuss this peacefulness, Joe, who lives toward the south end, addresses his experience in Vietnam in expressing contentment about living in the tunnel. He describes leaving his apartment because of flashbacks and states that they have diminished in the tunnel. Five of his six children died, some from the effects of Agent Orange. This strained his marriage, which ended in divorce and caused him to lose touch with the only child who is alive.

On the street, Joe met Cathy, who is a Vietnam veteran’s widow. She lost her only child to a stray bullet in Central Park. Joe and Cathy married and made a home in the tunnel. In discussing Cathy’s first husband, who died from an overdose, Joe describes his military experience: “He was a tunnel rat [in Vietnam]. I know how it is to be a tunnel rat because I did that tour myself— flashlight and a gun, go down in the tunnels, visit people.”18 The irony of choosing to live in the tunnel after being sent to destroy the underground complexes created by the Viet Cong lies in the fact that Joe chose the tunnel for peace and safety while his experience with the tunnels during the war was perilous due to waiting soldiers, traps, and dangerous animals. Going into a very different tunnel, Joe and Cathy sought to escape the effects the war had on their lives. The tunnel as a place of peace and a place that pacifies the consequence of war is an example of mental space that is purposefully created through inhabitants designing and adapting to physical space. The tunnel as a place for storytelling functions as an image of the mind; it is virtually hidden unless entered into through stories that explain choices in day to day life.

Public Space vs. City Attractions Most of the residents Morton interviewed stayed in the tunnel while others moved away to take a chance on the aboveground world again. In the epilogue, Morton states: “Most of the entrances have been padlocked or welded shut by Amtrak police. Many long-term residents have been informed that they are trespassing and have been threatened with arrest. As this book goes to press, the tunnel residents have been notified that eviction is imminent.”19 Ordinarily, a person cannot make use of a public space when his or her conduct prevents others from using the space, but the label “homeless” has been mistakenly approached as a criminal behavior in itself. Being pushed out of the tunnels is yet another step in controlling and prohibiting the use of public place that is not uncommon in urban areas. For example, urban theorist Mike Davis calls the destruction of public space a crusade: “The contemporary opprobrium attached to the term ‘street person’ is in itself a harrowing index of the devaluation of public spaces. To

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reduce contact with untouchables, urban redevelopment has converted once vital pedestrian streets into traffic sewers and transformed public parks into temporary receptacles for the homeless and the wretched.”20 Altering these spaces to correspond to the population inhabiting them treats the homeless with ignominy and brands both the people and space with a degree of disgrace. Davis refers to this as the extinction of democratic space that is comparable to Victorian England: “In a city of several million yearning immigrants, public amenities are radically shrinking, parks are becoming derelict and beaches more segregated, libraries and playgrounds are closing, youth congregations of ordinary kinds are banned, and the streets are becoming more desolate and dangerous.”21 In The Tunnel, the move underground responds to the lack of public space and the poor conditions of the public space that is still available. Throughout Morton’s subsequent publication on the homeless in New York, it is evident that the war on public space intensified in the years after the closing of the tunnel.

In Fragile Dwelling, Morton’s study of the city places the images of the urban environment into a binary. She presents no postcard photographs that stereotype or glamorize the city. Such representation of the city in her book would have no function because conventional images already exist in the minds of viewers. The typical images and the highly decorative commercial attractions of the city are constructed ideals designed for the tourist and consumer mindset; meanwhile, Fragile Dwelling embodies the hidden reality. The city has become an area to be exploited by all who wish to profit from it. In order to profit, businesses have to expand, bring in the wealthy, and attract tourists. The means to this goal has been to push the poor out of sight. The most damaging binary in the images of life in the city has been wealth and poverty. While one is something to strive for, the other is a state of being an outcast. In observing these spaces, Morton employs the dérive, and in the responses of the shanty town residents, she finds their simultaneous participation in the dérive. Their dérive is rooted in understanding everyday life through space, and with this perceptive, they assert their identity by performing work (home building) that defines them, rather than contributes to mass production. What distinguishes this work from all work outside of mass production is that it is necessary for their survival. The homeless population represented in Morton’s work does not live outside of mass production or capitalism; rather, the individuals innovatively navigate the system they exist in even if it fails them.

With this particular collection, Morton returns to the psychological relationship the homeless have with the city, and psychogeography is again instrumental in understanding how the city’s inhabitants relate to the environment. In “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Debord claims that psychogeography: is not inconsistent with the materialist perspective that sees life and thought as conditioned by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals

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with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climactic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.22 This definition of psychogeography is consistent with Morton’s study of space.

The environment’s effects on emotion and behavior are observed in Fragile Dwelling as much as they are evident in The Tunnel. But what is newly apparent in Morton’s later work is the rarity of seeing an urban construction outside of what attracts tourism and consumerism.

The use of commodities to alleviate one’s onerous circumstances comes from the false sense of security images of wealth create. In this case, selfconception is formed through commodities that do not reflect one’s own economic situation, constructing a sense of escape through consumerism. Debord comments on the culture of excess by condemning how the population’s desire for excess is motivated by the desire to emulate the images of the city created to bring in big businesses and temporary visitors: We know with what blind fury so many unprivileged people are ready to defend their mediocre advantages. Such pathetic illusions of privilege are linked to a general idea of happiness prevalent among the bourgeoisie and maintained by a system of publicity that includes Malraux’s aesthetic as well as Coca-Cola ads—an idea of happiness whose crisis must be provoked on every occasion by every means.23 Because the public trusts in commercial messages, they seek out the material items that double as signs of privilege. In this mindset, the material is demanded based on publicity-created fixation rather than need (or even want), for prior to the publicity, the individual is not aware that he or she either requires or desires the item. This distracts from an awareness of the populations Morton interviews because their lack of resources cannot be approached with the commercialist understanding of the material.

The city, as it is altered for business and tourism and consumerism, repulses Debord in the context of psychogeographical maps. He sees these maps as free from the influences that construct an artificial, consumer-based relationship with the city: The production of psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that

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express not subordination to randomness but total insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit).24 Breaking down conventional maps is dedicated to the personal relationship with space. The situationists aspire to living in a democratized space by the means of reinterpreting maps. Debord explains how this process is sometimes artistically inventive when he provides an example of a friend who “wandered though the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone.”25 In Fragile Dwelling, the awareness of the city through reinterpretation is present throughout the images of domestic architecture, which refer to the homeless population’s construction of home environments. While the projects of New Yorkers are not deliberately experimental, their investigative nature redefines space in a similar fashion.

Domestic Architecture The very idea of domestic architecture is a new understanding of structural design, and it assigns a different meaning to homelessness. The people of The Tunnel and Fragile Dwelling technically have homes they have built. The argument that they do not own the property and therefore have these homes only temporarily can be dismissed with the realization that many people do not own the property they live on. While the inhabitants classified as homeless are more vulnerable to a property owner’s decision to push them out of their residences, this fragility is widespread.

The difference between those who have been categorized as homeless and those that have not been categorized as homeless is the level of vulnerability and the level of awareness of this vulnerability. The homeless are faced with a reality others avoid recognizing by divorcing themselves from urban space and by providing themselves with a false impression of control by obtaining material signs of wealth and security. Having to face this reality of vulnerability, the homeless demonstrate, for the rest of the people, the inventive nature of endurance. In his introduction to the book, Alan Trachtenberg states: Fragile Dwelling crystallizes the paradox at the root of Morton’s work: not only the coexistence of wealth and poverty in the world’s richest metropolis, but the coexistence of despair and hope in the devices whereby the rejected contrive a life for themselves. We have the paradox of fragility itself: the dangers of hanging by your fingernails, and the pride of creative survival.26

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In the metropolis, the homeless struggle with creating personal space within an area that the richest population of the city or the city itself owns without utilizing.

To allow people to create their own personal space would be to give them the right to housing and to remove the damaging stereotypes of laziness and need for charity. If the homeless are seen as independent individuals, a system they can succeed in would have to replace the custom of sporadic and patronizing charity.

Morton captures their homes and retells the stories of the inhabitants of domestic architecture. To embark on this project is to remember that to patronize is also to demean, and patronization is not completely unlike the demonization of the population living below the poverty line because both approaches convey perceived inferiority. Their survival can be attributed to their connection to the land, and this survival is not connected to forms of charity. They care for gardens, for animals, for all the living things that those who live more comfortably often neglect because they are disconnected from spaces they live in.

While Morton celebrates the power of the human creativity of the homeless, it is her creative work that invites readers and viewers into their lives.

The areas in which the homeless reside (and the homeless themselves) are almost always described to the audiences by outsiders. Morton’s outsider status in the situation of homelessness takes the fear out of the idea of what it is to be an insider. Documentary photography can occur at the expense of the subject, allowing the photographer to use the subject as representative of a political stance or sociological research. However, Morton represents the voices of the neglected, so while the audience does not have access to the self-representation of the homeless, Morton brings her audience closer to what is rendered invisible through physical and emotional distance. In Fragile Dwelling, Morton records interviews and takes photographs and turns them into sociopolitical commentary, informal anthropological fieldwork, and perceptive journalism. Most importantly, she allows the neglected to define the city and voice their reflections on existing within abandoned space.

Morton’s first story is based on her interviews with Pepe, the selfdescribed watchman of the New York neighborhood of Bushville, who made his money in typesetting and in electronics. After an accident in 1957, his skill set had to change and he began working for a friend. Other housing he has lived in was not only unaffordable but had unbearable living conditions. At the time of the interview in 1990, he collects his Social Security check, which is not enough to pay rent, so he creates his own dwelling and watches over others in the neighborhood. He continuously improves his home, fixing leaks and making it warmer for the winter months. Pepe finds tools and building materials in stores and at construction sites. In 1993, Pepe is finishing the kitchen and hoping to begin working on a bathroom for his home. By the end of the year, Bushville is demolished.

