As a child growing up on the Greek island of Limnos, I was forced from early on to experience the way in which regional specificities inform as well as being informed by the uneven and contradictory development of a capitalist system resulting in a plethora of contested forces. Far away from the country’s capital and near the Turkish border, the island is poised precariously ‘in between’ the urban and the rural as well as ‘in between’ competing nationalist powers. I still remember when at the age of 10 I asked my father why there are thousands of soldiers around us while there is no a single cinema. Escaping the island and its politics, first to work in Athens and then to study in Sydney, I soon discovered the endless dialectics between the conflicting claims of a place identity and the also contested terrain of class, race and gender as well as the different shape this dialectics takes in each place.
Dolores Hayden in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History expresses vividly this dialectics by examining debates on the public meaning of New York’s built past. The exchange of articles between Herbert J. Gans, an urban sociologist, and Ada Louise Huxtable, an architectural critic, provides an indicative reflection of the way different disciplines engage with questions of urban landscapes and memories of class, ethnic and gender struggles. Hayden argues that public spaces are storehouses for social memories and public preservation politics and urban design should trigger these memories by reflecting a more inclusive history which respects the struggles and meanings of a diverse people. I couldn’t agree more. The successful efforts in Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia to preserve sites associated with the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King is extremely important, especially within the context of the increasingly changed social composition of the cities’ population with the top ten cities across U.S having a white population of less than 40 per cent by 1990. These sites commemorate past struggles and stimulate inspiration for future ones.
However, at the end of her article I was left with what I believe is an inescapable question. How can we develop a far more inclusive ‘cultural citizenship’ in view of the class structure of society? How can we ignore that although classes share a common territory, the ruling class is the one who have the power to make decisions on what should be remembered and what should be forgotten? What I mean is that the exclusive character of most urban landscapes is not only due to the inability of different scholars and disciplines to engage with the diverse history of workers, ethnic minorities and women but largely to the intentional efforts of a racist and sexist ruling class to suppress any kind of resistance to its dominance. For instance, reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia I was amazed to realize how the urban landscape of Barcelona was radically transformed when the working class was in the saddle for the first one and a half year of the Spanish Civil War which broke out in 1936. Orwell writes of a city where almost every building had been seized by workers and was draped with red flags; every wall was scrawled with the initials of the revolutionary parties; churches had been gutted and every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized.
In contrast to Hayden, I think Kay Anderson deals with the problematic of endemic power imbalances by examining the complex interactions of opposition politics that were embedded within the making of the Sydney suburb of Redfern, before, during and after it was set aside by the Commonwealth government for Aboriginal use, in April 1973. I found extraordinary the way a place-specific study could illuminate so powerfully the unevenness of Aboriginal oppression and thus Aboriginal resistance in what was perceived as a renegotiation of dominance between the dispossessed indigenous population and a capitalist, colonialist regime. Since 1973, the Aboriginal Redfern came to symbolize a wider anti-hegemonic struggle whose political significance and character undergo continuous construction and transformation. The Block, as it is widely known, was not only the result of specific power struggles that occur in the 1970s but it also constitutes the always-evolving stage in which contemporary struggles unfold.
So, whether in the case of the underdevelopment of a small Greek island, the desperate material existence of Sydney’s Aborigines in the late 1960s or the uprooting of millions due to the construction of bid dams in India by multinational corporations, conflicting ideas and interests both shape and are shaped by the historical and political processes whose complex dialectics endlessly construct and transform a particular place.
References:
Anderson, Kay J., ‘Constructing Geographies: “Race”, Place and the Making of Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern’, in Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose (eds), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation, University College London Press, London, 1993, 81-99.
Carter Erica, Donald James and Squires Judith (eds), Space & Place: Theories of Identity and Location, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1993, (into.)vii-xv.
Hayden, Dolores, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1997.
Orwell, George, Orwell in Spain, Penguin Books, London, 2001.
Roy, Arundhati, The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of Imagination, Flamingo, London, 1999.
Sivaramakrishnan K. and Cedrlof, Gunnel (eds), Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006, (extracts from intro.) 1-10, 29-40.
Comments
This is great. The images it included were so vivid. Loved your description of Barcelona red with flags, and of you asking your father why Limnos was the way it was when you were ten years of age. You certainly communicated your key point successfully: i.e. the importance of recognising the way inequalities of power shape the places around us. I have to say, though, that the diversity of your examples made your discussion too jerky. Given you only had 750 words, it would have been a good idea to use less examples (or less disparate examples). It would also have been good if you’d come back to a discussion of your own experiences at the end of the discussion. That would have given it a sense of roundedness that was lacking here. Using shorter sentences would also have made it easier to read. But it was still a v worthwhile read in spite of what I’ve just said.
Posted by: Melissa Bellanta | May 25, 2007 05:39 PM
I really enjoyed reading your seminar response. Your description of growing up in Limnos reminded me of my experiences visiting Cyprus. My grandparents on my father’s side grew up there before migrating to Australia. I have been there three times because I still have a lot of family there.
Cyprus is also in between the urban and the rural. The younger generation spend their days at a McDonalds on the beach while my grandparents’ generation still live traditional lives in the villages. Cyprus is also in between competing nationalist powers, with the northern third of the island occupied by Turkey.
I like your point about the endless discourse of claims of different identities to a place, and that this discourse takes a different shape in different places. I think it is also interesting the ways in which different places are subject to similar conflicting claims to place, for example Limnos and Cyprus. In this case, the ways in which different places are subject to similar conflicting claims obviously illustrates the influence of culture and history in shaping claims to place.
Although I agree with Melissa that you tried to cover too much and that your discussion would have benefited if you had focused on Limnos and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, overall I found your response creative and insightful.
Posted by: Alex Pavli | June 12, 2007 07:25 PM