Spatiality

La Narració Identitària Com a Vehicle De Les Emocions / the Identity Narrative as a Vehicle for Emotion

“…Anant per parts, una cosa tan aparentment neutra com ara l'espai pot arribar a constituir un punt de referència a la nostàlgia, al patriotisme, a carregar-se de significacions, com ara la muntanya apartada del món i en la qual el temps es queda congelat per a donar pas al pensament aprofundit, al debat ideològic i a la reflexió sobre l'existència humana (Tally 2013). Potser La muntanya màgica de Mann destil•laria un altre caliu sense aquest univers particular.…”

The Concentrationary Universe: Primo Levi’s Spatial Consciousness

“…As Robert T. Tally observes, if "space was both a product and productive" for Lefebvre, Michel Foucault suggests that "it produces us, in fact." 29 Foucault analyses nineteenth-century urban, penal, medical and military spaces as illustrative of the "disciplinary mechanism" that ensures that "each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed" in social space through branding, codification, and spatial exclusion and containment. 30 Foucault's most powerful example of the disciplinary "panoptic mechanism," "visible and unverifiable," is Jeremy Bentham's model prison the Panopticon, an "enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised" by "an omnipresent and omniscient power," which, to the powerless prisoner, appears almost godlike.…”

“…12 Giordano, Knowles and Cole's project of mapping the geographies of the Holocaust is part of a wider "spatial turn"--an enquiry into questions of "space, place, and mapping"--in the humanities in the aftermath of the Second World War. 13 As Robert T. Tally notes, spatial questions became increasingly pressing after the war as "the massive movements of populations--exiles, émigrés, refugees, soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and explorers-disclosed a hitherto unthinkable level of mobility in the world" and as "traditional spatial or geographic limits were erased or redrawn" due to "the transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies,"…”

“…which "served to suppress distance while also augmenting one's sense of place or of displacement." 14 The postwar period, thus, "called for a serious rethinking" of the teleological tenets of western civilization, which "could not be maintained in the aftermath of concentration camps and atomic bombs." 15 The resulting "spatial turn" in social and critical theory draws on Henri Lefebvre's ground-breaking study The Production of Space (1974), in which Lefebvre argues that space is "neither a mere 'frame' .…”

“…Tally is right to observe that "displaced" individuals are often peculiarly "attuned to matters of place." 20…”