Negotiating German colonial heritage in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel

Abstract

Conceptualising heritage as a contested process of past-based meaning production in the present, this paper analyses the ongoing dispute over street names in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel. In 1899, Berlin named two of its newly-built streets Togo Street and Cameroon Street. Togo and Cameroon had been proclaimed the first German colonies in 1884. By 1958, 22 Berlin streets had been named after African regions that had been colonised by the German Empire or after German colonial protagonists. In 2004, several NGOs called for the renaming of some of these streets, igniting a fierce dispute over the heritage status of the German colonial past. Drawing on guided interviews and document analyses, we analyse this debate on three levels, showing how the NGOs and their claims have been marginalised on each level. While the level of agency can be traced back to the different positioning of the actors in the political field, the levels of temporality and spatiality belong to the realm of ideas about the world and one’s place in it. By exploring the authoritative power of traditional notions of permanence, and of place and space, this paper seeks to bring temporality and spatiality into the focus of those studying heritage-making practices.     

From number to name: symbolic capital,places of memory and the politics of street renaming in New York City

Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of street naming as a strategy for constructing ‘places of memory’. This paper draws upon Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital to examine two key moments in the history of street renaming in New York City: the renaming of the avenues on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the latter nineteenth century and the street renamings in Harlem a century later. The aim of such a comparative case study approach is to demonstrate how the symbolic capital associated with street naming may be linked to an elite project of symbolic erasure and forced eviction, on the one hand, and the cultural recognition of a historically marginalized group, on the other. Both cases consider attempts to rename formerly numbered streets and avenues, and the benefit of considering them together is that they illustrate the multiple interests—as well as the exclusionary politics of race, class, and gender—involved in such shifts from ‘number’ to ‘name’. In doing so, this paper extends the current literature on street naming as a commemorative practice by linking it to a broader relational view of place-making, memory, and symbolic capital.     

Mapping the nation: street names and Arab‐Palestinian identity: three case studies

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab‐Palestinian street names – pre‐1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post‐1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation aims at charting the ideological orientations represented and the political messages entailed in these three different textual manifestations of Arab‐Palestinian national identity. The analysis focuses on notions of historical and cultural heritage as expressed in the choice of street names. Finally, it offers an interpretative evaluation of this process, placing it within broader ideological and historical contexts.     

南宋建康城居住空间布局研究

建康城是南宋时期的留都,城市地位仅次于京师临安,对其空间布局进行研究可以为城市发展提供稀缺资源和文化启迪。南宋建康城内的居住空间存在一个由区域中心出现——新街道出现(表现为新的街道名出现)——新坊设立(表现为新的坊名的出现)的过程,这一现象深刻的反映了当时城市经济及其文化内涵的变迁。     

Securitisation through re-enchantment: the strategic uses of myth and memory

ABSTRACT

This article is an investigation into the attempt by the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper to securitise the Canadian polity through re-enchantment. Through the strategic use of discourses and the shaping of the regime of signification, the article explains how the Harper government attempted to re-enchant national myths of Anglo-conformist nationalism, militarism and loyalism. Using discourse analysis of government documents and speeches, the article examines three sites of discursive intervention: (1) National Museum and Archive policy, specifically, the renaming of the Canadian national museum; (2) the militarisation and royalisation of national institutions and commemorations, notably the renaming of the Canadian navy and (3) the privileging of anglo-centric and loyalist tropes in the performance of citizenship rituals, and associated with this, reforming Citizenship legislation. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons for the overall failure of the Conservative government’s attempts to securitise through re-enchantment.     

Representing Commerce in Tallis’s London Street Views

This essay examines how the London Street Views organize the city as a space of commercial interaction, one that is curiously at odds with an image of crowded Victorian streets full of shoppers, street-sellers, advertisements, and window displays. As a commercial directory, it is at once tightly self-referential and open ended, cross referring information between the lists of businesses, the advertisements, and the street elevations while also including advertisements for shops in other streets and neighbourhoods than that focused on in each issue. This essay considers the distinctiveness of Tallis’s project by contextualizing his Street Views within a range of forms of urban commercial information, including directories and advertisements.     

Bringing gender and spatial theory to life at a German technical university

This article focuses on the use of a university sculpture garden, the renaming of streets, and advice about the use of public space in order to teach the intersection of gender theory with spatial theory. This article outlines methods for teaching gender and spatial theory to international and multidisciplinary bachelor’s and master’s students in English at a German technical university. Most of the students had not learned gender or spatial theory prior to the course. A review of the course syllabus is included, and interactive teaching methods are outlined for the writings of three scholars: Elizabeth Grosz, Henri Lefebvre, and Dolores Hayden. Three intertwined aspects of campus life: its student life, its architecture, and its outdoor sculpture are brought into conversation with those theorists. Students learn the history of their campus buildings, outdoor spaces and artwork, along with how university spaces, place naming, and storytelling all affect their educational and individual experiences. By interacting with and analyzing examples of campus architecture, urban space, and outdoor sculpture, students discover how spatial and gender theories function in everyday life. However, students were more convinced that living gendered interactions affected everyday life, and less convinced that static gender representations such as the sculpture garden or street naming impacted gender ideas and perceptions.     

Negotiating "Streets for All" in Urban Transport Planning: The Case for Pedestrians, Cyclists and Street Vendors in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract:  This paper uses the concept of "streets for all" as the analytical basis to critique the neglect of pedestrians, cyclists and street vendors in transport policy and practice in the city of Nairobi. The paper shows that transport planning in Nairobi has not adequately taken care of informal economy and non-motorized transport such as walking and cycling. This has resulted in competing use of pavements and roads, exposing pedestrians, cyclists and street vendors to insecurity and harassment. The paper calls for inclusive transport planning for multiple street activities, which requires implementing a "streets for all" policy. Such a policy needs to be critically pursued at the level of dealing with the institutional and structural bias in urban transport planning towards motorized traffic and the overall urban development that does not adequately consider the spatio-temporal activity pattern and the life of pedestrians, cyclists and vendors on the streets.     

