Jeremy Foster | Cornell University (original) (raw)

Papers by Jeremy Foster

S. Sumartojo, ed., Commemorating the First World War: Experiencing 11 November 2018 (London, Bloomsbury), 2020

Compared to elsewhere in the Anglophone world, the commemoration of the centennial of the First W... more Compared to elsewhere in the Anglophone world, the commemoration of the centennial of the First World War’s end was remarkably muted in the US, where the conflict remains largely forgotten. Although Congress created a World War One Centennial Commission in 2013 to develop projects and activities commemorating the centennial, broad popular interest in its work proved elusive. When approached for suggestions of a nationally significant event marking 11 November, the Commission suggested the service at the National Cathedral in Washington. An ‘interfaith worship service’ to remember ‘the sacrifice of the 4.7 million Americans who served in the Great War’, and the US military’s ‘role ... in preserving peace and liberty around the world for the last 100 years’, this ceremony also participated in the collaborative Bells of Peace programme, in which citizens and organisations across the country (and the world) tolled bells that day. Both in terms of locale and character, this ceremony differed from the way 11 November is usually marked in the US, that is, through Veterans Day events held at military cemeteries, which recall the contribution of the armed forces in general rather than in any specific conflict. By contrast, I argue, during the 2018 Washington Cathedral service, the interplay between the venue’s history and the current political situation, as well as the atmospheric and emergent aspects of the ceremony, converged to create unprecedented feelings of solidarity and revive forgotten interpretations of national purpose.

Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2018

Commemorative Spaces of the First World War: Historical Geographies at the Centenary, D. Harvey & J. Wallis eds, 2018

Sometimes overlooked in accounts of the War Graves Commission’s strategies to project an imaginar... more Sometimes overlooked in accounts of the War Graves Commission’s strategies to project an imaginary supranational, yet Anglophone identity in its commemoration of the WW1 dead is the way this initiative helped construct the identities of emerging nations like Canada, South Africa and Australia. Despite the IWGC’s initial reservations, each of these Dominions (or, at Versailles, “minor belligerent powers”) eventually erected their own monument on sites they deemed especially resonant. Although all of these projects reflected the same fundamental political reality – recognizing Dominion forces’ contribution to the War’s outcome – and architectural program – a ‘memory place’ that received and made sense of transnational pilgrimages – these factors gave rise to landscapes quite different in size, design character and iconography, as well as where and when they were built. These differences derived from the unfolding of the war, and the evolving political climate vis a vis Britain and discourses of nationhood in each Dominion during and after the War. In each case, a transportable architectural type embodying a particular set of cultural-symbolic values was hybridized by local topographical, material, and ecological circumstances, and subject to further processes of making/unmaking, as each country’s collective memory of the War evolved, and interpretive and investment priorities shifted. However, now that the original events that gave rise to these ‘memory places’ have passed out of living memory, and they are visited by tourists (rather than ‘pilgrims’) with widely divergent historical and territorial understandings of the national identity they nominally project, geo-aesthetic meanings rooted in representation, interpretation and collective memory, have started to be overlaid by meanings based in processes, practices and individual becoming. At the same time, “retentions from the past and protensions for the future” originally materialized in these memorials encourage a quite contemporary play of temporal orientations, and given rise to a multi-scalar, non-hierarchical affective ecology distinct from that found in other IWGC sites.

$Research paper thumbnail of Towards a Post-Historical Landscape Governmentality? Refractory Im/Mobilities and Multi-Temporality at Paris' Jardins d'Eole$

Geography Research Forum, 2018

Today, overlapping mobilities and displacements are creating new kinds of urban spaces, as well a... more Today, overlapping mobilities and displacements are creating new kinds of urban spaces, as well as new kinds of urban subjectivity. The circulation of people, ideas, capital and imagery undermines the cityscape's ability to mediate feelings of collective citizenship, and notions of 'improvement' that inform the making and maintenance of urban landscapes. This erosion is significant in a city like Paris, where the cityscape has historically been used to cultivate feelings of republican citizenship. Despite the converging 'post-historical' effects of neo-liberalism and immigration, Paris' government strives to provide an urban landscape that ensures 'equal access for all and appropriation by none', while still meeting sustainability goals. At Jardins D'Eole, programming, design and construction gave agency to an unprecedented array of stakeholders while avoiding identity politics. Although the park has promoted the coexistence of multiple publics and new forms of environmental citizenship, these achievements have been challenged by translocal forces. A Foucauldian lens of 'governmentality' suggests these tensions, and their resolution, might originate in how urbanites' understandings of the 'city-as-transformed -nature' involves a détente between the temporal understandings produced by historical narratives and those produced by daily life. Rather than a failure of governmentality, Jardins d'Eole offers new ways of conceptualizing linkages between the state, urban landscape, and futurity.

