This article develops the concept of ‘visionary infrastructure’, defined as infrastructure that provides visions of and begins to build more sustainable futures for local communities, through the case study of a solar-powered street lighting project in Highland Park, Michigan, near Detroit. After the local utility company repossessed most of the city’s streetlights, residents began building their own grassroots public lighting network. This infrastructure is visionary because it allows members of the largely African American community to determine precisely how their city is illuminated, and thus how seeing operates therein. By shifting control over the conditions of urban visuality from state and corporate officials to local residents, the lighting project intervenes in a long history of light on the street as a racialized tool of state surveillance and policing. And it shows how utility infrastructure can become a key site and mode of contemporary political resistance.
This article deals with the location of Mount Theches, the vantage point from which Xenophon’s Ten Thousand famously got their first sight of the sea after a long and arduous march across eastern Anatolia. It discusses what the written sources can and cannot tell us about this iconic spot, comments on the currently favoured identification (stressing its dependence on an assumption about the route the army followed to and from the vantage point), and presents three other places that can come into contention if different assumptions are made about the route. The aim is not to insist that one or other of these is the correct solution but rather to underline the point that, since we do not (and are never likely to) know how the Ten Thousand approached Theches, and since there are many points in the Pontic Mountains behind Trabzon from which the sea can be glimpsed in the far distance, the identity of Theches is a problem that does not admit of more than conjectural solution. This prompts broader reflections on the textual and the topographical, and the relationship between landscape and narrative.
For several hundred years from the mid-first millennium B.C.E. the Mossynoikoi and the Kardouchoi were dominant peoples in their respective regions of Anatolia. While the historical record indicates they were strong militarily and successful at commerce, they were apparently not inclined to express their power or wealth in terms of monumental architecture or durable artwork. In the absence of a material legacy our knowledge of these peoples derives primarily from ancient literary sources, the most important of which is the firsthand account given by the Greek writer Xenophon the Athenian in his Anabasis. The aims of this paper are, firstly, to highlight the importance of ancient accounts in so far as they preserve knowledge of peoples who we may otherwise know nothing about and, secondly, to explore how these same texts have a decisive bearing in the process of remembering ancient peoples.
In May 401 bce the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger started out for Mesopotamia from his satrapy in western Anatolia with an army of levies and Greek mercenaries. Although he did not declare his intentions at the outset, his aim was to win control of the empire from his brother, King Artaxerxes. At the battle of Cunaxa in Babylonia Cyrus was killed, though the engagement itself was inconclusive. Emerging practically unscathed, the Greek contingent began what became an epic march to safety through hostile territory. The journey took them north along the middle course of the Tigris river, into the Armenian Mountains, and finally, in late April 400, to the peaks overlooking the Black Sea. From the Greek colony of Trapezus they proceeded alternately by foot and ship to Byzantium. Their story is told in the Anabasis of Xenophon the Athenian, the only first-hand account of the journey that has come down to us.
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