The past two decades have seen the rise of the walking tour as a tourist practice that stands in uneasy and contradictory relation to commodity culture. Focusing on the guided tour to Virginia Woolf’s London, this article examines what happens when we literally go back to Bloomsbury, walking the literary text as we write the urban one. Placing it in a tradition of walking as a cultural, critical and aesthetic practice, this article explores the literary walk as a mapping of the city, a reading of the streets that is also a performance of the text and that, as an embodied experiencing of urban space, is the corollary of the present obsession with heritage and cultural memory
It is generally accepted that memory is a dialectic involving both remembering and forgetting. Also, there is agreement among cultural memory scholars that acts of memory seek to counter the effects of forgetting: they serve the imperative to remember and impede the work of forgetting. This article develops the concept of amnesiology to explore forgetting and forgetfulness not as a failure of memory but as a made condition, produced and reproduced. Focusing on Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, a book which was carved out of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, it inquires into the relationship between memory performance and the production of oblivion and explores the role of language and literature in it. As I argue, the die-cut pages of Tree of Codes invite reflection on the narrative and technological dimensions of memory as well as on the role silence, repression and absence play in it as technologies of forgetting.
In this article, we use Hage’s (2000) critique of White multiculturalism’s orientalizing logic of ethnic enrichment as a lens to analyze the multicultural valorization through ethnic food of the Javastraat, the commercial artery of Amsterdam’s Indische Buurt district. Stemming from a larger ethnographic study of gentrification in the area, the article provides evidence of how racial aesthetics have served as the central guiding principle in the transformation of the neighborhood from a dark space of grime, crime, and decay to the current space of hipness, coolness, and global culture. While being celebrated as a living example of multicultural society in the inner city, we argue that the area embodies a multicultural reality in which White, middle-class residents, and visitors are the prime occupiers of space and aesthetic organizing principle of the neighborhood’s landscape.
It is generally accepted that memory is a dialectic involving both remembering and forgetting. Also, there is agreement among cultural memory scholars that acts of memory seek to counter the effects of forgetting: they serve the imperative to remember and impede the work of forgetting. This article develops the concept of amnesiology to explore forgetting and forgetfulness not as a failure of memory but as a made condition, produced and reproduced. Focusing on Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, a book which was carved out of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, it inquires into the relationship between memory performance and the production of oblivion and explores the role of language and literature in it. As I argue, the die-cut pages of Tree of Codes invite reflection on the narrative and technological dimensions of memory as well as on the role silence, repression and absence play in it as technologies of forgetting.
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