IN PLACE:  A SEMINAR CONFERENCE

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7,  4:30-7:30 P.M.

304 ENGLISH-PHILOSOPHY BUILDING

The participants in UI professor Barbara Eckstein's graduate seminar on place are presenting ideas and images from their projects on December 7^th at 4:30 in 304 EPB.  Everyone is invited.

SESSION ONE:  PRODUCING URBAN PLACES                       4:30-5:25

"Garden Gateways: The Construction and Use of Shaw's Garden, 1850-1890"

Erica Hannickel, American Studies

To what extent is the botanical garden an imperialistic, disciplinary, or

imaginative space? The early history of the Missouri Botanical Garden, now located in St. Louis, reveals that 19th century publics formulated their identities and nation through

discourses of nature and by producing open green space in the city. Yet was

the production of space consonant with the experience of it? Special attention

will be paid to the national and international context (the capitalistic and

rhetorical formation of the garden), as well the changing garden space itself.

Stories behind the "Hutongs" of Beijing

Li Guo, Cinema and Comparative Literature

     This project examines the "hutongs" in the city of Beijing in

the 20th Century. The term hutong refers to the lanes, alleys and streets that

came into being in what is today called Beijing City during the early Yuan Dynasty (1260-1368). "Hutongs" are an interesting place for study as an ancient

architectural structure underlying the mapping of Beijing City still today and as

the site of people’s everyday practice. I will first study

how "hutong" serves as a contested terrain where racial, social, and cultural

forces met and interacted in the last century, basing the study on images,

symbols and names of "hutong". Besides I will investigate "hutongs" as places

of historical memories. Relating to the ongoing debate about the preservation

of "hutong" in China’s urbanization process, I will investigate who’s to

take the lead in the preservation, by what means, to what extent. In addition

I am interested to see how the marginalized, broken, native memories carried

by "hutongs" work against the totalizing perspective of constructing

the modern city, and how these ephemeral memories carried by "hutongs"

contribute to the ongoing process of defining Beijing as a place.

“Reversible Destinies in Lower Manhattan”

Ben Basan, English

This paper will examine the spatial and platial implications of architects Arakawa and Gins’ Museum of Living Bodies (to be constructed in the Seaport area) in relation to the redevelopment of the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan. In sum, I will ask what it means to build a site that intends to ‘defeat death’ in the center of a hyper-capitalist cityscape in close proximity to an (elided) site of mass death.

SESSION TWO:  BETWEEN NONPLACE AND PLACE/ CONSUMPTION AND CITIZENSHIP                                                                     5:30-6:10

"The Self, the Suburbs, and the Non-South: Walker Percy's Thanatos Syndrome"

Everett Hamner, English

Considerable attention has been given to both Walker Percy's

distinction between dyadic "signaling" and triadic "sign-making" and his

fiction's relevance to the American South and particularly the Mississippi

River Delta. This essay takes the additional step of linking his semiotics and

geography and tying them to both his personal history and his fiction. Ranging

among various late essays and fictions, I focus on Percy's last and somewhat-

neglected novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, which invites both the South and an

increasingly-suburbanized America into an active dialectic between placement

and non-placement, the Old and the New, "nature" and technology, and the

sacred and the secular.

“SALVATION ARMY? - An examination of the role of the American thrift store in

the production of the critically conscious citizen.”

Joshua Haringa, Intermedia Studies  

This paper asks whether the consumptive space of the thrift store plays a role

in the development of critically conscious subjects and the production of

public debate. This paper argues that thrift stores' unique practices of

commodity collection and display result in the production of a publicly

accessible space that elicit personal public memory. These unintended

reflections upon one's personal history force the subject to do the type of

examination of personal and social historical development that is an essential

component of any critical debate.

SESSION THREE:  PRODUCING SPACE AND THE POLITICAL SUBJECT 

6:15-7:30

“The Secession of Yugoslavia: Political, Social and Ethnic Geographies.”

Francesco Molinari, International Studies

The war in Yugoslavia has often been explained and justified as a bloodbath

steeped in ethnic and religious differences and historical antagonism, which

eventually would not allow coexistence. I will argue that the conflict was the product of political and economic interests which manipulated social groups identified by different geographies, urban and rural, mountain and valley, not only among different

ethnicities, but also within each one.

“The Formation and Deformation of the Colonized Subject’s Space:  Seoul 1936 and YiSan’s ‘Wings’” 

Chang Seop Song, Visiting Faculty Scholar

Taking a Korean short fiction written during Japanese colonial rule as an example, this study analyzes the colonized subject’s sense of space as it is inscribed in materialist terms of the production of the text.

“Down the river, back to the origins: the travel guides to the Chusovaya River

and the production of natural landscape”

Natalia Chernyayeva, Women’s Studies

The paper will examine the corpus of advice literature for tourists traveling

down the Chusovaya River published in Russia during the period from the early

1960s to the 1990s. It will analyze several intertwined discourses

(imperial, fictional, scientific, industrial and militarist) that

different travel guides applied to the river’s landscape, and how different

types of representation activated multiple social and cultural identities in

the modern Soviet subject.

“Memory and museum: Imagining Cape Town's District Six Museum”

Cinda Nofziger, American Studies

This paper will examine the politics of the District Six Museum. I will look at

the intersections of discourses of memory, tourism and the history of apartheid

in the creation of a "new" South African national identity.