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The photographs of Pepe’s home show the progression of his house as it becomes a more complex piece of domestic architecture. The very last image of his home is as a pile of scraps with which he started. The morning of the demolition is described by Morton through interviews with the residents of Bushville and through photography that is accompanied by the following description: The residents were notified of the impending destruction but had nowhere else to go. As the Bulldozers arrived, people quickly gathered their belongings. The noise of the heavy equipment was deafening, as massive shovels wrenched the small houses from their foundations, held them high, and then hurled them to the ground. Everyone scattered, seeking temporary shelter in doorways, abandoned cars, or with friends, while their homes fell splintered, piles of refuse again.27 The homes made out of materials deemed worthless by those who discarded them were built into dwellings that provided shelter and security to the homeless. Their efforts to create homes for themselves and their success in doing so did not prove to their destroyers that these materials, pieced together for survival, held any significance. The demolition of homes represents a robbing of identity. To destroy something a person has created is to deny their capacity for such creativity, and considering the negative images of the homeless, the destruction of their homes is also the denial of their willingness to be self-sufficient.

The building of homes is also connected to the ability to self-identify, to represent the inner self through the personal and practical art of domestic architecture. In discussing the building of his home on East Ninth Street in his interview with Morton, Moses describes his previous struggles with housing. He found life in a shelter to have conditions that do not even meet prison standards: “A man can’t live like that. First of all, men need a private room; they need a sink, they need a sanctuary—not in an open place where they’re ushered around by security guards.”28 Moses presents his home building as a need to have a room of his own. To have personal space is to have room for individuality, which is not an idea that is considered when the public expects the homeless to retreat to the shelters. The importance of being allowed to self-identify has been neglected when it comes to the discussion of homelessness. The homeless describe their transitory dwellings as homes, which conflicts with the very term used to identify them, but their right to be heard on the subject is disregarded because they are never asked to define their space.

The issue of voice in human survival is not only about the individual voice but about the community. Morton’s interview with Louie reveals how the homeless take care of one another (even though the stereotype would only recognize crime among them). Louie describes his home at the Hill to have been initially a culmination of rats and weeds that eventually became a site for shacks.

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He became a part of this and began to build houses for the residents. Many have burned down. He cares not only for the people in the neighborhood by building the shacks, but also for the homeless animals that wander around the area.29 Louie’s efforts to help his community do not stem from contempt or charity; rather they are a product of social responsibility. The distance that exists between the homeless and those who are not homeless is vague. The public has othered the homeless as a group it cannot become. The homeless are a group that is in some way beneath the public, and whether this idea of superiority is a product of the perceived laziness of the homeless or of recognition of a difficult existence, it does nothing for the homeless.

Around the same time Morton conducts the interviews and collects the photographs of the homeless, New York anthropologist Arline Mathieu writes that mainstream images of the homeless either try to elicit sympathy or stereotype the population as: “‘the worst of life…drunks, vagrants, prostitutes, wild-eyed men with matted hair and beard who may well be insane.’”30 One’s perception of the homeless is inherited from the governing forces, and dismissing the unknown as insane is a convenient way to neglect the issue of homelessness. Mathieu mentions the Reagan administration’s discussion of the homeless at this time, which consisted of the popular notion that homelessness is a choice. Ed Koch, New York City’s mayor from 1978 to 1989, claimed the homeless were choosing this lifestyle in order to receive welfare and better apartments from the government. The image of the homeless as insane also helps explain why they are homeless without questioning the system that has failed them. If the public sees the homeless as having made this choice, as being abnormal and wanting to take the easy route, then the public does not see itself as being like the homeless and as being vulnerable to homelessness.

If those who are not homeless do not see themselves in a binary with the homeless (in which one is clearly superior to the other), what would be found is that the othering of the homeless does not occur out of pure ignorance. If the line between the two groups is not clear, those with stable housing have to face the fear that they too could lose the security they find in having a home. The fluidity of homelessness exists because the state of not being homeless is not clearly defined. It is not defined by home ownership because much of the population rents homes, owes substantial amounts on homes, has houses that are in foreclosure, or has living arrangements with a friend or family member. Even the listed possibilities are not perfectly stable. One may be a single misstep, natural disaster, or company reorganization away from losing the source of funding that provides one with housing.

The binary is also complicated by the fact that the homeless Morton observes have homes, but these are homes that happen to not be protected by the government due the perceived worthlessness of these homes. There are no officials who have orchestrated their construction. In this particular “us and them” binary, can the “them” ever be protected from the perception of accepted

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authorities? The homes and communities of the homeless were sometimes destroyed by arsonists and at other times by the orders of city officials as a part of an effort to clean up New York City. Destroying their homes was identical to moving out garbage, and the effort it took to build these homes did not exist because the perception of the “superior” group did not function to recognize the significance of these homes.

Binaries are accepted out of lack of awareness about the other. In an article discussing homelessness and the study of literature, Allen Carey-Webb discusses his personal journey of learning about the complex causes of homelessness and the need for awareness. As a teacher, he decided to focus on homelessness in a college course and noticed the voiceless role of the homeless in books: “…regardless of the genre, we were not hearing the unmediated voice or voices of homeless people themselves. Putting these texts next to one another undercut any one text’s claim to truth, and all the texts, in differing ways, needed to be read as ‘fiction.’”31 Without disregarding the power of Morton’s work, recognizing that the representation of homelessness in her books is filtered through her privileged position places some symbolic space between the audience and the voices of the homeless.

The difference between the lives of the homeless and those who consider themselves settled also lies in the proximity to the natural world. The material world creates a barrier between the natural and the man-made. The homeless, too, have what they have created with tools or have bought or found in New York.

They use objects to accessorize their shelter. Their homes have décor, they have pets, and they plant gardens. Hence, the discrepancy is found in the excess of the material. Is it necessary for a pet to be bought from a breeder or can a pet be a vagabond that one chooses to feed? Is a garden any less of a garden if it is not ornamental? Does the natural world have to be as heavily constructed as people have become? Domestic architecture dismisses such definition of necessities and accessory. The homeless do not claim that they have only what is absolutely necessary, but they do not use nature as embellishment symbolizing wealth.

Examples of home adornment are found in Morton’s photographs of Mr. Lee’s dwelling. Located at the top of the Hill, his home is bound together by knots. The objects secured by the knots include mattresses, cords, and pieces of cloth. Whatever objects he finds during the day, he uses to secure his house in the evening. Morton writes, “Much like his house, Mr. Lee is soft and round and held together by knots. Bits of wire twisted through buttonholes fasten his multiple layers of secondhand clothing.”32 The characterization of the house as resembling its inhabitant describes the closeness one has to something he or she builds. In 1992, Mr. Lee died in a fire set to his home by an arsonist. The fragments of his destroyed home included “…bundles of charred photographs of Chinese families; handcrafted passports for imaginary relatives, all named Lee; and a large slate inscribed with cryptic ideograms.”33 In his death, Mr. Lee is still very much a part of his home. In this case, embellishment is very much a gesture of personal

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security. The knots held his home together while the passports and photographs were crafted to hold him together on a mental level.

The personal connection between the homeless and what they create continues to reappear in Morton’s interviews. Morton does not limit the writing in her book to her own commentary. Doug, a homeless man she interviews, describes the East River dwellings: You may drive by here and see that they are shabby, but I think that if you look again you see this person took the time to build a place that could be comfortable for himself. If you saw it up close, you could see that we’d turned it into a home. I’ve come to find out that it puts you more in touch with your spirit, too, because you realize it’s not always about the money; it’s really about getting an idea of who you are…The person who will take the time to build for himself is the person who still has an interest in himself. And then other people come along and get the idea, and they start building too.34 His perception of his state of being is not one of being homeless; rather it is having a home that is constantly in danger of being destroyed. The system’s failure was made invisible with further abuse of the homeless. The construction of the residences is not only about the need for shelter but also about the emotional aspect of home creation. The places they build are not typical images of houses, and those who build them do not need to be government recognized residents of these areas in order to consider them their homes. They are their homes from the very beginning; they are their homes because they physically create them and emotionally invest in the process of home building.

Conclusion In “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Ivan Chtcheglov, a major figure in Situationist International, wrote: “Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.”35 In 1953, he perceived people as avoiding reality by allowing technological advancements to get rid of whatever aspects of lived reality they found unpleasant, and throughout Morton’s examples, it is evident that the neglected urban population understands what the more privileged inhabitants overlook: space adjusts and, at times, controls our reality, and in giving in to space psychologically, inhabitants can generate ideal environments.

As long as the majority does not subscribe to this vision of architecture, the conflict between the society of the spectacle and the survival of peripheral

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groups like the homeless will continue. And as much as the homeless in Morton’s books have attempted to piece together the fragments, the identities and possibilities they expressed through space were destroyed. There is a brand of war against establishing a connection to space such as this because without personal investment in space, urban exploitation has no limits. The ideas developed by the Situationist International help understand space as a creative guide that is not only artistic expression, but also necessary for survival. Debord’s belief in humanizing the city space is eternally relevant because the environment responds to every human action as an interaction, regardless of whether such response is foreseen.

Notes 1. Ken Knabb, ed. and trans., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006).

2. Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 30.

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson (London: Routledge, 2004) 236-283.

4. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1990), 55.

5. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 85.

6. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 242.

7. Margaret Morton, The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 27.

8. Ibid., 37.

9. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 77.

10. Ibid., 82.

11. Ibid.

12. Morton, The Tunnel, 41.

13. Sadler, The Situationist City, 77-78.

14. Morton, The Tunnel, 46.

15. Sadler, The Situationist City, 92.

16. Morton, The Tunnel, 50-51.

17. Ibid.,71.

18. Ibid., 97.

19. Ibid., 143.

20. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 226.

21. Ibid., 227.

22. Guy Debord, “Introduction of a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Kelowna, B.C.: Praxis (e)Press, 2008), 23.

23. Ibid., 24.

24. Ibid., 26.

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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

DISCLOSURE

Ibid.

Margaret Morton, Fragile Dwelling (New York: Aperture, 2000), 7.

Ibid., 39.

Ibid., 50.

Morton, Fragile Dwelling, 56.

Arline Mathieu, “The Medicalization of Homelessness and the Theater of Repression,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1993): 173.

Allen Carey-Webb, “Homelessness and Language Arts: Contexts and Connections,” English Journal 80, no. 7 (1991): 24.

Morton, Fragile Dwelling, 65.

Ibid., 70.

Ibid., 80 Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 3.

Bibliography Baumohl, Jim. Homelessness in America. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1996.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, edited by Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson, 236-283.

