Browsing by Subject "Space"

This dissertation explores the relationship between identity and place in the imagination, performance and production of post-World War II Puerto Rican urban space in Chicago. Specifically, I contend that the articulation of Puerto Rican spatiality in the city has emerged primarily as a response to the threat of local displacement as a byproduct of urban renewal and gentrification. I further argue the experience of displacement, manifested through territorial attachment, works to deepen the desire for community and belonging. Through a performance and cultural studies approach, this project works to track this recent history of Puerto Rican geographic and psychic displacement within Chicago as it is evidenced by various performative spatial interventions and manifested within the community's expressive culture.

My topics of study include the 1966 Division Street Riots, the Young Lords Organization (YLO), Humboldt Park's Paseo Boricua and spoken-word poet David Hernández. Through these interventions and forms of expression, I argue that physical, political, discursive, and affective claims are made to local territory, articulating a Puerto Rican cultural identity inextricably connected to urban space. In so doing, I aim to endorse the theoretical utility of concepts of "space" by highlighting the enduring material and metaphoric significance of place for Puerto Ricans, arguing against a tendency in contemporary Puerto Rican studies to equate circular migratory movement with transnationalism by virtue of its opposition to territorially grounded definitions of identity.

“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975 many Southern Vietnamese were displaced and forced to relocate. Many of those refugees settled into an area located in Orange County, California and for the past fifty years have worked together to establish the community and space that is now recognized as Little Saigon. This thesis is a study of Little Saigon in particular, how Vietnamese immigrants have deterritorialized, or rejected the dominant notion of having to assimilate and adopt American culture to fulfill the American dream. Instead, community members have made purposeful interconnections to reterritorialize to construct a space meaningful to them where they, through their own minor strategies can productively and successfully live their own version of the Vietnamese American dream, thus allowing them to climb the ladder of upward mobility and attaining opportunities to physical mobility. I first trace the ways in which the first and generation physically alter the space in Orange County to a space that is accessible and makes sense to them by analyzing historical and present maps. Next, I examine the ways Vietnamese culture is produced and maintained in the United States for this community by examining the content and distribution of entertainment shows such as Paris By Night. Lastly I trace the impact of Vietnamese contribution to the nail salon industry and how the expansion of manicuring services has allowed for Vietnamese women to successfully become independent entrepreneurs and breadwinners in their family.

This dissertation ethnographically examines the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in Yachen, a mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment in eastern Tibet that emerged in the 1980s and is now a leading center of Tibetan Buddhist revivalism in post-Mao China. Over 10,000 nuns make up the vast majority of the permanent residents in this community (approximately 2,000 monks live there as well), but few scholarly discussions have taken place regarding the lives and practices of the nuns in Yachen or in Tibetan Buddhist revivals in China in general. This dissertation, therefore, calls attention first to the lack of proper research on these nuns by providing ethnographic accounts of their everyday lives in “China’s Tibet.” By placing the nuns and their lives at the center of discussion, I was able to realize the significance of examining the material, sensory, and mobile events and occasions through which alternative political logics and possibilities appear in the practice of Buddhism and in Sino-Tibetan politics. This alternative politics—which I call the politics of tranquility—presents itself through the mobilities and material engagements of the nuns in Yachen, and offers a stark contrast to the existing dichotomous understanding of Sino-Tibet relationships. Therefore, second, I argue that mobilities, as well as material and sensory engagements, are essential to the practice of Buddhism and the lives of the nuns in Yachen, without whom the current Buddhist revivalism, in Yachen at least, would not be possible.

Following my Introduction (Chapter 1), I begin my chapters by presenting the distinctive mobilities of the nuns. Most of the nuns whom I have known in Yachen are escapees, running away from their homes to become nuns in this remote region; their mobilities, against all odds—both physical and social—are what initially make Yachen possible (Chapter 2). Upon arrival, in the face of the harsh spatial regulations imposed by the Chinese state, they engage in building residential huts for themselves; these building activities are primarily responsible for Yachen’s accelerated expansion and thus for its potential political tension (Chapter 3). In Chapters 2 and 3, I also argue that the nuns’ mobilities and building practices, which have rarely been taken seriously within the Buddhist revival in China, in fact constitute the fundamental process of making Yachen, i.e., of making the sacred. In addition, by living with the nuns, I was able to observe their intimacies and secrets through the lens of their transgression and confession. I consider the act of transgression as one of the most political ways to give an account of the self as Buddhist practitioner, as nun, and as woman (Chapter 4). I argue that the nuns actively, provocatively, and riskily (re)shape Yachen’s norms and morality through their acts of transgression and confession. Finally, by drawing on food consumption and eating habits among the nuns in Yachen, I tackle the highly intertwined issues of ethnicity, money, religion, and ethics in Buddhist revivalism as well as in Sino-Tibetan relations (Chapter 5).

“Spaces of Order” argues that the African novel should be studied as a revolutionary form characterized by aesthetic innovations that are not comprehensible in terms of the novel’s European archive of forms. It does this by mapping an African spatial order that undermines the spatial problematic at the formal and ideological core of the novel—the split between a private, subjective interior, and an abstract, impersonal outside. The project opens with an examination of spatial fragmentation as figured in the “endless forest” of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard (1952). The second chapter studies Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a fictional world built around a peculiar category of space, the “evil forest,” which constitutes an African principle of order and modality of power. Chapter three returns to Tutuola via Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and shows how the dispersal of fragmentary spaces of exclusion and terror within the colonial African city helps us conceive of political imaginaries outside the nation and other forms of liberal political communities. The fourth chapter shows Nnedi Okorafor—in her 2014 science-fiction novel Lagoon—rewriting Things Fall Apart as an alien-encounter narrative in which Africa is center-stage of a planetary, multi-species drama. Spaces of Order is a study of the African novel as a new logic of world making altogether.

