‘Beer and Britannia’: public‐house culture and the construction of nineteenth‐century British‐Welsh industrial identity

Prior to industrialisation, there was a nebulous and fragmented Welsh national character or mass collective identity. Industrialisation engendered significant sociocultural upheaval and change, and for this ‘new’ society to function effectively a cohesive Welsh identity had to emerge. Because the impetus behind industrialisation had occurred primarily in a British context, any newly formed Welsh identity would ultimately have to be reconciled to the nation's industrial import within a ‘United Kingdom’. Mass cultural commonalities and the role played by leisure in this procedure is a core element in the establishment of industrial modernist nation‐states. Therefore, this article argues that public‐house culture played a central role in the construction of a new industrial Welsh national ideology that was ultimately allied to, and a constituent of, a British imperial agenda designed to exploit both the natural resources and workforce of the area to its maximum extent.     

Illuminating the Path to Grand Pari(s): Architecture and Urban Transformation in an Era of Neoliberalization

This article examines the architectural exhibition associated with the large‐scale Grand Paris urban development project initiated in 2007 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Through a close examination of the exhibition, I argue that imaginative representation is crucial to urban transformation, here acting to justify and naturalize neoliberal reforms. While the ten international teams of architects tasked with imagining twenty‐first century Paris presented sometimes radical scenarios, the architectural proposals are also used by the state to secure a sense of regional coherence, to reaffirm the imperative of economic growth, and to deny broad sociospatial conflict. The futural aspect of speculative regional development is redoubled in the prospective architectural visions, thus solidifying the dominance of a marketized mode of urbanization. While this cooption of architectural designs emerges from the unique circumstances of contemporary Paris, it also speaks to the broader promise and limits of imaginative urbanism and large‐scale architectural intervention.     

The Holly Bluff style

We recognize a new style of Mississippian-period art in the North American Southeast, calling it Holly Bluff. It is a two-dimensional style of representational art that appears solely on containers: marine shell cups and ceramic vessels. Iconographically, the style focuses on the depiction of zoomorphic supernatural powers of the Beneath World. Seriating the known corpus of images allows us to characterize three successive style phases, Holly Bluff I, II, and III. Using limited data, we source the style to the northern portion of the lower Mississippi Valley.     

Returning home: heritage work among the Stl’atl’imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley

This article focusses on heritage practices in the tensioned landscape of the Stl’atl’imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the Lower Lillooet River Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Displaced from their traditional territories and cultural traditions through the colonial encounter, they are enacting, challenging and remaking their heritage as part of their long term goal to reclaim their land and return ‘home’. I draw on three examples of their heritage work: graveyard cleaning, the shifting ‘official’/‘unofficial’ heritage of a wagon road, and marshalling of the mountain named Nsvq’ts (pronounced In-SHUCK-ch) in order to illustrate how the past is strategically mobilised in order to substantiate positions in the present. While this paper focusses on heritage in an Indigenous and postcolonial context, I contend that the dynamics of heritage practices outlined here are applicable to all heritage practices.     

‘A Just and Liberal Landlord’: Manliness,Work, and the Landed Gentleman in the Brontës’ Novels

The Brontës’ many striking depictions of landowners are rife with ambiguities, particularly as these characters are seldom presented at work in their traditional roles as landlord and magistrate. While the Victorian landed gentleman’s status was partially predicated on not having to work for money, both the new Victorian professional ideal and traditional conceptions of paternalist care affected the ways this class was viewed by middle-class commentators at mid-century. In the Brontës’ novels, traditional paternalist responsibilities are fused with aspects of the professional ideal in depictions of reformed landed gentlemen, but even this new, ideal figure is represented as unsatisfactory. In this article, I consider how landowners were written about in contemporary periodicals and how the Brontës engage with these expectations. The Irish tenant and landlord problem, which was covered extensively in the periodical press, shaped Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in a profound way, as the novel serves as an important, but until now overlooked, reworking of Maria Edgeworth’s representations of landowning masculinity in Castle Rackrent (1800). The Brontës repeatedly depict landowners retreating into the domestic sphere, which I argue forms an implicit narrative challenge to this figure’s social authority. This article opens up new ground for the examination of Victorian discourse on professionalization in relation to the Brontës’ works and a consideration of the ways in which this discourse was applied to landowners both in the periodical press and the Victorian novel.     

Asphaltum hafting and projectile point durability: an experimental comparison of three hafting methods

The design of a projectile delivery system often plays a critical role in the durability and breakage patterns associated with spent projectile points. This paper presents the results of an experimental project designed to examine projectile point durability and breakage patterns between three different hafting methods. Specifically, we compare two asphaltum hafting techniques drawn from archaeological and ethnohistoric accounts from the Central Valley of California with a more stereotypical cross-hatched sinew hafting system. Our results suggest a small yet statistically significant increase in durability among asphaltum hafted points, opening the door to future research on these ethnohistorically documented hafting techniques.     

Immoral geographies and Soho’s sex shops: exploring spaces of sexual diversity in London

London’s Soho, situated in the urban heart of the city has long been understood as both a cosmopolitan and diverse space where transgression and deviance, particularly in relation to the sex industry and sexual commerce, are constitutive of this area. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, we add to some of the existing debates on sexual spaces in Soho by documenting the changes to the social/sexual landscape of sex shops in this area, and look to geographers interested in the spatial politics of gender and sexuality to understand the importance of this particular place. Looking at two particular sex shops in Soho, we argue that the spatial practices in this very specific part of the city encourage a disruption of traditional hierarchies that often govern gender and sexed practices, and invite women, LGBTQ and kink communities to inhabit more inclusive spaces of sexual citizenship.     

Space,power and sexuality: transgressive and transformative possibilities at the interstices of spatial boundaries

The themed section consists of articles that explore the relationship between power and space in relation to gender and sexuality by looking at processes of transgression, subversion or expansion of normative spatial practices and narratives. Using a theoretical framework that draws out power and space within a more specific context of feminist and queer literature, the articles explore the possibility to transgress, subvert or expand norms at the interstices of spatial boundaries beyond traditional binaries and hierarchies. Collectively, the articles call for a continued theoretical and methodological focus into the importance of looking at everyday sites of struggles and resistance in the crevasses, the liminal zones of space. The transgression of spatialized norms of sexuality and gender present a transformative potential that should be recognized for its political significance but, we argue, with caution as heteronormative and heteropatriarchal norms too often remain de rigueur in a neoliberal context.