London: Routledge, 2004.

Carey-Webb, Allen. “Homelessness and Language Arts: Contexts and Connections.” English Journal 80, no. 7 (1991): 22-28.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1990.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1977.

———. “Introduction of a Critique of Urban Geography.” Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, edited by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro. Kelowna, B.C.: Praxis (e)Press, 2008.

Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City.

Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.

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Houghton, Ted. “What is Government For”: The Surge of Homeless Persons with Mental Illness in New York City. New York: Coalition for the Homeless, 1993.

Knabb, Ken, ed. and trans. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.

McDonough, Tom, ed. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Mathieu, Arline. “The Medicalization of Homelessness and the Theater of Repression.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1993): 170-184.

Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press, 2003.

Morton, Margaret. The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Morton, Margaret. Fragile Dwelling. New York: Aperture, 2000.

Mott, Carrie, and Susan M. Roberts. “Not Everyone Has (the) Balls: Urban Exploration and the Persistence of Masculinist Geography.” Antipode 46, no. 1 (2014): 229–245.

O’Flaherty, Brendan. Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1990.

Stringer, Lee. Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.

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Sussman, Elisabeth, ed. On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Trachtenberg, Alan. “Photography and the Scholar/Critic.” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 13.

Six Poems on Sixteenth-Century Maps JEREMY DAE PADEN Transylvania University

The Age of European Imperial Ascendance, more typically known as the Age of Discovery, was also the age of maps and the age of Petrarchan poetry. I mean by the age of maps primarily two things: a period when more and more sophisticated portulan charts were being produced to aid in navigation and a period when, though not necessarily in rigorous intellectual debate, the nature and purpose of maps was under discussion. Medieval European maps, like St. Isidore’s famous O-T map that represented the orbis terrarum as a circle divided into three parts by a T of water, had always been overtly ideological documents, more interested in theologico-political depictions of the world than with showing the wandering traveler the way to San José. As the usefulness of the new technology became undeniable, as news of new continents came back and the contour of those shores were traced out, the map as representation of geographical accidents rose to prominence. Yet, in the century or two after Columbus’ stumbling onto that archipelago in the western ocean, an event that coincided with and aided in the development of the modern conception of what a map should be, two kinds of maps, the overtly ideological/symbolic one and the one we presume to be more objective because it is utilitarian, came together in strange ways.

Europeans struggling to understand how those new lands fit into their understanding of the world created maps that, while they tried to be geographically and mathematically correct, were also visual icons of theological, philosophical, and political conceptions of the world. (This is not, of course, to say that the modern map, the Rand-McNally Atlas or the digital Google Map, are not themselves political and ideological documents, but that is another matter altogether.)

As European nations spread across the globe taking land and gold and spices, enslaving peoples, raping women, setting up Colonial outposts, and stealing the booty extracted from these places from each other, their poets were busy writing about desire and love. Some of these like Philip Sidney, Henry Howard, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Juan Boscán, to name a few from the English and Spanish traditions, were also soldiers. Others, like the epic poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga or the privateer Walter Raleigh, actually participated in the conquest of America. The discourse of desire and love is closely bound in the Early Modern period to the expansion of empire and the extraction of material goods based on human exploitation.

The six poems that follow explore the topic of mapping in the Early Modern period. They are a series of ekphrastic poems on sixteenth-century mappa

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mundi and use the trope of the cosmographic heart or the cordiform map to tell the story of early European and American contact. The first two poems take up the figure of Columbus. Rather than true ekphrasis, which is a description in words of a visual icon, they are descriptions of imaginative objects. (It should be noted, though, that the first example of ekphrasis, the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, is a description of an imagined physical object.) The first poem takes as its point of departure the well-known fact that Columbus kept a secret captain’s log and map, now lost, which presumably recorded the real mileage and latitude in order to keep proprietary claims on his route. According to Columbus’s official, known, and publicized log, after leaving the Canary Islands he sailed straight across the ocean, just north of the demarcation line that would have put him in Portuguese waters, possibly invalidating his trip and forfeiting everything to Portugal’s crown. This route has him landing in the Bahamas. Curiously, no other journey of his has him sailing that far north or that straight across the Atlantic. The second poem riffs on the rumor that started soon after his return that he got the idea to sail west from a man named Alonso Sánchez, who had discovered Santo Domingo and provided the Genoese mariner his hard-won map.

The purpose of this rumor was to invalidate Columbus’ claim of discovery, thus to wrest from him his titles.

The latter four poems use sixteenth-century mappa mundi as points of departure: Fineaus’s 1566 cordiform map, Bünting’s 1581 clover-leaf map, Hondius’s 1589 cosmographical heart, and an anonymous Flemish map ca. 1590 that uses Ortellius’s cordiform map as the face of a jester. These maps, which use mathematical projections to iconographically distort the world while still maintaining fidelity to the relative position of landmasses to each other, make visible the trouble Early Modern Europe had with fitting the Americas into its established theologico-political framework. To wit, the O-T map of medieval Europe not only depicts one world made of three landmasses, it often shows Jerusalem either at the center or the top of the map, and sometimes has inscribed on each continent which son of Noah populated said region. Bünting’s map can be considered part of a grouping of maps that struggles with how and where to place America in relation to Europe on the globe. His map is later than those from the first part of the century where the real problems were worked. In fact, it’s something of a novelty map and shows a self-conscious awareness of the theological questions at stake. The other three maps, all which show the world as a heart, are part of a mystico-cosmographical set of maps that try to resolve the theologico-political tension of Europe’s stumbling upon America by justifying the conquest as the final movement in a divine love story. These maps tried to allegorically incorporate the Americas within the European cosmographical imaginary through the discourse of love.

All six poems use traditional tropes from European love poetry, both the Petrarchan tradition and the Hispano-Arabic one. When Columbus sailed in 1492, he brought with him Arabic and Hebrew translators. This way, should he indeed

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arrive on eastern shores, he would be able to make his economic intentions plain.

Thus, the first language heard by the Taino people after Columbus’s Italian/Portuguese/Castilian pidgin would have been Arabic. The golden age of Arabic science and literature and Hebrew philosophy and literature coincided with Arabic and Sephardic existence on the Iberian Peninsula – Al-Andalus and Sefarad, respectively. A central poetic form of the Hispano-Arabic lyric tradition is the muwashshah, in Spanish, moaxaja. These poems, written in Arabic, had final refrains, known as kharja, or jarcha. The kharja, though written in Arabic script, could be in Classical Arabic, colloquial Andalusian Arabic, and even, a number, in Ibero-Romance, or proto-Spanish. The kharja is often in the voice of the female lover responding to her beloved. In these poems, those passages in italics specifically draw on the kharja tradition, both in terms of their images and in speaking voice.

These poems bring together tropes taken from love poetry along with cartographic images from the period in order to comment on the violence of the conquest. My interest in this period is because it is the birth of the modern world: capitalism, nation state, global commerce, etc. If the discourse of love, in the cosmographic heart maps of Hondius and others, allegorically overcomes the new and fragmented world of the sixteenth century, these poems turn that discourse on its head. They juxtapose the discourse of love and desire that has come down to us, that was forged in the crucible of Petrarchan poetry and spread throughout western culture, with the language of desire and possession that are part of colonial/capitalist system in order to trouble both, and mark more insistently the violence on which the modern world was founded.

Because the World Is Round Because neither winds nor waves obey a lover’s wants a secret account must be kept a book that tells the story straight

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a log of trials only heroes vanquish Let the world think the heart has sailed about in circles think desire is a silly fickle thing that blunders blind through waves and lands confused on sandy beaches Lies and rumors will always be spoken in the market place so keep the secret close balance the columns on one side, the real and the false miles on the other, the bodies captured, bought and sold

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On the Map Columbus May or May Not Have Gotten from Alonso Sรกnchez It says, simply, acts of God Says, skirt along the coast of Africa until a storm heavy with locust and dust batters your heart like a ship on waves dark as wine on lees Whispers, over the ocean seas are cinnamon-skinned women with golden bracelets and parrot-feather skirts Murmurs, there are islands green and ready for sugar cane Sailing west, it says is also sailing east

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The Heart Is Both Bow and Arrow On Fineaus’s Cordiform Map, 1566 The heart is both bow and arrow and shoots, not in an arc, but straight across the waters and lands quivering on virgin beaches The heart follows its own desire line across the ocean sea and pays no mind to currents or winds that pull south The world is one, it says and speaks its love in moaxajas and kharjas and calls the earth aceituna, green and plump You are mine, O world beyond the western seas O meu al-habib, I open tonight for you my door

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Because the World Is No Longer Three In One On Bünting’s Clover-leaf Map, 1581 Because the world is no longer three in one Jerusalem no longer a jewel, center from which the continents unfurl like God’s own fleur-de-lis, the one for which he became man because the world is now four and still dividing draw the earth as a heart split the world in two discovery is passion possession is love the mining of gold? the harvest of cane? call these the search for a mate that completes the heart

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The World Is a Sacred Burning Heart On Hondius’s Cosmographical Heart, 1589 The world is a sacred burning heart hung and held in place by the very breath of God The continents, pendants that like the heart taper away Africa, India, America each claimed as prize given as booty The world, a sacred burning heart that lays its body down on the altar of war and pestilence as offering

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We Are Fools On the Stage On a Flemish Fool’s Cap Map, ca. 1590 All the world is a play and we are fools on the stage who wear our heart on our face as a mask to hide our eyes Little sister, are all men false?

Mother, mother, I did not open the door last night.

Who is this man beside me?

Mother, mother, he has my heart.

Little sister, he stole my world, he came in through a window like a thief in the night, now he sits by the door singing of his exploits, my body an ocean, my heart, a world he’s circumnavigated.

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Collective Counter Cartography from Prinzessinnengarten, Berlin GABRIEL WULFF Brighton University

All three maps, illustrated with the help of Natalia Hosie, are part of my PhD project exploring the inner and outer workings of gardening spaces on left over spaces within cities. They are created through participative processes involving interviews, collective cartography workshops, and participative action research of one specific example: Prinzessinengarten in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Berlin is a city in which collective gardening is not a new activity; however, more places like these are starting to appear. Prinzessinnengarten is unique and innovative in its entrepreneurial, self-funded structure, its collective approach to growing food (you can’t own vegetables but can collaborate in allowing them to grow), and its flexible approach to use of the space—from university conferences to whisky tasting sessions.

