Friday, July 15, 2016

Visualizing 19th-Century New York

A spatial interface to twenty essays on the objects and themes of the exhibit as well as the objects and landmarks.  
Nineteenth-century New York City was a visual experience, a spectacle for residents and visitors alike. Visions of Broadway dominated the burgeoning number of visual images of New York that poured out of commercial publishing firms and entered American homes during the nineteenth century.
More at Visualizing 19th-Century New York, Framing the City: Civic Landscape and Identity, and other essays

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Fear the everyday state

On the fifth anniversary of the fall of Egypt's president Mubarak, this is an account of the uprising, and the ebb and flow of the Egyptian revolution, from an anonymous activist in Cairo.

Protesters against Mohammed Morsi in Tahrir square

Protesters against Mohammed Morsi in Tahrir Square


Continue reading Fear the everyday state online and be overwhelmed as you read -- or download Fear the every day state_1.pdf  (148.16 KB) and be overwhelmed when you read it later. Weep. 



Remember "this beast has colonialism as its ancestor." Try to breathe. 

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Florilegium urbanum

townMedieval English urban history - Introduction



The vast majority of the primary sources that bear witness to medieval English towns and the lives of the men and women who resided in them each focus on some particular aspect or event. General descriptions of any individual towns are rare, as are surveys or reviews of English towns generally. We do possess a few examples of these, however, and several are given here. Two happen to be roughly contemporary with each other, from the period when we are just beginning to see boroughs emerging as distinctive entities in the social and economic fabric. Furthermore, they present contrasting viewpoints on urban society: one pro, one con. The third comes at the close of the Middle Ages, while the fourth is a century later yet looks back at a city as it was in the medieval period. A fifth document (actually the fourth in the sequence below) is not in the same mould, but has been included for the light it throws upon key characteristics of towns in medieval England.



Most of the medieval texts presented in the Florilegium Urbanum almost inevitably date from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries – the final third of what is conventionally considered the European Middle Ages. This is due to a dearth of surviving written documentation produced by urban sources in earlier periods.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

.@airplanereader on writing about place

…saturated with memories, associations, tracks and traces, more layers than a medieval palimpsest, unstable boundaries…I took pains excavating those layers in Little Dorrit (dss chapter) but don't manage so well writing about my own personal places, falling back on images, links to the efforts of others…this blog…

It's impossible to write about place.
I was chatting with my friend Ian the other day and he mentioned in passing, "writing is impossible." We had been talking about how hard it really is to write clear coherent prose. It is. Difficult, I mean. Just try following your thoughts and sensations for five minutes, and putting them into neat prose.
Then you add a topic, or god forbid a 'theme', and it gets harder still. Focus, attention, word by word, sentence to paragraph. Logical propositions. What was I talking about again?



It's impossible to write about place.
 Read the rest at What is literature?: Writing about place

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

the view from Latin America

 A new issue of Critical Reviews of Latin American Research is out. Jose H. Bortoluci and Robert S. Jansen (Michigan): "Toward a Postcolonial Sociology: The View From Latin America." Erin Graff Zivin (USC): "Beyond Inquisitional Logic, or, Toward an An-archaeological Latin Americanism."



Matiias Bargsted, Juan Carlos Castillo, and Nicolas M. Somma (UC-CL): "Political Trust in Latin America." Naomi Roht-Arriaza (Hastings): "After Amnesties Are Gone: Latin American National Courts and the New Contours of the Fight Against Impunity." Roberto Laver (Harvard): "Judicial Independence in Latin America and the (Conflicting) Influence of Cultural Norms."



Juan Cristaldo and Lorena Silvero (UNA): "Maps of Our Shared Territory." Tanya Golash-Boza (UC-Merced) and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke):"Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity and Ideology in Latin America." From the International Journal of Multicultural Education, a special issue on Globalization and Educational Equity in Latin America



and much more at the view from latin america - bookforum.com / omnivore