Cultural Geographies , 2018

Originally planned as a collaboration, Wim Wenders' 2011 film about the choreographer Pina Bausch... more Originally planned as a collaboration, Wim Wenders' 2011 film about the choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal was made by Wenders alone, working with members of Bausch's company after her unexpected early death. More than a documentary, Pina combines clips of staged productions, interviews with dancers, and sequences of them performing in selected settings in and around the city of Wuppertal. Combining Kracauer's theories about film and dance with contemporary cultural geographical theory, this article unpacks how these landscape performances reflect Wenders and Bausch's shared preoccupation with performance and temporality, and mediate a post-historical relationality between culture and nature. These performances occur in variety of overlooked places, in a region known to both Wenders and Bausch, and recently the subject of a renowned post-industrial regional regeneration project. This region's material and ecological history, and the experimental approach adopted for its re-purposing, is set against broader histories of nature-culture, notions of bildung and self-actualization, environmental politics, and re-unification. Wenders' direction and Bausch's dancers combine to (re)perform this corrupted, post-carbon landscape, exorcising its revenances, and projecting an atmospheric, affect-saturated world by non-discursively working through its multiple pasts.

Women, Modernity & Landscape Architecture, J. Beardsley & S. Dumpelmann eds., 2015

Landscape is a dialectical image, an ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipulative aspect... more Landscape is a dialectical image, an ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipulative aspects cannot finally be disentangled, which can be neither completely reified as an authentic object in the world, nor thoroughly dissolved as an ideological mirage.

Architecture Research Quarterly, 2015

Le Corbusier’s ideas about geography, history, and urbanisation are used to explore Martienssen’s... more Le Corbusier’s ideas about geography, history, and urbanisation
are used to explore Martienssen’s topographical documentation
of remote African settlements in 1940s South Africa.

the backdrop is always man made. We have planted the forest the birds endorse. For hills we have ... more the backdrop is always man made. We have planted the forest the birds endorse. For hills we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places.

This article explores the constructions of urban space, national identity and gender mediated by ... more This article explores the constructions of urban space, national identity and gender mediated by an important genre of contemporary French cinema, the film de banlieue. Over the last 20 years, films by both French and French-Maghrebi filmmakers determined to show the reality of life on the outskirts of France's major cities have paradoxically helped reinforce notions of the grands ensembles as places outside the mainstream of culture and identity. In her movie Jeunesse Dorée (2002), filmmaker Zaı¨da Ghorab-Volta uses the simple narrative of a road trip made by two young working-class women around France photographing these ensembles to subvert various forms of discursive emplacement that have resulted from the convergence between inhuman built environments and filmic representations of those environments that exploit ethnic difference and glamorize masculine violence. Although the film recognizes the incarcerative nature of these modernist neighbourhoods for women, it does not mediate a simplistic rejection of the banlieu. Instead, Jeunesse Dorée proposes a working class solidarity that cuts across place, race and gender, and a relationship between (urban) modernity and (geographical) citizenship that reworks mainstream French ways of thinking about urban culture and the space of nationhood. The young women's project of 'framing modernity' also works within the film as a mise en abyme, recuperating high modernist theories of mediated vision as a primary link between cities and their hinterlands.

Rhodes' 'Cape-to-Cairo' vision was more than a road, rail and telegraph route linking the two ext... more Rhodes' 'Cape-to-Cairo' vision was more than a road, rail and telegraph route linking the two extremities of imperially-controlled Africa; it was also an imaginary axis that gathered around it a range of cultural 'epiphenomena' during the early twentieth century. This paper examines one of these, accounts of the Cape-to-Rand railway journey, which first appeared in the 1890s, and became a common trope in travel-writing about South Africa until after World War II. These accounts, which appeared in everything from personal memoirs to travel books and were written by visitors as well as South Africans, helped localize and naturalize the 'spatial story' of imperialism during the period when South Africa was emerging as a modern, autonomous nation. A recurring set of textual strategies in these accounts rehearsed a particular bodily subjectivity towards landscape, while at the same time incorporating the new nation's physiographic regions into a historically and geographically-legible whole. The Cape-to-Rand railway journey became a discursive trope in which culturally-constructed ideas about landscape and identity were protected and saved.