This space is as big as two football (soccer) pitches and run as a nonprofit social enterprise. It employs around ten people full time and an extra twenty people seasonally. They run a variety of workshops (from jewellery making, to natural dyeing, to city politics) and more entrepreneurial activities (such as a landscaping company, an up-cycled furniture collective, and a restaurant/cafe/bar). This space is built with modular and mobile infrastructure, both to comply with the criteria of temporary use but also in order to ensure that if it must move, it can. Land tenure is still the pressing issue, despite the garden being a new tourist destination in the quirky, gentrified Kreuzberg.

The place provides everyday activities in a different setting as a working assemblage of people, materials, space, other living beings, practices, and information, and works under values of suboptimality and “dedicated amateurship.” This approach enables an open structure that encourages people to participate. Weaknesses or lacks in the system become points in which new participants can get involved in upgrading. Their use of materials is also remarkable; they re-use industrial waste and take advantage of a frugal opportunism to save money and develop a specific aesthetic and identity based increasingly in the sociability the objects create and less in the way they look.

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“Use of Space in Prinzessinnengarten” The first map, “Use of Space in Prinzessinnengarten,” is a representation of Prinzessinnengarten: a mobile social-ecological garden in the middle of Kreuzberg Berlin. In this map, the different spaces, elements, and infrastructure related to the garden are located in order to highlight the diversity of activities within this inner city outdoor space. This hybrid, changeable, new kind of city landscape is becoming more and more common and brings our relationship with the city and its spaces to the fore.

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“Prinzessinnengarten’s GartenBau” The second map is meant to illustrate the opportunistic nature of these new working models in the city. “Prinzessinnengarten’s GartenBau”— meaning both horticulture and garden building in German—is a group made out of five people already involved in the garden. They build all the furniture used within the garden to grow food and accommodate activities and rest. But they also build to measure and get pieces of furniture commissioned to go into museums, markets, shows, schools, rooftops of media companies, private gardens, and bars. In other words “we do what we can, and we charge them accordingly”: they have a flexible approach to charging, making free gardens in schools and refugee camps, but then charging high-end prices to private companies and also negotiating maintenance contracts. They have created about forty-five gardens in three years, highlighting another potential of the mobile, modular gardening infrastructure they have created: easily assembled and transported within the city or even to other cities and countries.

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“Socio-ecological X-Changes in Prinzessinnengarten” The third map, “Socio-ecological X-Changes in Prinzessinnengarten,” is an attempt to model the flows coming in and the spaces created through this interaction. The garden becomes a city membrane in which the city intermingles with natural systems and with people to create specific spaces. It is more about spatial sovereignty through food than food security through space, as it is usually thought. In effect, the amount of food produced in this space is minimal considering this garden receives 100,000 visitors every year.

This place becomes much more about feeding and researching our concerns and relationship to food than our stomachs. It is a hub in which people can talk about food and its convergent power, bringing city politics, everyday life, and citizenship to the table. In this way, it becomes a socio-ecological laboratory, giving agency to participants to try things out together.

A Posture of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’s Location, Position, and Displacement AARON CLOYD University of Kentucky In 1682, Mary Rowlandson published what would become known as the first “Indian captivity narrative.” Her work, entitled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, tells of her capture by Wampanoag Indians in 1676, the eightytwo days of her captivity, and her eventual release. The published account of these events is valued not only as the initial expression of what would later develop into the genre of captivity narratives, but also as the first North American publication of its type by a woman, which created potential barriers to publication. As Deborah Madsen explains, in Rowlandson’s Puritan culture, women were “members of a powerless class.”1 Perhaps as a way to grant authority to Rowlandson’s narrative or as a way to secure a reading audience for her work, the publisher printed Rowlandson’s captivity piece as part of a larger document, which included a preface by the leading Puritan minister, Increase Mather, and a concluding sermon written by Rowlandson’s husband, Joseph Rowlandson. Situated between these documents, men, and voices, Rowlandson’s narrative has thereby remained a significant context wherein literary critics ask questions of textual originality and editorial influence and tease out the complex relation between self and other.

While questions of original voice and textual mediation remain significant, I enter this conversation of Mary Rowlandson and of self and other through ideas of place. Throughout her narrative, Mary Rowlandson moves across and within multiple geographies. Initially situated in Lancaster, in the center region of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, her capture takes her west toward the Connecticut River, north to cross the Baquag River2 and beyond the Massachusetts Bay Colony territory, and then south again across the Baquag towards Lancaster.

Rowlandson experiences forests, swamps, steep hills, and flat country. She dwells in wigwams, garrisons, houses, and in the open land.

More than a record of her travels in a given landscape, Rowlandson’s situatedness within place provides one basis whereby to explore the outlines of her self. Said differently, identity and the various expressions of it rely on relations to place. By place, I follow the lead of geographers such as Doreen Massey and John Agnew who define place as a scaled and multi-layered construct, and I draw on work from autobiographical studies that distinguish between but also correlate position and location to argue that Rowlandson is a figure of removal and displacement from multiple expressions of place. This reading of Rowlandson responds to and counters a propensity in critical work on

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Rowlandson that does not fully account for both her position and location and thereby portrays her as a firmly emplaced figure. Although Rowlandson seeks to position herself through voice, actions, and text, such movements of agency occur in conjunction with the locating structures of culture, expectation, and memory.

The resultant tension between self-positioning and other-locating leaves Rowlandson perpetually removed as she is unable to fully reposition herself within any significant site.

This understanding of self and identity by way of surrounding spatial contexts echoes Gaston Bachelard’s idea of “topoanalysis,” which he defines as a “systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.”3 While I do not directly attend to the psychoanalytical component of Bachelard’s concept, I retain his argument that self is understood in a relation to place, and I propose that individuals are defined by place in at least two significant ways. First, places act as what Eudora Welty calls “gathering spots” for feelings.4 Similarly, Edward Casey argues that “places . . . gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts. . . . Places also keep such unbodylike entities as . . . memories.”5 Places are therefore sites of assembled meaning, and more than inert containers, places actively reinscribe their contents on those associated with them. As Rowlandson enters the wilderness, for example, she does not simply become surrounded by trees and hills; she is also defined by the previous experiences, remembrances, and emotions of this landscape.

Secondly, place defines individuals by a reciprocal action of imaging, or as Lawrence Buell has it, “How we image a thing, true or false, affects our conduct toward it, the conduct of nations as well as persons.”6 In comparable language, Lynda Sexson contends that “imagination forms reality. . . . The images we create in turn create us. The ways that we image the world (out of our imaginations) in turn give us the perspectives (images) we have on ourselves (the imaginal).”7 The places with which Rowlandson interacts are thereby not purely objective and static, but shift in definition according to perception and interpretation. Whether she is in Lancaster or in the wilderness, Rowlandson interacts with and is informed by more than the physical properties of these places but also experiences these sites as they are conceived, as ideas. This action of imaging not only directs Rowlandson’s response to place but in turn contributes to a shaping of her self.

The recognition of topographical markers throughout Rowlandson’s narrative is somewhat apparent, as are the images, experiences, and emotions that define those places and the individuals involved in them. However, who constructs and attributes those definitions and the resulting situation of Rowlandson is not always clear. At times she enfolds herself or is thrust into her current setting; at other moments, she distances herself or is propelled toward removal. Placement within a setting is elected as a nexus for self-definition as

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well as arrangement outside of and away from specific locales. Implied here is the slippery nature of Rowlandson’s situatedness, a juncture constructed by her individual agency and by broader desires and needs of other people and structures. To attend to these nuanced complexities of Rowlandson’s platial relations, tracing the lines of distinction and correlation between location and position becomes beneficial.

Writing about self and place, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson distinguish location from position by defining location as those “coordinates in which narrators are embedded by virtue of their experiential histories” and by presenting position as that which “implies the ideological stances . . . adopted by a narrator toward self and others.”8 In my work with Rowlandson, I thereby take location to represent those aspects that are given or conferred while position indicates a tailored response or embraced posture.9 Both concepts, as Smith and Watson imply, are thereby related to and associated with geographical space, but both also speak of more than physical environments, for they also indicate cultural, political, and psychological aspects inherently represented in geographical places.

For Rowlandson, location might be represented by Lancaster and the dietary restrictions as set out by her Puritan religion while her position is realized in her acceptance and eating of horse hooves while in captivity, an action otherwise shunned by her religious and cultural associations. While location and position represent subtle degrees of variance, therefore, they inherently coexist. I see this intertwining as similar to a gyroscope. The spinning inside wheel, representative of location, remains constant while the outside frames of the structure, similar to position, become oriented in multiple fashions. Thus, like the gyroscope’s distinct parts that function within a configuration of interdependence, location and position are best understood as distinct but interlocking counterparts.

Hence, attending to Rowlandson’s situatedness by way of her location and position supports access to the complexities of her emplacement, but one cannot be separated from the other. Although there are instances of self-positioning through expressions such as refusal, requests, and memory, Rowlandson is also located by the actions of others, her own narrative, and various obligations. In short, Rowlandson is best understood as a subject seeking her own positioning in conjunction with a set structure of locating impulses.

This approach and conclusion runs counter to a current impetus in Rowlandson scholarship that relies on firmly distinguishing between location and position. Preferring to highlight position, many critics seek to establish sites from which Rowlandson authentically speaks for herself, acts of her own accord, and clearly circumscribes her sense of self in opposition to a determinative backdrop.

