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A Home in Becoming: Forging Taiwan’s Imagined Community in Jiufen

Dennis Lo

in The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas

Examining Hou Xiaoxian's Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989) as case studies, this chapter tells the story of how Jiufen, a once sleeping mining community in Northeastern Taiwan, ... More

Examining Hou Xiaoxian's Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989) as case studies, this chapter tells the story of how Jiufen, a once sleeping mining community in Northeastern Taiwan, transformed into Taiwan's first site of historical origins almost entirely re-imagined by the Taiwan New Cinema, making it a truly postmodern nativist landmark. This chapter demonstrates how Dust’s rural representations not only stem from the filmmakers' practices of location shooting as cultural remembrance, but also provide spectators with a visual framework for recollecting their own memories. Jiufen is imaged as a paradigmatic Taiwanese hometown, a space in which one has learned to accept one’s unfulfilled aspirations. City re-shapes this image of Jiufen into a metonym for the entire nation, a home where all – regardless of identity – must remember and accept personal loss as part of their collective history. Through City, Jiufen materializes into a paradigmatic site of Taiwan’s coming of age, a heterotopic microcosm of the nascent Taiwanese imagined community. Thrown into the national spotlight by the Taiwan New Cinema, Jiufen transforms off-screen into a socially contested space, attracting the diverse and competing attentions of local and international tourists, preservationists, advertisers, filmmakers, historians, developers, and politicians.Less

Becoming Female and Deformed through Suffering in Hell

Meghan R. Henning

in Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature

Chapter 3 focuses on the bodily torments themselves, demonstrating that hell threatened readers with the horror of transforming into a female, disabled body through references to hair, skin, and ... More

Chapter 3 focuses on the bodily torments themselves, demonstrating that hell threatened readers with the horror of transforming into a female, disabled body through references to hair, skin, and reproductive organs. This chapter applies the ancient understandings of the bodies that were “assigned to suffering” in chapter 1 to an analysis of the apocalyptic depictions of hell. The results of this analysis demonstrate that ancient Christian understandings of the suffering body were not simply employing a binary juxtaposition between male and female, or a negative valuation of the feminine or disabled body. For example, this chapter examines the weeping, leaky, male bodies of Jesus, Peter, and Paul as well as the weeping bodies of male sinners, without trying to fit the ideological differences of those depictions into a single explanatory framework.Less

From Urban Core to Vacant Terrain: Defining the Heterotopia of Maya Monumental Landscapes at the Crossroads of the Middle Belize River Valley

Eleanor Harrison-Buck, Mark D. Willis, Chester P. Walker, Satoru Murata, and Marieka Brouwer Burg

in Approaches to Monumental Landscapes of the Ancient Maya

In Chapter 5, Eleanor Harrison-Buck and colleagues describe their use of drones to quickly and economically map roughly 7 km2 of plowed fields at the site of Saturday Creek in the middle Belize River ... More

In Chapter 5, Eleanor Harrison-Buck and colleagues describe their use of drones to quickly and economically map roughly 7 km2 of plowed fields at the site of Saturday Creek in the middle Belize River Valley. They argue that Saturday Creek was a central node on the landscape from Preclassic to Colonial times, serving as an important crossroads between east-west and north-south transportation routes. The authors consider the dense settlement around the site core of Saturday Creek to be part of a larger monumental landscape and consider activities taking place in the vacant terrain on the fringes of the peri-urban settlement—what they refer to as the “heterotopia” (borrowing from Foucault). These spaces were separate from the settlement, but integral to its operation and included environments such as the pine ridge that served as an important transportation corridor, vast tracts of wetlands with ditched and drained agricultural fields, and broad floodplains with rich alluvial soils, which were likely places of cacao cultivation. The authors conclude that these “heterotopian” spaces in the monumental landscape are important to consider in settlement studies because they played a vital role in maintaining long-term, dense populations in urban and peri-urban centers like Saturday Creek.Less

Fashion and film: a synergetic kaleidoscope

Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén

in Fashion on the Red Carpet: A History of the Oscars®, Fashion and Globalisation

The introduction anchors the contemporary red-carpet phenomenon to cultural shifts at the turn of the 20th Century. More specifically, it links these to the cultural practices of New York Society ... More