This dissertation argues that the metaphor of integration, which describes the incorporation of immigrants into the national body, functions as a way to exclude "Muslim" immigrants from German national identity, as these groups are those most often deemed "un-integratable" (unintegrierbar). By looking at cultural products, I explore how the spatial metaphor of integration is both contested and reproduced in a variety of narratives.

One of the recurring themes in integration debates focuses on finding a balance between multiculturalist strategies of population management; the regulation and enforcement of the third article of the German Basic Law, which guarantees gender parity; and the public religious life of conservative Islamic social movements like Salafism, which demand gender segregation as a tenet of faith. Discourses of women's rights as human rights and identity politics are the two most frequent tactical interventions on the integration landscape. My dissertation explores how identity, performance and experience of gendered oppression manifest in the autobiographical novels of Turkish-German women, comic books, journalistic polemics, activist video and the activities of the social work organization Projekt Heroes. Reading a broad array of cultural products allows me to explore the tension between the metaphor of integration and the reluctance of some to reenvision German national identity, with specific attention to how this tension plays out in space and place. Through literary analysis, participant-observation and interviews, I explore how the language of integration shapes the space of the nation and limits what the space of the nation could become. I argue that the tone of integration debates over the past decade has become increasingly shrill, and propose that limited and strategic silence may offer potential as a political strategy for reenvisioning modes of immigration incorporation.

Given that we cannot perceive space via the senses, how do we arrive at the representation of space in the first place? Why do we tend to attribute certain properties to space – for instance, that it is infinite, empty, continuous, immutable, and so forth? My dissertation, consisting of four chapters, investigates two early modern accounts, which have suffered relative scholarly neglect, despite proposing to answer these time-honored questions: Locke’s account in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Du Châtelet’s account set out in in her Foundations of Physics. While Locke’s views concerning the idea of space prompted animated responses from early modern philosophers, it seems to have fallen into relative neglect in contemporary scholarship. In the first chapter, I engage with Locke’s controversial distinction between simple and complex ideas, as applied to the simple idea of space. In particular, I take up two objections that have been raised against Locke: that Locke’s criterion of simplicity fails (Aaron 1955) and that Locke’s use of ‘idea’ is ambiguous (Woolhouse 1970). I show that appealing to the method of strict interpretation is an effective means to defuse these difficulties, allowing us to appreciate Locke’s views with a greater degree of analytical confidence. The second chapter is devoted to analyzing Du Châtelet’s chapter on space, in order to identify her singular contributions to the absolute-relative debate about space which animated the scientific body at the time. To begin with, I demonstrate that contrary to the received view, Du Châtelet’s account is neither Wolffian nor Leibnizian. Instead of deriving the representation of space from perceptions of spatially related objects, Du Châtelet argues that we obtain this representation by conceiving extension as occupiable by possible coexisting objects. Next, I argue that by means of this proposed account, Du Châtelet not only defends the Leibnizian idea of space as the order of coexisting objects, but further succeeds in explaining why the Newtonian idea of absolute space is so attractive, viz. the idea that space is an independently-existing, empty, infinite, and immutable entity. The third chapter, “A Deeper Investigation of Du Châtelet’s Uses of the Term “External-to””, identifies three distinct uses of the term ‘external-to’ in Du Châtelet, and argues that each of them denotes a relation obtaining among different kinds of relata: simple substances, composite bodies, and objects of imagination. At the outset of the chapter, I challenge a recent interpretation by Jacobs (2019), which construes “external-to” as an ontological relation, pointing out that this interpretation is in tension with (1) Du Châtelet’s division of labor between the faculty of imagination and the faculty of understanding, and (2) her considered view that we cannot perceive simple substances as distinct individuals, owing to the weakness of our sensory organs. This significant chapter lays the groundwork for future research by seeking to distinguish three tiers of created reality in Du Châtelet’s ontology: the elementary (inhabited by simple substances), the phenomenal (by material bodies), and the ideal (by entities such as space and time). The last chapter turns to another issue intimately related to the ontological problem of space in the same period: the problem of gravity. This chapter starts with a response to George E. Smith’s “Newton’s numerator in 1685: A year of gestation”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 68 (2019) 163-177. I offer this response from the perspective of Euler scholarship. First, I challenge Smith’s claim that Euler dismisses gravity’s proportionality to the mass of the attracting body. Rather than rejecting this proportionality from the numerator of Newton’s law of gravity, I will show that Euler is opposed to Newton’s appeals to the third law of motion to derive this term. Second, I provide a reconstruction of Euler’s elastic ether mechanism of gravity, whereby he “recovers” all three proportionalities in Newton’s law of gravity without appealing to the third law, but to the material properties of the ether and contact action (i.e., fluid pressure). Third, I proffer a critical assessment of Euler’s mechanism. My analysis reveals that, while Euler is right to point out the lack of direct evidence for gravity being a force of interaction governed by the third law of motion, his alternative falls far short of its Newtonian rival on grounds of empirical adequacy and fruitfulness for future research.