Negotiating Nation-Building and Citizenship through the TRC ’ s ‘ Dramatic ’ Spheres : a Reading of Two Post – apartheid Plays (original) (raw)
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Space and Spatiality in theory
This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on 'Space and Spatiality in Theory' which was held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, April 2010. In the article, the panel map out some of the challenges for thinking, writing and performing spaces in the 21st century, reflecting upon the emergence of new ways of theorizing space and spatiality, the relationship between writing, action and spacing, and the emergence of distinctive spatialized ontologies (e.g. 'movement-space') which appear to reflect epistemological and technological shifts in how our worlds are thought, produced and inhabited. The panellists stress the importance of recognizing the partial nature of Anglophone theoretical approaches, and they argue for more situated and modest theories. They also reflect upon the importance of a wide range of disciplinary knowledges and practices to their thinking on the spatialities of the world, from philosophy and the natural sciences to art and poetry.
Race and Social Analysis
I will focus on the concept of space presented and used by Boulanger (2017) in his article combining a Moscovician social representation theory (SRT) with Hermans' dialogical self theory (DST). I argue that the notion of space used is somewhat incongruent with Boulanger's (2017) argumentation due to its (the concept of space used) natural scientific bias, and would need to be reworked by relating it to a notion of place instead. I am first going to present Boulanger's (2017) notion of space in relation to Moscovici then stating some worries about it, and lastly, conceive the concept of dynamic space as related to a dynamic place as well. While space connotes a geometric shape, like a form of space, hence the natural scientific bias, as well as something separate and unalterable from the living beings and stuff occupying this space, the notion of place emphasizes the dynamic interplay of subjects and space. So, while I agree with the presented criticism of Moscovici, and the use of DST, I would also emphasize relating space and place as providing us with a more nuanced way of addressing dynamic spatiality by understanding every moment of positioning as a normative matter involving the spatial aspect of objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In general terms, subjects, by placing themselves or by being placed in a space, at the same time re-configure the whole space in which this placing is done. The last notion is more prone to be congruent with the dynamic notion of space needed to conceive the relation between subject and alter, than a separate and unalterable space.
The Question of Space: A Review Essay
Humanities, 2018
This article is a review essay which discusses the inter-disciplinary collection of essays edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch, titled The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines (London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017). The book was published as part of the Place, Memory, Affect series, edited by Neil Campbell and Christine Berberich. As well as providing a detailed critical overview of The Question of Space, the article responds to some of the broader questions that the book poses in terms of the radical inter-disciplinary of space and spatiality, relating these firstly to ideas drawn from Henri Lefebvre's discussion of 'blind fields'. The review essay then goes on to question what we might understand by the so-called 'spatial turn' and whether this itself requires some rethinking in order to better take stock of the developments in and around the inter-disciplinary scholarship on space and spatiality. Following this, the essay engages more directly with the individual chapter contributions in The Question of Space, before drawing together some concluding remarks that speak to the concept of 'atmosphere' as an affective and phenomenological quality of space as experiential and embodied 'spacing'. 1. The Question of Blind Fields To pose space as a question—as the title of Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch's edited collection proclaims—is already to cast the problem of space and spatiality, and the inter-disciplinary confabulations that such a problem creates, to the foreground of consideration. As a problem (or set of problems) that demands the pursuit of a question (or set of questions), the question of space is at its most productive when those doing the asking resist the urge to provide a definitive answer. Those who are in the business of looking for an off-the-shelf answer would do well to steer clear of Nieuwenhuis and Crouch's illuminating collection of essays and instead hunker down in the comfort of more routine orientations towards 'space' as an object of study. That The Question of Space sets out to unsettle and cast a quizzical light on these more localised of well-trodden disciplinary precincts, makes it a timely and welcome intervention. The book's subtitle—Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines—clearly states its intent to confront the fugitive nature of space and spatiality as a discourse that, by definition, cannot be readily hemmed in without doing a fundamental disservice to an unfolding conversation that has rippled and inveigled its way across an increasingly diffuse field of practice. Space is as open and expansive, or as finite and restrictive, as the structures that are brought to bear on its study. A sense of this openness and exploratory impulse is threaded across the ten chapters of The Question of Space (twelve including the book's prelude and postlude), with each throwing its gaze partly back on the preceding chapter, inasmuch as any one elucidation of 'space' casts the other in a slightly different light, the colours and textures merging like those in the artwork adorning the book's cover (from a painting by Crouch).