The introduction anchors the contemporary red-carpet phenomenon to cultural shifts at the turn of the 20th Century. More specifically, it links these to the cultural practices of New York Society circles in their attempts to emulate European royal and aristocratic traditions. In doing so, it also tackles the changes brought along by late modernity, including the emergence of American beauty ideals in the media and the first attempts to create awareness around the need for an American fashion scene that could compete with Paris. It briefly discusses the shifting meanings of glamour as a central idea that navigates alongside Hollywood and the red-carpet event. The concept of heterotopia is used to ground the elusive meaning of Hollywood, and Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the 5-scapes is brought to the forefront to contextualise the multifaceted aspects that need to be taken under consideration when studying the complexities of the red-carpet phenomenon in the context of globalisation. The introduction finally proposes thinking about different periods of fashion at the Academy Awards, structured under Raymond William’s understanding of the emergent, the dominant and the residual, led by shifts in the fashion and film industries.Less

Baṣrayaātha: Self-portrait as a City

William Maynard Hutchins

Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head (eds)

in The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives

Basrayatha, Muhammad Khudayyir’s innovative book, is both a personal memoir and a cityscape of Basra, Iraq. In it the author created a model city called Basrayatha, which is both based on but also ... More

Basrayatha, Muhammad Khudayyir’s innovative book, is both a personal memoir and a cityscape of Basra, Iraq. In it the author created a model city called Basrayatha, which is both based on but also serves as a mirror and critique of the actual city of Basra. This model then took on a life of its own and appeared in other works by Khudayyir. The book can be enjoyed at face value but is best understood with reference to his many critical writings. The work’s blend of influences from the visual arts, local history, and stories about the storyteller is rather special if not unique in Arabic literature.Less

Splitting hairs: Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ and bisexuality in later life

Christopher Wells

Trish Hafford-Letchfield, Paul Simpson, and Paul Reynolds (eds)

in Sex and Diversity in Later Life: Critical Perspectives

This chapter recognises older bisexual intimacies as an example of cultural theorist Michel Foucault’s spatial concept of the ‘heterotopia’. Through this conceptual apparatus of the ‘heterotopic’ ... More

This chapter recognises older bisexual intimacies as an example of cultural theorist Michel Foucault’s spatial concept of the ‘heterotopia’. Through this conceptual apparatus of the ‘heterotopic’ space, the chapter examines the paradoxical inclusion and exclusion of the older bisexual subject, and their sexual intimacies, within both institutional care home settings and wider socio-cultural spaces. In doing so, this chapter reflects on the subjectivity of the ageing bisexual and the ways that both bisexuality, as a complex identity category, and current institutional practice affects older bisexuals’ intimacies and sexual developmental needs. To contextualize this consideration, the article centres specifically on mononormative assumptions around monosexuality (the ideological assumptions that an older person is either homo- or heterosexual) within the social policies and institutionalized care home practices. This section will cite various case studies to explore this contradictory ‘heterotopic’ space, what the author describes as the ‘bitopia’ of later life, one inhabited by older bisexuals who are both included and excluded from the ‘post-sexual’ gay and lesbian imaginary (Foucault, 1967: 1; Simpson, 2017: 3).Less

Home and Migration

John Wei

in Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes

In the context of transnational and border-crossing migration, this chapter focuses on the newly emerged (post-2008) queer films created by and for queer people, and the underlying queer mobilities ... More

In the context of transnational and border-crossing migration, this chapter focuses on the newly emerged (post-2008) queer films created by and for queer people, and the underlying queer mobilities on and off screens, as vehicles to understand the issue of home and migration through autobiographical and cinematic queer homecoming and homemaking. Through an investigation of the heterotopic non-places in migration, this chapter examines queer people’s emotionally embodied experiences of mobilities. The unfulfilled homecoming and homemaking and the unsettled bodies and desires in the long process of uprooting—with or without the chance to put down the roots for regrounding—inevitably become constituent of and productive of the stretched kinship structure.Less

Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck as Heterotopia

Susanne C. Knittel

in The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

Chapter 1 presents a detailed history of the Nazi euthanasia program and of its commemoration by means of an analysis of the former killing center of Grafeneck in southern Germany and various recent ... More

Chapter 1 presents a detailed history of the Nazi euthanasia program and of its commemoration by means of an analysis of the former killing center of Grafeneck in southern Germany and various recent commemorative events associated with it. This analysis facilitates an exploration of the historical reasons for the marginalization of the memory of Nazi euthanasia within the discourse on the Holocaust, as well as the various steps that have been and are being taken to overcome this marginalization. The chapter incorporates not only Grafeneck's postwar history but also its present-day function as a home for the disabled. This ambiguous status challenges visitors’ assumptions about what commemoration is or should be and how it invites them to consider the place of disability in contemporary society. The chapter concludes with a reading of Grafeneck as what Michel Foucault terms heterotopia, a liminal space suspended between reality and unreality, past and present. This offers a key to understanding the uncanny character of the site.Less

Material Memories: (Re)Collecting Clandestine Crossings of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Sam Grabowska and John Doering-White

in Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting

Drawing from ethnographic and archaeological data collected by The Undocumented Migration Project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this chapter investigates the ways in which unauthorized ... More

Drawing from ethnographic and archaeological data collected by The Undocumented Migration Project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this chapter investigates the ways in which unauthorized border-crossing is remembered. The memories are posited as heterotopic, that is, as institutional counter-sites with various actors who have competing aims, different experiences, and polarized socio-political positions. Grabowska and Doering-White highlight how identity, landscape, and materiality oscillate while memory works through personal recollection, cultural construction, and analytic interpretation. Grabowska and Doering-White show, for example, how artifacts can recall stories that migrants forget, and how the memories of border-crossers can equally contest the agendas of humanitarians and anti-immigration militias. In so doing, Grabowska and Doering-White seek to add variation to the border-crossing narrative while self-reflexively considering the strength of a mixed methodology.Less

The Structural Transformation of the Coffeehouse: Religion, Language, and the Public Sphere in the Modernizing Muslim World

Michiel Leezenberg

in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality

This chapter discusses the Ottoman coffeehouse against the backdrop of the understanding that the emergence of the coffee house in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe ... More

This chapter discusses the Ottoman coffeehouse against the backdrop of the understanding that the emergence of the coffee house in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe indicates the rise of a modern liberal and secular public sphere. The new institution of the coffeehouse (just like coffee itself) had, after all, been imported from the early modern Ottoman Empire, where it had emerged as early as the sixteenth century, thus well before any substantial European influence. The Ottoman coffeehouse, it is argued, operated as a Foucauldian “heterotopia,” constituting a public and secular counterpart to the mosque. The absence of the outspoken anticlericalism featured by its European counterpart reveals, however, the Eurocentrism of Habermas's rationalist conceptualization of the public sphere.Less

Chabrolean Spaces as Heterotopias of Crisis

Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

in Claude Chabrol's Aesthetics of Opacity

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or ... More

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or functional buildings (the hospital in Le Boucher) become places in which generic battles take place and the real and the virtual come to a head. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is used to illuminate these unstable and overcoded Chabrolean topographies through the following case studies: the boarding house and park in La Rupture; the crystal house in Juste avant la nuit; the hotel room in Violette Nozière and the Gothic houses in Poulet au vinaigre and La Demoiselle d’honneur.Less

Womb with a View: Ectogenesis in Ethan of Athos and Brave New World

Ally Wolfe

in Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or ... More

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or artificial womb. Close reading demonstrates how the novel proves more complex than initial readings might suggest in its careful working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator for parenting, motherhood, and the duty of care towards the young. The chapter argues how the existence of Athos with the wider Vorkosigan series is significant, part of an ongoing and series-wide project by Bujold to demonstrate the range of possible futures that the uterine replicator might permit. At various points, Ethan of Athos is brought into conversation with Huxley’s Brave New World to contrast Bujold and Huxley’s visions of reproductive futurities. The chapter shows how Bujold’s saga-length project of creating a diverse science-fictional heterotopia involves a thorough working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator, of detaching reproduction from a gestational body, in which Ethan of Athos plays a necessary part.Less