Denise Mary MacNeil, for example, interprets Rowlandson as a feminine precursor of the American frontier hero who acts independently of her surrounding culture and its expectations.10 Rowlandson’s actions are interpreted

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as an expression of her own agency as she “[engages] with the American wilderness and the native peoples . . . in isolation from European American culture,” “[integrates] aspects of Native American culture” with her own culture despite existing prohibitions, and “[asserts] . . . the ‘I’ as an authority in the face of social/ cultural authority.”11 Read within this paradigm, Rowlandson is seen as responsible for “conquering and domesticating” the wilderness, negotiating her own release from captivity, and turning the wilderness into her home.12 For MacNeil, Rowlandson’s position counters and restrains the locating apparatus of cultural expectations by her ability to work against the larger coordinates in which she is enmeshed. In a similar approach, Annette Kolodny views Rowlandson positioning herself domestically and fiscally when she “manages to carve out an economic niche for herself with her knitting skills” and when she uses the food and Bible she receives to “negotiate the often treacherous political terrain” and “spiritual desolation” of her captivity.13 While MacNeil and Kolodny detect movements of autonomy within Rowlandson’s experiences, scholars such as Lisa Logan focus more on the positioning work of the text itself. Rowlandson’s narrative, argues Logan, is “about finding a place from which to speak, claiming a position of authority from which to represent self and experience”; the text works to “reestablish a social, ideological, and discursive ‘home’ for her.”14 According to Logan, Rowlandson succeeds in these goals, at least partially, as her text resists the “social, discursive, and political structures which define and confine women.”15 For Logan, Rowlandson is able to position her self by the fact that she “consistently resists interpretations of her experience that tie the meaning of her captivity to socially and ideologically received ideas about violent forms of justice visited on the guilty woman’s body.”16 To be accurate, these critics do not completely isolate or remove Rowlandson from the broader cultural, temporal, geographical, or societal structures in which she is currently located. Kolodny acknowledges that “the only terrain she can never negotiate on her own is the landscape itself,”17 and Logan references the ways in which Rowlandson’s text upholds or is subject to early American genre expectations.18 Yet while these readings of Rowlandson support complex interpretations of her sense of place, they tend to dichotomize position and location by collapsing the distinction between process and outcome. Her activities of knitting and preparing food in the wilderness are interpreted as finalities, and her efforts to delineate her self as woman and locate a stance from which she can communicate are understood as the terminal features by which she is defined. Rather, even while acknowledging the inherent agency within Rowlandson’s actions, her efforts to position her self might be read as simultaneously linked with a broader sense of outcome or locating structure.

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Attending to Rowlandson’s position and location, however, suggests a reading of Rowlandson that critics such as MacNeil, Kolodny, and Logan subtly write against, namely that Rowlandson is a displaced figure. In considering position and location, Rowlandson is not firmly established in place by either means, but rather exists as a perpetually removed subject. Despite her efforts to position her self through domestic, economic, or spiritual means, and even though multiple locating structures influence her potential emplacement, Rowlandson remains inevitably removed across multiple levels of place.

More than a single entity, place is commonly understood as stratified or as consisting of multiple expressions,19 as explained by political geographer John Agnew, who argues that place is comprised of three interrelated layers: location, locale, and sense of place. According to Agnew, location represents the “objective macro-order,” a “geographical area” that defines places within a “wider scale.”20 Locales, interpreted as more regionalized or as smaller areas are the “settings in which social relations are constituted”; they are the “local social worlds of place.”21 At the smallest scale, sense of place indicates a “structure of feeling,” a “subjective territorial identity.”22 In a similar manner, Buell writes, “place gestures in at least three directions at once – toward environmental materiality, toward social perception or construction, and toward individual affect or bond.”23 Following Agnew’s and Buell’s lead, Rowlandson’s interaction with place occurs within a set of scaled and concentric areas. (To avoid confusion with the previously introduced pair of location and position, I will substitute “geography” for Agnew’s largest scale of “location.”) Regardless of which scale of place is examined, however, Rowlandson remains removed from place as she shuttles between location and position.

At the broadest level, an interaction between location and position occurs in relation to the two geographical sites of town and wilderness. Leaving Lancaster and before her captors construct camp on a hill outside of town, for instance, Rowlandson notices a “vacant house” that has been “deserted by the English.”24 Preferring a night’s stay in the house over sleeping on the exposed hillside, Rowlandson asks to “lodge in the house that night,” to which her captors respond by asking, “what will you love English men still?”25 In part, Rowlandson strives to position herself within a site associated with the town by asking to abide in the English house. In opposition to her captors, she attempts to negate their demands that she sleep in the open country. These bold actions might be interpreted as Rowlandson claiming a posture from which she can speak, but an analysis of her positioning efforts must also recognize the ability of her captors to locate her within their place, the wilderness. Yet even if her request was to be recognized, Rowlandson would have been emplaced in a site of a double removal. As a vacated house, the walls, doors, and building structure extract the house from the surrounding wilderness, and as a result of

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being abandoned, left to elements of nature, the house is shifted away from associations with the town. Her request thereby reflects her actual position, within sight of the town and at the edges of wilderness, but removed from both.

Rowlandson’s situatedness outside of place, her removal and displacement is further emphasized by the posture of her body in relation to the wilderness and the town.

On the first morning of her captivity, Rowlandson notes, “I must turn my back upon the Town, and travel with [the Nashaway Nipmucs] into the vast and desolate Wilderness.”26 Similarly, in preparing to return home eighty-three days later, she realizes, “I must go, leaving my Children behind me in the Wilderness.”27 In both instances, the text functions within a structure of spatial metaphors. The two sites of town and wilderness are posited as two poles, and each is separated and viewed as distinct from the other. Within this structured space, Rowlandson is situated in a particular relation to each site. By describing the pose of her body, Rowlandson pictures herself relative to either the town or the wilderness as she is first facing the wilderness by being turned away from the town and then later is turned toward the town by moving away from the wilderness. The space between town and wilderness is not described and goes unnamed. In one sense, Rowlandson is within a perimeter-type place, not quite in the wilderness and not fully within the town. Read differently, and by placing these citations as the bookends of her experiences, Rowlandson becomes situated in a space of removal from both the town and the wilderness as her back is turned to both sites.

The tension between position and location, which her body’s posture suggests, is also evident in the linguistic structure of the above sentences. The subject of each sentence, “I,” registers Rowlandson’s efficacy in positing her self.

She is clearly the one performing the action in both cases, not her husband and not her captors. However, the auxiliary modal of “must” indicates the presence of another obligation that contextualizes her actions. Linguistically, Rowlandson is therefore defined within a deontic modality. Her presence is registered somewhere between “I” and “must,” and in this boundary, she is equally removed from both.

As Rowlandson is removed from the wilderness at the outset of her capture, so she remains detached from this geographical space throughout captivity. As the party initially prepares to cross the Connecticut River, Rowlandson attempts to step into the canoe, but “there was a sudden out-cry among them, that [she] must step back.”28 Similar to being moved away from the town or wilderness, Rowlandson is propelled back from the river by the cries of her captors. While her attempts to cross the river highlight her own actions, she is ultimately relocated by the desires of others. Even while surrounded by elements

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of wilderness, therefore, Rowlandson becomes associated with ideas of removal from that place.

Rowlandson’s removal from place is therefore signaled in her relationships to particular geographic features and frequently marked by her physical posture as a subject seeking a position of self while also being located by other constraints. While her removal from geographical sites relates primarily to topographical markers, Rowlandson’s situatedeness and her removal from place is equally evident in Agnew’s second sphere of place: locales of social interactions.

Many of Rowlandson’s interactions within locales, or sites of social relations, arise in conjunction with food. Toward the end of her captivity, for example, Rowlandson is invited into a wigwam for a meal of pork and ground nuts. While eating, another Native American scrutinizes an apparent contradiction between Rowlandson’s growing friendship with her captors and her lagging relation to her own soldiers. Speaking of the man who invited Rowlandson to eat, this Native American observes, “he seems to be your Friend, but he killed two Englishmen at Sudbury, and there lie their Cloaths [sic] behind you.”29 Rowlandson can be read as shaping her own position in this experience as she is literally facing away from her associations with the English colonies, sitting with her back turned to the soldiers’ clothes. Further, and in response to the accusations of friendship gone awry, Rowlandson does not automatically reassociate herself with her fellow colonists; she does not mention any grieving over the dead, and her reaction to her hosts vacillates between a mild repulsion over their murders and thankfulness for her food as she continually returns to this wigwam to refresh her “feeble carcass.”30 Rather than reinstate her previous relationship to her own culture by demonstrating loyalty to the dead soldiers, her commentary on this experience focuses on her safety and provision in the midst of violent and bleak circumstances. By each of these actions, agency might be ascribed to Rowlandson, particularly in that she continues to adopt a stance more akin to her captors than to her own culture.

Yet while Rowlandson seeks to demarcate her own position, the inquisitive Native American indicates that her moves are inauthentic, unwarranted, and perhaps even unwanted. Rather than granting her a space to resituate herself, her captor denies Rowlandson that opportunity, implying that she cannot fully break from the locating structures of the town, and that of an English colonist.

While Rowlandson’s position is challenged here by one of her captors, textual features of her narrative operate in a similar fashion. When the party stops to eat by a swamp early in her captivity, Rowlandson asks for horse liver, but her captor appears confused and responds, “What . . . can you eat Horse-liver?”31 She attempts to cook her piece, but when half is stolen, she eats the rest, uncooked, “with the blood about [her] mouth” and declares, “savory bit it was for me: For to

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the hungry Soul, every bitter thing is sweet.”32 Likewise, late in her captivity, Rowlandson wanders between wigwams, attempting to find some form of nourishment. In one, the “Squaw was boyling [sic] Horses feet” and offers Rowlandson a piece.33 She “quickly” eats her own piece, and after finishing more, comments that “savoury [sic] it was to my taste,” for the “Lord made that pleasant refreshing, which another time would have been an abomination.”34 Although Rowlandson seeks to position her self in opposition to her religion’s prohibitions by eating uncooked food that otherwise would have been an “abomination,” textual features attempt to reposition her firmly within her association with the town by offering an explanation for her actions. Like the Native American who nudges Rowlandson back toward a relationship with her own culture, the text performs a similar function, arguing that while Rowlandson’s positioning actions link her with wilderness, she exists within and responds to the locating energies of town constructs.

In each instance, Rowlandson attempts to circumscribe her own position within particular places of social and cultural interactions and expectations. By partaking in the sustenance of her captors, Rowlandson’s actions can be interpreted as an expression of her own agency, a willingness and desire to align herself within the structures of a new social environment. However, either by the locating prowess of her captors or her own text, Rowlandson is deprived of that option. Rather than achieving a new position, Rowlandson is left displaced from both communities. Her unwillingness to grieve over the dead soldiers and her consumption of horse liver and feet removes her from the social codes of her colony while the assumptions of her captors and her textual explanations remove her from associations with Native American cultural constructs.