Fragments from many pasts: layering the toponymic tapestry of Milan

In the recent literature on the cultural politics of naming, toponyms and street names are increasingly read within the wider social–historical context upon which naming is contingent. In this perspective, naming is often seen as an act of power and a way to inscribe an ideological discourse into the landscape. In this article, we analyze the street names currently inscribed in the historical center of the Italian city of Milan, Italy as a reflection of its long and contested social and political history. Fragments of all the different toponymic regimes and hegemonic discourses that took over one after the other over time have remained inscribed in Milan’s street network, originating a complex tapestry in which different pasts revive and conflicting ideologies co-exist. In this context, we examine the role Geographical Information Science (GIScience) methods and technologies play in quantifying, revealing, and visualizing the spatial patterns of downtown Milan’s toponymic texture at the urban scale and at the scale of the six historical neighborhoods.     

Naming,dedicating: street names and tradition

Naming is always dedicating, that is to say offering to the ancestors, inserting the person or the named object in a lineage of some sort. Only street names will be considered here because they have two characteristics of sociological relevance: they are chosen and they pertain to a social group in relation to which they are supposed to express some deep and ancient value. They can be studied from two different perspectives: the kind of action that is the naming of a street and the fact that street names express something of the social reality. Or, in other words, if naming is dedicating, when and how is it possible to shift from one tradition (to which the name refers) to another? A further question could be if street names express something of the social reality, does it imply that different types of social stratification are linked to different types of street names? Both questions will be examined here in reference to two different situations—Paris, France and Évora, Portugal.     

Why can't you change? Stories of parents and street educators about adolescent girls in street situations

For children and young people in street situations, to give up street life is easier said than done. The study reported in this article aims to contribute to the field of children and young people in street situations by introducing the voices of parents whose daughters live on the streets. In biographical narrative interviews, we asked parents together with street educators from Bolivia to share their stories of girls entering and leaving street life. Our findings showed that a child's act of running away made parents aware about their parenting, leading to new openings and possible renewed social bonds with their children. At the same time, street educators’ stories exposed the importance of the family support during the process of exiting street life. Nevertheless, even though parents no longer want to stand on the sidelines, the stories also revealed that parents are still forgotten throughout interventions with street children in Bolivia.     

Vichy's Mass Firing of Women Teachers of Colour in the French Caribbean and its Consequences1

This article examines the application to Martinique and Guadeloupe of Vichy's sexist law of 11 October 1940, relating to the employment of women and its impact on female teachers. We argue that Vichy showed greater zeal in applying the new regime's patriarchal law on women's work in the Caribbean than in mainland France. We examine in detail the 11 October 1940 law and the modalities of its application in the metropole and in the Caribbean, its manipulation by various actors and the arguments mobilized over the course of its promulgation in a West Indian context. Next, we consider to what degree female Caribbean teachers were impacted by these measures and analyse some of the underlying causes for their dismissal. We highlight the broader social and administrative transformations into which this particular purge fitted. Finally, we underscore the agency of fired schoolteachers as well as their resilience.     

Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in people's lives and identity struggles, little work has explicitly analyzed place naming rights in terms of social justice, citizenship, and belonging. We introduce readers to the naming of streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and use two brief case studies from the southeastern USA (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina) to discuss the barriers that hinder the creation of a landscape that truly reflects the teachings of King. Naming opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black activists, impose spatial, scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in the street naming process and to appropriate the identity of streets outside of their neighborhoods, even though challenging historically entrenched patterns of racial segregation and marginalization is exactly the purpose of many street naming campaigns. The case of King streets prompts us to think about place naming as a mechanism of spatial (in)justice, demonstrating the fundamental role that geography plays in constituting and structuring the processes of discrimination or equality.     

Fascist censorship on literature and the case of Elio Vittorini

This article tackles the issue of literary censorship in Fascist Italy. The first part offers an outline of the organization and the practices with which the regime attempted to control publishers and authors. It tracks the development of Mussolini's Press Office into a fully fledged ministry, examines the introduction of a semi-preventive form of censorship, and looks at the effects of the anti-Semitic laws. The second part concentrates on the literary activities of the novelist, editor and translator, Elio Vittorini. His many encounters with Fascist censorship provide ideal subject matter for a close examination of how censorship affected literary production. It also provides an example of the need to re-address aspects of Italy's literary history during the Fascist period, particularly in relation to questions of coercive and consensual collaboration with the regime.     

From the Little Tree,Half a Block Toward the Lake: Popular Geography and Symbolic Discontent in Post‐Sandinista Managua

Abstract: The inhabitants of Managua, Nicaragua have a sophisticated, often bitingly ironic, popular geography that they use to navigate the city. The Nicaraguan capital has been destroyed twice by earthquakes, ravaged by war, left to decay for lack of funds, transformed by the creative destruction of speculative capitalism and subjected to a series of ideological impositions. Few people know the official names of streets, and recent governments have not had the ability to put up signs. So a supple system of popular geography dominates, resisting and ridiculing attempts to impose an official order, and adapting to change while preserving a bottom‐up sense of memory, history and place. Drawing on Allan Pred's classic account of popular geography in late nineteenth century Stockholm, I use Managua's language of spatial orientation as a window into peripheral modernity and the politics of everyday life.