Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space

An Interdisciplinary Conference, 5-6 July 2013

University of Paderborn, Germany

 

In his report about a journey from London to Birmingham in 1844, the German traveller Johann Georg Kohl notes with apparent disappointment: "I arrived a little too late for the riot-season, for September had already begun, and the season for disturbances seems invariably fixed for July."[1] The riots are registered almost in passing as if they were part of the natural order – or rather disorder – of urban space.

If one compares this historical example with the experiences of the present, parallels become evident. The 2011 London riots did not just elicit bewildered reactions but also prompted a feverish search for explanations within the medial and political spheres.[2] But this recent upsurge of a "defiant urban culture" – from the London riots to the Occupy movement – primarily gives proof of the necessity of tracing the cultural resonance of these and similar incidents in the framework of a phenomenology of the city beyond feuilletonistic outpourings and political knee-jerk reactions.

Spaces of agglomeration have always been spaces of conflict. Long before Georg Simmel described the set of problems resulting from life in the big cities with new urgency and speculated how the metropolitan type of man "creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruptions with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it,"[3] literature and philosophy had been concerned with the frictions of urban life.

It is the aim of the conference to study the question of the subversive and anti-establishment element in urban space both from a cultural and a literary perspective. The title "Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space" is supposed to point towards the tense relationship between humans and the city and to draw attention to two interconnected phenomena. On the one hand, the city is frequently regarded as a challenge; on the other, it is regularly challenged by the cultural practices of its inhabitants. Even where the urban space merely appears as the stage for conflicts, outbursts of frustration are more often than not directed against its representatives, buildings and symbols. These antagonisms and strains are not exclusively of a destructive nature, but have also inspired creative activity at the level of popular culture. At the same time, the conflict-laden opposition often leads to destruction whenever social pressure is released in the cities.

Since spatial research in literary and cultural studies has for quite some time concentrated on the perception of the urban environment and has thus for example described how the city is seen through the eyes of the flâneur, it is about time to give close consideration to tensions occurring in the production de l'espace, to use the words of Henri Lefebvre.[4] There is a reciprocal relationship between subject and space; city-dwellers and the city mutually influence and shape each other. It should, however, not be the purpose of cultural studies discussions to understand "resistance" in the framework of restrictive binary models, but rather as a factor in a network of actors. By focussing on the multiple manifestations of resistance in the city, the conference consciously aims at placing dissenting sentiment and contrary action next to an affirmative practice of the production of (urban) spaces, because it is only in the subversion of established cultural spaces, so the argument goes, that their topography becomes visible as a wide-ranging and continuously transforming discourse.  This alternative encounter with the urban, which, for instance, becomes visible in the self-conscious appropriation by autonomous counter-cultures or even in open militant resistance, will be examined.

The conference will not only regard the present situation but will also study the historical experience of urban societies as subversive cultures and relate them to other constructions of space.

The following guiding questions will be addressed: What aspects of urban space are perceived as challenging or subversive? Is the feeling of intimidation and endangerment subject to historical change? How precisely has the relationship between the individual and the demanding urban environment been understood? What are the cultural forms in which protest is articulated in and against the city? What is the connection between patterns of resistance and identity formation in the categories race, gender and class?

Proposals for papers may want to look at the cultural phenomena and/or literary representation of

-          demonstrations, blockades, sit-ins

-          riots, vandalism, rebellion

-          terrorism

-          urban subcultures: punks, squatters

-          carnivalesque festivity and urban subversion

-          graffiti, flash mobs, guerilla gardening/knitting, adbusting (subvertising)

-          lawsuits against construction projects, enraged citizens

-          performance art as resistance

-          street sports: parkour, skateboarding, urban golf, bush jumping

-          projects against gentrification and tourism

-          the city as a place of resistance in movies, music (esp. hip hop) and literature

-          the depiction of the post-apocalyptic city

or any other aspect of resistance in the urban environment.

 

Please, send an abstract of approx. 250-300 words by 30/12/2012.

 

Contact

Prof. Dr. Christoph Ehland                                                            PD Dr. Pascal Fischer

Department of English                                                                   Department of Modern Languages – English

University of Paderborn                                                               University of Würzburg

Technologiepark 21 (Nord)                                                          Am Hubland
D-33098 Paderborn                                                                         D-97074 Würzburg

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[1]       Johann Georg Kohl, England, Wales and Scotland. Chapman and Hall, 1844, 2-3.

[2]       Cf. Maev Kennedy, "Tottenham: echoes of a history not forgotten as rioting returns" (Guardian, 7 Aug. 2011); Tim Stanley, "History shows that the London riots were predictable, because the British just aren’t very nice people" (Daily Telegraph, 13 Aug. 2011); Slavoy ®i¾ek, "Shoplifters of the World Unite" (London Review of Books, 19 Aug. 2011).

[3]       Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" The Blackwell City Reader. Ed. Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, (2)2010, 104 [103-110] [Engl. transl. of  "Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben" (1903)]

[4]       Cf. Henri Lefebvre: La production de l'espace. Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974.