Streets Not Named: Discursive Dead Ends and the Politics of Orientation in Intercommunal Spatial Relations in Northern Greece

Demetriou, Olga

doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.2.295

Cited by 24 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…At the same time, place‐naming is also a powerful political tool of colonial dispossession, whereby colonial states erase indigenous conceptions of space embedded in place‐naming practices and construct other, settler‐colonial narrative landscapes (Carter 1987). In nation‐building projects, placenames become sites of hegemonic political power as “commemorative vehicles,” transforming “an official discourse of history into a shared cultural experience that is embedded into practices of everyday life” (Rose‐Redwood et al, 2010, 459; Demetriou 2005). Algeria was one of the longest‐lived settler colonies of Africa and the Middle East, an experience that fundamentally shaped local senses of place (see Barclay, Chopin, and Evans 2018).…”

Section: Re‐inscribing the Colonial Past Onto The Post‐colonial Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi Drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Post‐Coloniality in Oran, Algeria☆

Love

2021

City & Society

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Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this article examines why Algerians, after nearly sixty years of independence, continue to use French colonial‐era placenames instead of the post‐colonial names commemorating the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). I argue that vernacular place‐naming, including the use of colonial‐era names, should be understood as a component of what I call the “poetics of grievance,” whereby city dwellers simultaneously draw attention to linguistic and physical urban forms to express dissatisfaction with their post‐colonial authoritarian state. By examining local taxi drivers’ detailed knowledge of vernacular placenames and the everyday talk that often accompanies them, this article demonstrates how the colonial past can become a powerful poetic resource for city dwellers, serving as a means to conceptualize the potential for grief and rage to bring about revolutionary change in post‐colonial cities.

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Section: Re‐inscribing the Colonial Past Onto The Post‐colonial Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi Drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Post‐Coloniality in Oran, Algeria☆

Love

2021

City & Society

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“…39 Lastly, these processes reveal ideologies such as nationalism, colonialism, an ideology of "progress," or a patriarchal bias. 40 While the open-endedness of Foucault's definition leaves space for debate, recent understandings of the notion help further unpack the place naming dispositif. Andreas Reckwitz's analysis is especially useful in this regard.…”

Section: Interpreting Place Namingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Place Naming asDispositif: Toward a Theoretical Framework

2016

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Recent critical toponymies have convincingly demonstrated that studying place names also reveals much about geopolitics and power relations. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for interpreting these toponymies, in order to better decipher, theorise, and compare the many very rich case studies in the field. Our first argument is that the focus of enquiry should be place naming processes rather than place names themselves. We then show that place naming is a dispositif in the Foucauldian sense. This allows us to build a framework that distinguishes between (a) four types of geopolitical contexts, from which place naming processes tend to stem; (b) four types of technologies that are commonly used; and (c) three types of actors. Lastly, we identify the preferential combinations and nexuses between these building blocks of place naming contexts, technologies, and actors.Mohamed Bouazizi was the Tunisian fruit seller whose self-immolation on 17 December 2010 triggered uprisings in the Arab world. Very soon afterwards, he was commemorated in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid, in the capital Tunis, and in Paris, the capital of the former colonial power, by naming streets after him. While referring to the same person, and to the same event he inspired, the naming processes and the places named after him differed strongly in Sidi Bouzid, Tunis, and Paris. In his hometown, the main thoroughfare now bears the name of its most famous son. In Tunis, Bouazizi's name replaced the Boulevard du 7 novembre, which had celebrated Ben Ali's deposition of Bourguiba, as early as 17 February 2011. In Paris, a small section of the Avenue de la Sibelle (14 th arrondissement)where the sidewalk widensprovided a niche for the brand-new Place Mohamed Bouazizi, 1 which the Tunisia-born Parisian mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, inaugurated on 30 June 2011. The different natures of these places draw attention to the different contexts and objectives for naming a place after Bouazizi: The revolutionary context in Tunisia points to naming the town's main landmark after a local,

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“…Cultural Anthropology has also published a number of essays on cities and urbanism, including Olga Demetriou's“Streets Not Named: Discursive Dead Ends and the Politics of Orientation in Intercommunal Spatial Relations in Northern Greece” (2006), Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang's“Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self‐Cultivation in China's Capital” (2005), and Brad Weiss's“Thug Realism: Inhabiting Fantasy in Urban Tanzania” (2002).…”

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confidence: 99%

“THEY COME IN PEASANTS AND LEAVE CITIZENS”: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China

Bach

2010

Cultural Anthropology

120

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This essay examines the ongoing process of postsocialist transformation at the intersection of cultural and economic forces in an urban environment through the example of the so‐called “urban villages”(chengzhongcun) in Shenzhen, China, a booming southern Chinese city and former Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong. This essay ethnographically examines the role of former rural collectives encircled by a city that has exploded from farmland to an export‐driven city of over 14 million people in little over one generation. These villages form an internal other that is both the antithesis and the condition of possibility for Shenzhen city. By co‐opting the market economy in ways that weave them into the fabric of the contemporary global city, the villages become as much an experiment as the Special Economic Zone itself. This essay analyzes the urban–rural divide as complicit in each other's continued production and effacement and explores how village and city exploit the ambiguities of their juxtaposition in the making of Shenzhen.

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Streets Not Named: Discursive Dead Ends and the Politics of Orientation in Intercommunal Spatial Relations in Northern Greece

Cited by 24 publications

References 18 publications

The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi Drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Post‐Coloniality in Oran, Algeria☆

The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi Drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Post‐Coloniality in Oran, Algeria☆

Place Naming asDispositif: Toward a Theoretical Framework

“THEY COME IN PEASANTS AND LEAVE CITIZENS”: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China

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