Editorial Not all sweetness and light: New cultural geographies of food

Despite a resurgence of work that has begun to examine critically the artefactual mediation of memory, very few accounts have focused upon the interconnections between recorded music and daily acts of remembering. Drawing upon in‐depth case study‐based research into recorded music and everyday life with seventeen lower middle‐class households, this paper describes the composition of three practices of remembering with and through recorded music. First, remembering how to choose and ‘fit’ specific purchased music to particular socio‐spatial activities: a creative practice of mimicry, discretion and intuition in which the past is both embodied in the actions of judgement and choice and also functions to compose a co‐present, but not‐yet ‘virtual’ realm. Second, the widespread, ephemeral and subject‐less practice of ‘involuntary remembering’ in which a trace of a virtual past affects ‘in itself’. Finally, ‘intentional remembering’ in which a past is conditioned to occur as a fixed, relatively durable ‘memory’. The paper describes how such practices of remembering are bound up with the emergence of domestic time‐space, and thus the mode of being of the past, via the circulation and organization of affect.     

Our land is our voice: First Nation heritage-making in the Tr’ondëk/Klondike

Abstract

The subsistence lifeways of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, a First Nation in northwestern Canada, were radically challenged by the arrival of settler colonialism during the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–98). This Yukon First Nation has subsequently faced down a powerful array of Western heritage activities and commemorations, both local and national, designed to absorb them into modernity. Through a conscious and continuous programme of heritage-making, the citizens of the First Nation have re-asserted their territorial sovereignty and maintained and adapted their cultural identity to changing circumstances. Their heritage-making strategies are illustrated through a review of their call for a treaty, the creation of new instruments for carrying and expressing their cultural identity and their more recent programme of support for the survivors of the Canadian Government’s Indian Residential Schools.     

Providence,punishment and identity formation in the late-Stuart Quaker community,c.1650–1700

For centuries, Englishmen and women believed that any misfortune, from the smallest malady to a natural catastrophe, signified divine “justice.” Scholarship on providence and miracles has shown that beliefs in divine intervention were enhanced by the political and religious conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century. This article seeks to refine our understanding of the role of providence in confessional identity formation through an examination of Quaker providential interpretation between 1650 and c.1700. It explores the ways in which Quakers appropriated accounts of divine judgement, circulated them within their community and memorialised them for the benefit of future generations. The discovery of an attempt to create a nationwide record of judgements to befall Quaker persecutors shows that providential stories had a significant role in uniting, and ensuring the survival of a disparate and heavily persecuted religious community.     

In the Shadows of Monuments: the British League for the Reconstruction of the Devastated Areas of France

Armed conflict destroys people and property but, for obvious reasons, human losses have received most attention, as have the ways in which we have commemorated them. The affect of the destruction of the lived-in landscape and people?s loss of their vernacular material worlds has been neglected. Yet artefacts and their associations are constitutive of place. Not only are they the material product of any community?s collective activities over time, they become important reference points in everyday life and mnemonic devices for contextualising the past and future. They serve to imbue localities with symbolic meanings. These ?landmarks? and ?lieux de me´moire? effect a rendezvous in place and time of the lived-in world with the collective memory. Moreover, their sudden loss can constitute a collective trauma for a community. This was certainly the world of the French civilian population displaced from their homes by the events of the Great War. One of the projects attempting to transform the ?shadowed ground? into a place of human congress and community was the British League for the Reconstruction of the Devastated Areas of France.     

Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect

Abstract This paper attempts to take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity. It is in three main parts. The first part sets out the main approaches to affect that conform with this approach. The second part considers the ways in which the systematic engineering of affect has become central to the political life of Euro‐American cities, and why. The third part then sets out the different kinds of progressive politics that might become possible once affect is taken into account. There are some brief conclusions.     