Yet despite this overwhelming movement toward displacement, one element remains open for Rowlandson to position herself: memory. Writing of a time in which she was in the wilderness, she claims, “I cannot but remember how many times sitting in their Wigwams, and musing on thing past, I should suddenly leap up and run out, as if I had been at home, forgetting where I was, and what my condition was.”35 In a similar manner, once Rowlandson returns home, her “thoughts are upon things past, upon the awfull [sic] dispensation of the Lord towards [them],” upon “the night season,” and upon “thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before [her].”36 Although she is displaced geographically and removed from locales of societal and cultural constructs, Rowlandson, at least in part, establishes herself within a sense of place, Agnew’s third aspect. Within the dwelling sites of the wilderness and the wigwam, Rowlandson is able to strike a different position within memory, a move that resituates her within the town. Likewise, by thoughts of previous events, Rowlandson shifts away from the town to find a position in

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the wilderness. In both instances, she is able to step away from her geographical and cultural markers and fuse into a different place by way of memory.

This move is incomplete however. In the wilderness, Rowlandson is quickly located again when she emerges from the wigwam, seeing “nothing but Wilderness and Wood,” finding herself in a “company of barbarous heathens.”37 Once at home, her memories do not construct a completely new place, but are reliant on her culture’s conceptions of “night,” “enemies,” and “death.”38 Even in memory, therefore, while Rowlandson is able to hedge closer to establishing her own position, locating devices check her efforts. Infused with memories of town and wilderness, but unable to fully step outside of each, Rowlandson is left removed from both.

The experiences, emotions, and histories of the geographies, locales, and senses of place through which Rowlandson moves are primarily defined by aspects of removal. Captured by Wampanoag Indians, she is taken from Lancaster but not allowed to fully position herself within the territories of her captors. As often symbolized by the posture of her body, Rowlandson is frequently caught between places, and her attempts to resituate are repelled by her captors and later by her own text. Despite these removals from geographies and locales, Rowlandson retains traces of her home and her time in the wilderness by virtue of memory. However, now informed and defined by both places, she becomes unable to fully position herself in either. These gathered associations inform the displacement of Rowlandson and her lack of place that is accentuated by her imagining of place.

This attention to Rowlandson’s removal is more than an attempt to reshape the reading of a text according to a predetermined theoretical frame, for the analysis of this paper represents a reflection and an extension of a significant textual component of Rowlandson’s work. Throughout her narrative, Rowlandson portrays place and her relation to respective places as sites of removal as indicated by her running subtitles of “removes” throughout her narrative. As Richard Slotkin observes, “for Mrs. Rowlandson . . . time is marked not in temporal days but in ‘Removes,’ spatial and spiritual movements away from civilized light into Indian darkness.”39 Thus “removes” for Rowlandson indicates her sense of absence, a departure rather than a stationed presence. Yet Rowlandson’s use of removes marks more than a parting from Lancaster, for only half of the removes direct her away from the town, while the remaining removes designate her return trip. Even more, Rowlandson’s sense of removal from a given place is also indicative of her life outside the scope of her captivity in the wilderness, for as Neil Salisbury argues, “her entire life was punctuated by removes from one place to another.”40 Following her release, for example, Rowlandson notes that once a house was found in Boston, her and her family “removed from Mr. Shepards,” where they were currently living.41 Therefore, if the entirety of her trip into and

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out of the wilderness, as well as her experiences beyond her captivity, are taken into account, Rowlandson’s use of “remove” not only signifies her effort to describe a departure from a given place or site, but also indicates a consistent imaging of place as sites of departure and displacement.

Rowlandson encounters and relates her experiences with multiple places throughout her narrative. More than an impassive backdrop wherein she travels, however, the qualities of those places inform significant aspects of her sense of self. Whether the emotions or experiences that have gathered in a particular place or the actions of imagining are taken into account, place is defined by removal; Rowlandson, in her associations with these places, is reciprocally delineated within frames of displacement. Her platial experiences do not carve out unique sites in which she is firmly emplaced, but her affiliation with place leaves her permanently removed, unable to reposition her self.

Notes 1. Deborah Madsen, Feminist Theory and Literary Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 50.

2. The Baquag River is now known as the Millers River.

3. Bachelard appears most interested in memories and in a psychoanalysis of how and where memories are positioned, but his general point applies to my argument here, that a fruitful study of individuals takes place into account. For a developed discussion of topoanalysis, see Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 8-10.

4. Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in A Modern Southern Reader, ed. Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway (Atlanta: Peachtree, 1986), 541.

5. Edward Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 24-25.

6. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 3.

7. Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 69.

8. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 42-43.

9. A similar concept is developed by David Simpson in his book Situatedness where he contends that situations include “outside forces that influence subjectivity. . . . But they are also open to . . . responses or reactions. . . . [Situations] are given to us but also open to amendment.” See Simpson, Situatedness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 20.

10. Denise Mary MacNeil, The Emergence of the American Hero 1682-1826 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

11. Ibid., 7.

12. Ibid., 9-10.

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13. Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 18.

14. Lisa Logan, “Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity and the ‘Place’ of the Woman Subject,” Early American Literature 28, no. 3 (1993), 256, 258.

15. Ibid., 259.

16. Ibid., 259.

17. Kolodny, The Land Before Her, 18.

18. Logan, “Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity,” 259.

19. For example, Doreen Massey in her article, “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” argues that “places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal differences and conflicts.” See Doreen Massey, “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 67.

20. John Agnew, Place and Politics (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 28.

21. Ibid., 28.

22. Ibid., 28. Agnew’s “sense of place” parallels Bachelard’s contention that place is inhabited subjectively, that we experience it “in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams.” See Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5.

23. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 63.

24. Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, ed. Neal Salisbury (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 70.

25. Ibid., 70-71 (italics in original).

26. Ibid., 71 (italics in original).

27. Ibid., 104 (italics in original).

28. Ibid., 81.

29. Ibid., 101 (italics in original).

30. Ibid., 101.

31. Ibid., 81 (italics in original).

32. Ibid., 81 (italics in original).

33. Ibid., 96 (italics in original).

34. Ibid., 96.

35. Ibid., 88 (italics in original).

36. Ibid., 111.

37. Ibid., 88 (italics in original).

38. Ibid., 111.

39. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 109.

40. Neal Salisbury, introduction to The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, ed. Neal Salisbury (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1997), 7.

41. Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 111.

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Bibliography Agnew, John. Place and Politics. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: The Orion Press, 1964.

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Casey, Edward. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith Basso, 13-52.

Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996.

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Logan, Lisa. “Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity and the ‘Place’ of the Woman Subject.” Early American Literature 28, no. 3 (1993): 255-277.

MacNeil, Denise Mary. The Emergence of the American Hero 1682-1826. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Madsen, Deborah. Feminist Theory and Literary Practice. London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Massey, Doreen. “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by Jon Bird et al., 59-69. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, edited by Neal Salisbury. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997.

Salisbury, Neal. Introduction to The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson, edited by Neal Salisbury. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997.

Sexson, Lynda. Ordinarily Sacred. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992.

Simpson, David. Situatedness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” In A Modern Southern Reader, edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway, 537-548. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1986.

Exploring Mapping: Discussions with Swati Chattopadhyay and Derek Gregory Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of British colonialism. disClosure Interviewers: Sarah Soliman and Erin Newell DC: The theme for the series this year is mapping, and we were wondering how this theme is broadly addressed in your work. It is something that came up quite frequently in the pieces we read for today to prepare for your visit, but more broadly, how do you see mapping in your work?

SC: You know maps are representations—and there has been a long history of scholarship on that—maps are about power. And I’m using the term power in a very broad sense: power in the sense of something being political. Doesn’t matter if it’s a microscale of power, it has political repercussion. Maps have a long history. They go back to the ancient world. But the kinds of maps I have looked at in my work (I’m thinking about the eighteenth century onwards) were cadastral surveys, surveys of estates, agricultural lands; they could be maps of roads; they could be maps of revenue surveys; they could be route surveys for military reconnaissance. There were various kinds of surveys and maps on a regional scale. But there were also city maps. And interestingly, when the scale gets reduced, we start calling them plans. We don’t call them maps anymore. We call them site plans, neighborhood plans; we don’t say neighborhood maps because it comes to the scale of what is conventionally understood as architectural scale. So maps, broadly speaking, are a set of scalar representations. This means you are reducing a scale; there is no 1:1 map unless it’s the fabulous Borgesian map.

Things get excluded, so one must chose what to include, and the choices—that’s where the politics reside. What are the choices? How do you choose? What is your method? There is no objective map, there cannot be, because you are making actual choices, and there are some choices that become conventional because they’ve been agreed upon. For example, look at this room. If you had to draw a plan of this room, there is a conventional way to drawing this plan. But you could do unconventional plans. For example, if you were not tutored in how to draw a plan, you would not do it “correctly,” right? As an architect would or draftsman would. But you would draw a plan, plan-like, some representation, which would describe your cognition of the space. Maps are also about cognition. It’s about how you perceive space. That’s when you move it from the technical aspect of it

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and get back to how you perceive space. Even the technically “correct” ones are about perception. So, as somebody trained in architecture and [who] works on architecture, what I find interesting in the work of a lot of architectural historians is that plans have become so conventional that the basis of their representations are not questioned. You don’t seek an explanation of “Why do I have to draw this plan like that?” Because it’s this long habit basically, disciplinary habit. So I’ve looked at why, let’s say, Calcutta city maps looked like what they did. They didn’t have to be like that. It was about some power struggle. As I will explain today, I’m making a distinction between maps and mapping—maps as artifacts and mapping as process. What are some other ways of thinking about space?

Maps are a way of thinking about representing space. So how do we get out of the conventions, or the conventional trappings and the power trappings of maps that presume a positivist view—that there is a world and I’m representing it. It’s not like that.

DC: We wanted to shift gears to some of your current projects, and then maybe go back to talk about your other pieces. Your current project on nature’s infrastructure—could you comment a little more on that, and also whether the differences between rural and urban play into that project at all? You talk about urbanism in the city, but we were wondering if the rural comes in at all in your current project.

