To be published in City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 17 (5 In this paper we consider the relationship between creative practice, activism, and processes of urban place-making. We argue that cultural activism is not merely capable of constructing meanings about urban space, it also provides the 'prospects for a new progressive political opening' (Scott 2011, 316; see also Long 2013) within the wider context of global capitalism through the cultivation of a shared aesthetics of protest. By a "shared aesthetics of protest" we are referring to two distinct though related meanings. First, in Stokes Croft there is a shared artistic style of protest grounded in a DIY sensibility and a highly varied spirit of artistic experimentation. Second, by shared aesthetics we are also referencing a shared perception by activists of the ways in which Stokes Croft has been excluded from civic or developmental narratives of Bristol or traditionally regarded as a problem for the city council, urban planners and the police. Aesthetics of protest here borrows from the work of Jacques
Geographies always contain more than they claim to represent, and there is always a politics involved in this excessive representation. This article examines how such indeterminate geographies structure popular, academic, political, and nationalist understandings of the current wave of political violence in southern Thailand.
The chapter examines how transnational currents of political thought and national ideological formations are intertwined, in the context of South and Southeast Asia. Focusing on trajectories of liberalism; communism; nationalism; religious ideologies; and ideologies of race, indigenity, and caste, it suggests that ideology constitutes an important terrain for analysing the dynamics of colonial and postcolonial politics. Rather than provide an exhaustive survey, this chapter seeks to diagnose the broad contours of the principal ideological fields across the regions and establish a basis for further comparative inquiry. The conclusion notes the absence of the theme of ideology in the scholarship on South and Southeast Asian politics, regions which are themselves products of ideology.
The city is not primarily 'community,' any more than it is primarily 'public space. ' The city is at least as much the bringing to light of a being-in-common as the dis-position (dispersal and disparity) of the community represented as founded in interiority or transcendence. It is 'community' without common origin. That being the case, and as long as philosophy is an appeal to origin, the city, far from being philosophy's subject or space, is its problem" --Jean Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 23Whereas for Jean Luc Nancy the problem upon which political philosophy organizes its thought is the city of ancient Greece, the problem in Matthew Sparke's In the Space of Theory is one of the nation-state. In the Space of Theory is not simply one in a long line of commentaries on the nation-state. Instead, just as Nancy is interested in the relationship between political philosophy and its problem, the city, Sparke seeks to recognize the "dis-positions" covered over in postfoundational critiques of the nation-state structured by less than critical spatial abstractions. These "anemic geographies" are identified by Sparke in works by some of today's most important postfoundational theorists: Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In the Space of Theory is an elaborate, dense and rewarding treatment of the "problem" of spatial abstraction at the core of contemporary political philosophy. Jacques Derrida's practice of deconstruction and Gayatri Spivak's understandings of context and deconstructive responsibility provide the theoretical motivation of In the Space of Theory. Sparke's introduction offers an outline of the geographic "arguments" in both Derrida and Spivak's thought, although the theme of the geographic is never explicitly elaborated in their writings. The basis for Sparke's deconstructive readings lies in the mark of the hyphen and the neologism: hyphen-nation-states. The hyphen is the trace of the abstraction of space, without which the co-figuration of the nation and the state would not be possible; it is "the unthought-of-nation-state territoriality" (177). In the Space of Theory is, in fact, an exploration of two hyphens. The first hyphen inscribes the much discussed proximity of nation and state (nation-state), while the second hyphen marks the "latent," absent presence of the hyphen within the term geo(-)graphy, insofar as the "the geo is constantly being graphed" (xiv). It is within the function of this second hyphen that Sparke develops his deconstruction of spatial abstractions.Geographic practice, for Sparke, is necessarily linked to writing. The term "geography," the "writing of the geo," discloses a graphematic structure that Sparke situates in the language of Derrida's early critiques of speech and the metaphysics of presence: when geographers and whomever else set out to describe a particular geography... there is a similar metaphysics of presence at work --what might be called a metaphysics of geopresence --that f...
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