Seeing Red: Baghdad and the event-ful city

In late modern war visuality plays a vital role in both the conduct and the rationalization of military violence. This essay explores the techno-cultural apparatus of US military operations and media briefings in occupied Baghdad from 2003 to 2007. It traces the visual reconfiguration of the city as a space of events rather than purely objects. These digital mappings were an intrinsic part of the US Army’s counterinsurgency strategy, and their performances were punctuated by a dialectical interplay of geopolitical and biopolitical imaginaries that was focal to the abstraction and legitimation of American military intervention.     

Domesticating the church: the reuse of urban churches as loft living in the post-secular city

In recent years, numerous mainline Christian denominations throughout Canada have sold their places of worship in the real estate market in response to declines in religious membership and participation. At the same time, a growing demand for creative residential spaces by a group of the new middle class encourages the redevelopment of churches into upscale lofts, a practice connected to but divergent from the post-industrial loft living made popular in cities like New York. In this paper, I explore how the production and consumption of churches as lofts represents a novel terrain of private urban redevelopment. Church lofts are an emergent form of housing and the latest frontier in the remaking of material, cultural and religious landscapes in the post-secular city – a context where novel forms of secularity take shape alongside new expressions of religion. With an empirical focus on Toronto, I investigate how ‘redundant’ worship spaces are appropriated and transformed into private domestic spaces of commodified religion and heritage. Rebuilt as unique but exclusive places to live, church lofts are part of a secular upscaling of the central city, a process that increasingly remakes the city as a place of capital reinvestment, middle-class colonization and socio-secular upgrading.     

The decline of eastern Arabia in the Sasanian period

This paper lists and reviews the archaeological evidence for the Sasanian period in eastern Arabia (third–seventh centuries AD). Much of the published evidence is shown to be either erroneous or highly doubtful, leaving very little evidence that is reliable. It is argued that the paucity of evidence in comparison to the Hellenistic/Parthian period indicates that this was a time of marked and continuing decline in the number and size of settlements, the number of tombs and the amount of coinage in circulation, all of which probably result from a population that was both declining in size and participating less in the types of production and consumption that leave discoverable traces in the archaeological record. This is in contrast to the historical evidence, which, although patchy, is stronger for the Sasanian period than it is for the Hellenistic/Parthian period. The argument for decline challenges some generally accepted historical views of eastern Arabia at this time, which see the region as undergoing a notable period of growth. In conclusion, some brief consideration is given to the possible causes of the decline.     

Introduction: New Directions in the History of Missionsin Africa

This short article introduces a selection of papers originally presented at the conference, "Africans Meeting Missionaries: Rethinking Colonial Encounters," held at the University of Minnesota in May 1997. Until quite recently much of the scholarship on missions in Africa tended to reproduce early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the colossal, all-powerful missionary. Whether celebrated as an heroic, civilizing agent in mission accounts or branded as a cultural imperialist in nationalist-era scholarship, the European missionary remained an actor scarcely soiled by the cultural commerce of the people on whom he worked. In short, African religious or political initiatives were seldom taken seriously. The papers which make up this collection give voice to and extend current debates surrounding the contested history (and future) of the missionary enterprise in Africa.