SC: The rural comes into cities whether you want it or not because it is part of city life. Rural spaces are implicated within the heart of the city—its laborers, its construction materials. So there is no way of separating that. My current project, the major research project that I have launched, is what I call “The Making of the Gangetic Plains.” The Gangetic Plains and the damming of the rivers, the hydroelectric plants, created major havoc in the landscape. And that’s the work of ecologists, people who are experts in hydrology and geography. What I’m interested in really is the process through which the plains were mapped, and I’m talking about major cartographic projects, and how that was connected to the canal building, the agricultural revenue, the dam-making, the railways, because the Ganges provides a framework for those infrastructural undertakings. So I want to understand how these got connected, and what kind of attitude towards the plains that demonstrates in terms of a territory: a war landscape (because the first maps were for military reconnaissance); it’s use as agricultural land (which is related to revenue); the revenue surveys that were conducted; and the building of canals and the failure (repeated failures) to build the canals (and there is a long history of that as well). Every time a major project would be launched, it would spawn another infrastructure. For example, a bungalow would be built, an office would be built, and there would be a network of these stretching out over the

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plains. So what we take to be the “natural” plains was every inch built. But it would struggle with the natural forces, if you will. It almost appears that the plains have an agency of their own. And it is formidable. So, I’m looking at that and I’m starting in the seventeenth century, looking at the plains from the inception of the British Empire.

DC: That actually leads really well into our next question—we are curious about the influence of your architecture background. Part of it is that you are able to get past the dominant infrastructure of the city, or the rural, or what we would normally conceive as “natural landscape,” and to look beyond that to see how space is constructed. But we were wondering how else your architecture background changes how you see what you work on and impacts your research.

Why did you begin to look at the world in that way? What prompted you to do that?

SC: I think my architecture background comes in very handy when doing spatial analysis. Let me give you an example. When I draw analytic diagrams, that’s a particular way of reading the landscape. There is nothing obvious or taken for granted about them. They are not illustrations, they are analytical, which means you need to be able to read connections between spaces. The spatial savvy to see those connections—I think that is helped by my architecture training.

DC: You can be confident in what you think you know.

SC: I think that’s my strength in terms of being a historian. I think the way I analyze the space and I produce the diagrams and drawings, that’s a method in itself. Everybody doesn’t need to do that, but I find that it not only explains, it’s a probe into issues. Charles Correa, an Indian architect, said there’s a reason why Mahatma Gandhi was called the architect of the nation and not the physicist of the nation or dentist of the nation; it’s because what architects do is take various [kinds of] expertise and put them all together. They can see the whole. They are the authors of a project in which they can see the viability of the connections. I take that to heart. I think that’s what a good architect does. Being an architect is not one particular expertise; it’s being able to put together various visions, various ideas, various methods into a manageable entity, whether it’s a whole or not.

Something that can be executed.

DC: Are there any particular architectural spaces that interest you?

SC: All architectural spaces interest me, but the scholars I learned from made a clear distinction between elite spaces and folk/vernacular spaces. I’m not sure I

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find the distinction terribly useful, but I can use that vernacular method to look at any space. You can do that to the palace in Versailles. What needs to be different for architectural history or cultural geography is to propose a different way of looking. So, sure, you can ask different questions about Versailles as opposed to, let’s say, the building we are sitting in. And you do, but you can also not get bogged down by architectural intentions, the intents of the architect and the patron, because that’s how we understand Versailles. This is what Louis XIV wanted. This is what his architects wanted. Chandra Mukerji has a very good book about the gardens of Versailles—Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. And that’s one way of thinking about those gardens. They were not just beautiful, choreographed spaces. They were war-like. They were a microcosm of the French state and its war ambitions. Similarly, one could, theoretically speaking, look at Versailles from the perspective of the laboring population. What would that history look like?

DC: Continuing with this idea of the relationship among binaries, I want to go back to the rural/urban divide for a moment. The urban seems to me to be a privileged category, at least in analysis in the academy, and I think much of your work also calls for a different vocabulary of the city. How do you suggest we think about the city and this trope of the urban/rural divide?

SC: The urban/rural divide exists because there’s a refusal to accept that much of what is urban is deeply implicated by the rural, and vice-versa. I do not launch a project of planetary urbanism because it continues to perceive the urban as the creative dynamic force. That’s the crucible—the urban is the crucible where change is happening, and that is deeply lodged in social theory, from Marx to Raymond Williams. Marxist tradition is replete with it. Raymond Williams’ critique was not quite able to get beyond this theoretical frame. The last chapter of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City does talk about the difficulty of accepting that cities are the places of change; at the time he was writing, he saw change happening in China and Cuba—change was happening in rural areas. He was critiquing the idea that rural areas are always backwaters (Marx’s famous phrase, “the idiocy of the rural”). But that English history is very different from the history of the urban/rural relationship in the rest of the world—most of the world. Despite the impact of the urban, rural areas have far more autonomy and are far more powerful. I’m not quite there to say we need to launch a project of planetary urbanism. Perhaps one could argue in the same breath a project of planetary ruralism. Why choose urbanism? I have difficulty with accepting that as an a priori.

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DC: I was intrigued by your “Core and Periphery” piece because you frame [the urban rural binary] as core and periphery or even just city and periphery instead of urban and rural. The core isn’t necessarily what’s in the center and the periphery isn’t necessarily the outside, but it’s also how we assign value to things, so it isn’t just a spatial relation.

SC: I’m an urbanist myself—there is a presumption that cities are the “happening” places. It’s possible to see the relationships in these complicated terms, and nothing seems inevitable along this divide or relationship. The reason I’m interested in this—and it’s something I kind of left out of my first book—is that rural India was launched as the site of the new nation. It was not the city.

Despite the fact that much of the rural imagination was city-centric, it was rural India. It is rural India that needed to be mobilized. It was very apparent that urban protest, urban revolution, would not do it. It was a simple demographic fact that most of the people lived in the villages. It’s a dominating fact. This was Gandhi’s success: he could mobilize. He taught that this was the way. He recognized that you have to mobilize rural India to win this game; otherwise, it’s not going to happen. It’s a very compelling argument, and what Raymond Williams recognized. Why in Cuba was it the rural? Why in China was it the rural? Why was the rural mobilized? Cities tended to be elite spaces—they tended to be conservative spaces. There just wasn’t enough reason for things to change. They were benefiting from this situation. Why change? Even now I would say, much happens in cities, but change has to happen. It has to come from somewhere else, not the cities.

DC: You always hear that the urban is privileged, but that change is going to come from cities.

SC: I think the rural has to be re-thought drastically. Think of cities—we think of America as so urbanized, right? Most of the territory is still rural. How much are they affected by urban and capitalist practices? And what’s your measure? For me, the terms have gotten too tired—the urban and the rural. They need to be energized. We need to do something new with them, otherwise we fall back on a priori assumptions.

DC: I was really interested in your use of the uncanny in “Cities and Peripheries.”

Could you talk a bit more about the uncanny and particularly the ecological uncanny?

SC: I came upon the idea of the uncanny when looking at the representations of colonial landscape and the anxiety of representation I could decipher in them. I’m

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using the idea of the uncanny as a kind of analytic for parsing through these representations because, as I explained in Representing Calcutta, the conflict between wanting a home in India, wanting a landscape to be familiar when it can never be familiar, produced different reactions among different people. Some people really wanted to assert that the home in India be an exact replication of the one in England, against formidable obstacles. Others wanted to see India as an escape from those sorts of bonds of home, if you will. And when they saw the familiar in the landscape, that was disabling. I needed a way to explain that, and I thought the uncanny really helped me there. In my more recent work, I’m starting to mobilize the idea of the ecological uncanny to speak of anxieties about landscape, but also at other times appearing without prior notice. If you will, ghost-like. Like you didn’t know there was a ghost landscape here. You didn’t expect it. And an unexpected return: you thought it was dead and quite buried, and suddenly it crops up. I think the uncanny allows one way of thinking of the simultaneity of past and present—to explain the moments when the two appear at the same time.

Derek Gregory is the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the spatial modalities of late modern war, where military violence, occupation and peace bleed into one another. disClosure Interviewers: Austin Crane, Sophie Strosberg, and Marita Murphy DC: We are familiar with your training as a historical geographer, but also your work has critically addressed cultural and political imaginations and their spatial relationships to violence in a way that’s been influential in terms of present events, and the understanding of those in critical human geography. We’ve noticed that you employ a method that toggles from past to present and back again, to address the injustices of our present condition. Could you explain your purpose in this methodology?

DG: That’s a good question. Some of it, I think, is pure instinct. Having been trained as a historical geographer, then I suppose I approach the present as something which is about to become the past right now. But I do think that it’s immensely dangerous to flatter ourselves into believing that we live in this brave new world where everything is novel, and we are the first people to encounter this sort of thought. More than that, I think it’s important to situate what’s happening now within a much longer, not necessarily continuous, series of trajectories in order to better understand the sequences of change that have taken place. I also think that there are times in which the contrast between past and present, or more

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often the continuities, can be remarkably illuminating. The last reason for doing it is that, as I have said, I think it’s important to approach the present unfettered by these sub-disciplinary categories and pursue problems wherever they take us.

The last thing I should say is that I’ve always admired the writing of really good historians, and for that matter historical geographers, and I think that’s in stark contrast to much of what I see across the social sciences, including human geography. I think that, even allowing for the critiques of narrative, the fact that there is a narrative force in so much historical writing is one of the reasons that it captures the imagination of an audience beyond the academy.

DC: Now, maps have obviously created a bridge from past to present as well.

This year we’re looking at mapping as the theme for the Committee on Social Theory. There’s a long and violent history of how the military and mapping have driven one another forward, and we were wondering how the theme of mapping is present in your own work, explicitly or implicitly.

DG: It’s present. It’s present in all kinds of ways. It’s present of course because the history of cartography is intimately bound up with military power and military violence, particularly exercised through the name of the sovereign. So it’s no accident that in Britain, the state mapping agency was known as the Ordnance Survey. But of course, mapping was bound up with military power long before the nineteenth century.