Manipulating the metonymic: the politics of civic identity and the Bristol Cenotaph, 1919–1932

The city of Bristol was one of the last major cities in Great Britain to unveil a civic memorial to commemorate the Great War 1914–1918. After Leicester (1925), Coventry (1927) and Liverpool (1930), Bristol's Cenotaph was unveiled in 1932, 14 years after the Armistice. During that lapse, its location, source of funding, and commemorative function were the focus of widespread disagreement and division in the city. This paper examines the nature of these disputes. The authors suggest that the tensions in locating a war memorial may have their origins in historic enmities between political and religious factions in the city. By examining in detail the source and manifestations of these disputes, the authors offer a detailed exemplar of how memory is shaped and controlled in British urban spaces.     

“British Tribute to Virginia Valor”: Unveiling the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue

This article outlines the political agendas surrounding the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue, an early Confederate monument commissioned in Britain in 1863 and unveiled with much fanfare in Richmond, Virginia in 1875. It argues that the statue’s British provenance made it an ideal means of expressing the distinctive claims of the Conservative Party of Virginia. By commemorating both General Jackson and Britain’s Confederate sympathizers, modernizers in the Conservative Party presented themselves as representatives of an Anglo‐Saxon Christian value system, guardians of the “Old Dominion’s” immemorial character, and defenders of political views that held national and international significance. Thus the Conservatives dedicated an international monument to a transatlantic and implicitly racist cultural tradition as part of their larger effort to facilitate Virginia’s integration into the reconstructed national union on terms favorable to the former Confederates.     

Archaeo-Ethnography, Auto-Archaeology: Introducing Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past

After significant research effort and publications over the course of a decade, a new generation of writings and research into archaeologies of the contemporary past is beginning to emerge, with a social and political awareness that appears more acute and more focused than before. Perhaps it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that this new generation of contemporary archaeologies can contribute in some small way to addressing specific problems and challenges that face contemporary and future society. In this introduction we begin to touch on this possibility, and introduce the papers and authors that explore it in further depth.     

Legacies of War in Creating a Common European Identity

Recent fieldwork, carried out as part of the Bloody Meadows Project on historic battlefields, has revealed the diversity of approaches to memorialising places of conflict in the European past. The different ways in which such places are marked and remembered has something to tell us about how we may construct a new sense of European identity. It thus provides the basis for the emergence of a sense of 'European-ness' that is not a copy of nationalist forms but which allows us to take into account the complexity of historical pasts and the many forms of human interaction involved in the historical process.     

Flirtatious geographies: clubs as spaces for the performance of affective heterosexualities

This article addresses the (hetero)sexualized, sensuous and affective nature of straight club spaces in Singapore. By attending to the theoretical intersections between affect studies and feminist perspectives, I argue that straight clubs are sites for the performances of affective heterosexualities that may and may not end up re-inscribing asymmetrical gendered power relations. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the growing literature on affectual geographies by expounding on the numerous technologies of affect which are being deployed in order to incite, transmit and sustain (hetero)sexual desires between bodies. Flirtatious (hetero)sexual practices thus give rise to, and are a result of, the political manipulation of intensely felt affects. Furthermore, I suggest that we should not overlook how becoming (hetero)sexual ‘feels like’ because these ‘feelings’ work to crystallize (hetero)sexual spaces and subjectivities. Nonetheless, we must also be careful not to discount the salience of ‘heterosexuality’ as a representational device that serves to codify and categorize sexual desires between bodies.     

HISTORY TO THE MAX

Steven G. Smith advocates a maximal approach to history by both historians and theorists of history, maintaining that a commitment to fullness or totality should always serve as an ideal. In my review, I try to explain what the author means by this ideal, and consider how practical such an ideal can be. He further maintains that history is mostly about shared action, and is itself an instance of shared action. I have certain reservations about this notion, though I think Smith's book deserves credit for calling attention to it.     

清乾隆四十六年至五十一年西安城墙维修工程考——基于奏折档案的探讨

在清代西安城墙的历次维修中,以乾隆四十六年至五十一年(1781-1786年)的工程规模最大。本文基于大量清代奏折档案,对这次维修工程的缘起、工程分期与做法、督工官员与工匠、经费数额与来源、工料产地、数量及其运输等具体问题进行了深入考辨,指出包括城墙维修在内的清代西安城市建设与关中区域社会经济发展和生态环境变迁之间具有紧密联系。