Something there is that doesn't love a wall ...-Robert Frost, MENDING WALL THE PASSAGE TO MODERN ITY entails the crossing of boundaries and the traversing of previously forbidding. impervious barriers that kept communities and individuals apart from and alien to one another. The cosmopolitan. centrifugal thrust of the modern sensibility, perforce, transcends borders, primordial, political, and cultural. The divisive nature of borders is now recognized. Taught to embrace all of human experience as our own, the modern imagination and ethical compass resonate with Robert Frost's poetic admonishment to be wary of the potentially invidious nature of borders. Yet boundaries persist. Residential neighborhoods are bounded by class distinctions, social and ethnic affiliations. Language is often inflected overtly or covertly to assert gender and hierarchical difference. The boundary between public and private space, which Hannah Arendt celebrates as "the realm of intimacy. of warmth and authenticity," is jealously maintained! Political borders continue to be zealously guarded and not infrequently bitterly contested. And in subtle ways, as Michel Foucault reminds us, the ontological tension between sacred and profane space endures even in our secularized culture: ... despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space isperhaps still not entireJy de-sanctified [...J. To be sure, a certain theoretical de-sanctification of space [...J has occurred, but we m<rystill not have reached the point of a practical de-sanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still govemed Iry a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have notyet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens, for example between private space and public space, between famiJy space and social space, between cultural space and useJuI space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured Iry the hidden presence of the sacred.' 2t2 Distributed by D.A.P.lDistributed Art Publishers, Inc.
Space, Time and the Articulation of a Place in the World: the Philosophical Context
B. Richardson (ed.): Spatiality and Symbolic Expression. London: Palgrave, 2015
This chapter shows how philosophical approaches to space attempt to articulate a difference between homogenous scientific space and the spatiality of human existence. From Kant and Hegel through to Agamben and Balibar the question at issue is what it means to be spatially constituted as being which lives in space in an irreducible temporal manner. Space, so understood, is not something external to the self, but rather that in which human beings are immersed as corporeal beings. Places are shown to be historical spaces embodying memories and gesturing possible meaning. However, space as historical place can be exclusionary and increasingly human beings experience place as exiles. Taking a view over the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, it is shown that to be in place is to risk displacement, to dwell is to be amidst ruination, to move is to be moved, to be spatial is also to be subject to spatiality.
“Rethinking Space: An Outsider’s View of the Spatial Turn”
Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.
3.1: Imagined Space and Lived Space, Alienation and Destruction, Singularity and Specificity
Powered by 'just there'-is never neutral and mappable. It is here that we find the critical potential of spatial theory. To fully understand this critical potential, it is helpful to consider the difference between the concepts of real, imagined, and lived space. Tim Cresswell's introduction offers a good overview, with a focus on the critical dimension in the theorizing of space. Let us begin by tracing his narrative on the differentiation between (what others called) real and imagined space. In the 1970s, he argues, humanist geographers articulated a critique of scientific approaches of space as an abstract, empty location (real space). They began to develop the notion of place to theorize the emotional significance places have for people (Cresswell 2004: 18-24). Cresswell shows how a good decade later, critical geographers-influenced by cultural studies-questioned the essentialism and exclusionary nature of many of these notions of place; the significance of a place is not the same for all its inhabitants; people of different classes, ethnicities, https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature\_and\_Literacy/Book%3A\_The\_Ideologies\_of\_Lived\_Space\_in\_Literary\_Te…
The question of space and place in geographical knowledge is ultimately not just about whether the question of "where" matters in the way that "when" does in explaining "how" and even "why" something happens. It is also about how it matters. Given that both space and place are about the "where" of things and their relative invocation has usually signaled different understandings of what "where" means, it is best to examine them together rather than separately. That is the purpose of this chapter.
2010
PREFACE The notion of space is as old as the history of human thought. Spatial categories used to predominantly connote immensity, unfathomableness, indeterminateness, or unlimitedness. However, with the passage of time, our perception of space has been substantially modified. Inhabitable space has proved to be insufficient and to have flexible borders, and even outer space, once beyond human reach, has turned out to be conquerable. The space of knowledge has been expanded considerably, although it has also remained impenetrable at points. As is commonly noted, now space seems to be " shrinking " proportionally to the increase in speed and the spread of technology. Consequently, any explorations into the notion of space inevitably reveal oppositions, paradoxes, ambiguities and unresolved questions related to our various perceptions of space. If we follow the meanders of thought on the nature of space as an ontological-epistemological concept, we will encounter the ancient ...