In my own work, I think there are two crucial ways in which mapping becomes important. The first is that I’ve been trying to think through the way in which modern war depends upon the performance of particular spaces. I identify three in particular: the space of the target, the space of the enemy other, and the space of the exception. If we focus on the space of target, then it’s clear that modern war depends on turning a rich, complex, diverse landscape, a landscape which is full of life, into the abstract space of the target. Maps are an essential means for doing that. It’s a process of abstraction which is in one sense scientific (or at least it purports to be scientific). In other words it turns the world into an object world in which weapons can be directed against, well, until very recently, objects: military bases, rocket launchers, missile batteries. And much more recently, of course, a mapping which is focused on the movement of individuals in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, so that the targets become people, but nonetheless still very largely abstract entities. But it’s not a purely scientific exercise; it’s also a rhetorical one. Because the more you can turn this complicated landscape into the abstract space of the target—the map, with its grid lines, its references, its coordinates, a screen of pixels even—the more, in a sense, you are distanced from the effects of the violence themselves. I think the modern

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kill-chain has become ever more dispersed, ever more subdivided, and that whole process of abstraction is, I think, driven by a series of mappings.

But there’s a second way that mapping has come into my work much more recently, which is what I’m going to talk about this afternoon. That’s to say that when we look at, in the case that is captivating me at the moment, the First World War, it’s very clear that on the western front, the apparent stasis of trench warfare was brought about not by the fixity of the map at all, but by a series of advances and counter-advances which depended upon, in fact were choreographed by, a constantly updating map basis. That is to say, maps were constantly redrawn, overprinted, and distributed. Aircraft were taking photographs, which were distributed at all command levels on a weekly and, eventually, a daily basis. And when you get right down the front lines, soldiers were updating these maps themselves, copying them, sketching them, and amending them. So there is this tremendous sense of a map in motion—which is precisely what enables the trenches to stay where they are. Because if you don’t know what the enemy are doing, then they will overwhelm you, and the stalemate is produced partly through that vector of geographical intelligence.

Yet, when you read the soldier’s accounts on the Western Front, many of them clearly don’t see this in purely cartographic terms at all. They certainly don’t see it in the optical/visual terms of the map or the aerial photograph. Their knowledge of the battle field is of a battle field—not of a space, not of a geometry—which they know through their bodies, they know it through sound, they know it through touch, senses which are very different from those which are mobilized in conventional mapping.

DC: So it seems like there’s a really concrete interplay between the geographic imagination and the form of representation or the technologies of representation.

DG: Yes, that’s right, because in very many ways, these are never just representations, of course. They have very real consequences. The fact that the general is far removed from the front lines at general headquarters, for example, at Montreuil—the only way he can know what’s happening is to plot it on a map, to look at a photo-mosaic. Until he visits the front lines, or until his staff officers visit the front lines, there’s a sense in which those abstractions produce a remarkably abstract view of the war itself.

There’s a memorable anecdote which I’d like to think is true, which is, in the early days of the war, the Royal Flying Corps were up in the air trying to provide real time intelligence about the German advance. They would land, and their reports would be rushed to headquarters. The British commander is supposed to have said: “How can I follow through on my plans when you keep bringing me all these bloody Germans?”

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That’s really the point, you see, that those abstractions produce a very particular kind of war. It’s an increasingly precise, geometric clockwork mechanical war in which everything is supposed to play out perfectly on the map.

But of course, on the battlefield, it’s not like that at all. Equally, the representations that the front-line troops produce emerge out of their direct experience of the war, but in turn shape that experience. So there’s a continuity that you can’t really pull out. The trench map which is being exhibited back at headquarters or the annotated scruffy copy that’s being changed and had mud splashed all over it in the front line trench—you can’t pull either out of the milieu in which they are being produced, and used, and activated.

DC: We read on your blog earlier this week that the purpose of today’s talk at Kentucky is “to explore a dialectic between cartography and […] corpography.”

Two questions: first of all, does the term “corpography” refer to corpus as in body or corpse as in dead body? That’s a clarifying question. Then, second, your work considers the lives, deaths, and imaginations of individuals caught up in geopolitical processes like the “War on Terror,” or “the kill-chain.” Why is it important for you to address corpography in your work on large-scale issues of war and violence?

DG: Well in a way, you answered your question yourself. Corpography is obviously a made-up word. And it goes right back to what I was saying about the First World War—that cartography imposes this optical, visual clarity on the world and, in fact, the inspiration, or at least the spur, for the talk this afternoon is a wonderful remark in a novel by William Boyd called An Ice-Cream War, which concerns the First World War but in German East Africa. There’s an extraordinary scene in which a young subaltern, Gabriel, is on board a troop ship and the whole campaign is being planned out on a map. But when Gabriel and his troops splash ashore, they encounter a radically different world—a world that he can make no sense of, that doesn’t seem to conform to the map. Boyd writes, “Gabriel thought maps should be banned, they gave the world an order and a reasonableness it didn’t possess.”

I’ve always been haunted by that phase, so what I want to do this afternoon is explore it. Now the cartographic vision that I’m talking about is of course not confined to the map, conventional or otherwise. Cartographic vision in the cases that I’m going to be talking about extends far beyond that to aerial photography and to field sketching, for example. All of these are modes of military apprehension which focus very much on abstraction, on simplification, and on a certain clarity of reason which is supposed, of course, to translate into a clarity of purpose and of execution.

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Corpography, by contrast, is that much more haptic view of the world.

Now the best discussion of that that I know is a brilliant book by Santanu Das called Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, which talks about these haptic geographies—knowing the world through the body. As I’ve been reading the diaries and the letters and the memoirs—not just of the soldier-poets, but of ordinary, front-line soldiers—it became clear to me that the world that I was searching for to contrast with the cleanliness of cartography, had to be corpography. Partly because it conveys that sense of the corporeal—the way in which, for example, in the Somme you live in mud, mud is the medium through which you fight. Everything is encased and caked in it, and your knowledge of what lies within the trench or beyond the trench in no man’s land—well of course it’s partially visual—but it’s profoundly sensual, physical, and comes through the experience of this muck that you’re slopping around in. Das calls it a “slimescape” and I think that conveys really what I want to get at.

But the reason I mention slimescape is that Das and others make it quite clear that Somme mud is not just mud. It’s composed of all the debris of industrial and industrialized killing. So it includes ammunition, barbed wire, spent shell cases. But of course it also includes body parts. So, for me, corpography is not simply about the corporeal but it’s also about the corpses, which, in a sense, make the killing field a field.

DC: Your recent work employs terms such as “the everywhere war,” as we’ve been talking about, “killing from a distance,” “global borderlands,” and “the killchain.” How does your work explicitly consider the spatiality of bombing and war today, getting into the more explicitly geographical aspects?

DG: Well, if we think about the spatiality of war, more generally, I suppose I’m interested in several questions: The first is the “where” of “the everywhere war.” I think it important to understand, in the most elemental, empirical sense, the geographies of military violence that are unfolding on the planet today. Secondly, I’m interested in the capacity of modern militaries to wage war over a distance.

And I’m interested in that in a whole series of different registers. So, how is it that when a state goes to war, it’s able to produce military intelligence so that it knows something of the terrain over which it’s going to be fighting, the enemy that it’s going to be up against? Then logistically, how is it going to get its troops, its supplies, and everything else that’s needed to a distant theater? And then the whole question of the weapons themselves, and their range, and the production of what I earlier called “the space of the target.” And in all of those registers, there are ways in which your mapping question comes to the fore.

But the third way in which I am interested in all of this is through these performances of space. So not thinking simply about where military violence is

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quite literally taking place, not thinking simply about how you get the means of military violence to engage peoples and places over a distance. But military violence does produce those three spaces: the space of the target, the space of the enemy other, and the space of the exception. And there too, spatiality is written into the conduct of war. So I don’t want to limit my understanding of war to the map, for all of the reasons that I’ve given you. Because, obviously, concepts of space and spatiality reach far beyond the narrowly cartographic.

the angel of dead & dying towns JEREMY DAE PADEN Transylvania University

This poem is part of a series of contemporary angel poems I have been working on for the last few years. In this series, I use the figure of the angel as a witness to modern life.

This poem takes part of its feeling from the lament. The book of Lamentations begins, “How doth the city sit solitary! how she is become like a widow!” And part of it from the related medieval poetic tradition of the ubi sunt, the where are they now? It is, in both these senses, a memento mori.

The genesis of this poem came from driving out west a few summers ago.

Both of my grandfathers were from Texas. One was from a small town with a few gas-stations, a Dairy Queen, and a high school, the other from an unincorporated community with little more than a crossroad and a masonic lodge. One is barely hanging on in West Texas heat, the other is about to completely sink into the dirt of Central Texas and disappear from maps and memory. This got me thinking about cities and towns and how and why they die. And who witnesses and remembers these places along the way. Who, that is, keeps a map of those cities?

Who charts the lives the people who once populated those streets? What might the task be of the angel assigned to watch over cities as they disappear?

Some cities and towns, like Pompeii, are destroyed through acts of God; others, though, like Carthage and Tenochtitlan, through human violence. And then there are the Flint’s and the Patterson’s and the Bridge Cities, there are the towns my grandfathers were from and countless others throughout the American heartland that, due to pressures both civic and economic, are dying. Towns and cities that are “moving off” the map, either because of dwindling populations or because people would simply rather skip over them and forget them. Much prettier is the gentrified Bronx than the decaying Flint.

Also, the final image, Tenochtitlan buried under Mexico City, recognizes that the world is a palimpsest—that cities of long standing are built on the ruins of previous settlements.

If the act of remembrance and marking a place down is an act of mapping, this poem tries to map those cities being lost to war, to economic pressures, and to natural disasters.

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the angel of dead & dying towns recites every morning the names of those destroyed & abandoned Gomorrah, Carthage, Pompeii as if to say at least, at least the condemnation of god has not yet visited, at least should the angels of inspection come looking for hearth & bed room & table will be found if only it were enough to worry about the florist undertaker, preacher’s wife still tending daisies & hydrangeas still setting flowers in vases should children think to visit the brightness of the sun that parches the grass & bleaches the brick leaves nothing hidden & Caesar’s mercenaries still prowl, levees still burst O Qusair, O Grand Basam Flint, Bridge City, Patterson somewhere below the rubble Tenochtitlan lies buried