Soweto nights: making black queer space in post-apartheid South Africa

In this article, I examine black queer nightlife in Soweto and its relationship with the making of black queer space in South Africa. Through an in-depth examination of the microgeographies of a Soweto stokvel party, I reveal the complexities of post-apartheid formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Employing the idea of usable space, I highlight quotidian practices of leisure as an important site for understanding cultural creativity within the marginalized spaces occupied by black South African queers. Performance and performativity are central to organizing nightlife spaces and reveal both the possibilities and limits encountered by black queers as they try to construct livable lives.     

Healthy discretion? Breastfeeding and the mutual maintenance of motherhood and public space

Although idealizations of motherhood are ever in flux, specific historical moments can be said to produce distinctive tropes of ‘good’ motherhood that have very real impacts on how women act and conceptualize themselves as mothers. This article examines good motherhood in its current iteration, and how now-common beliefs about breastfeeding are implicated in its construction. Furthermore, it looks at the ways in which idealizations of motherhood discipline the breastfeeding body so that it will fit into public space without disruption. I discuss the contradictory impacts of characterizations of the good mother as they appeared in the pro-breastfeeding dialogs that arose following a 2007 incident in which a mother was asked to cover herself up while nursing in a Kentucky restaurant. I posit that while these characterizations helped to make breastfeeding a more widely accepted public activity, they also had the effect of reifying a very narrow conception of what it means to be a good mother. I make this claim through an analysis of two common refrains heard in pro-public-breastfeeding arguments: breast milk is exceedingly healthy and mothers should not be persecuted if they nurse discreetly. Although these assertions together are compelling to the general public in that they provide a scientific justification for breastfeeding while at once assuaging fears of discomfort presented by a reproductive act being performed in a public space, I suggest that they also work to discipline women and maintain public-space-as-usual.     

Philosophy as a cultural resource and medium of reflection for Hermann Weyl

In a talk given at Zurich in the late 1940s, Hermann Weyl discussed Ferdinand Gonseth's dialectical epistemology and considered it as being restricted too strictly to aspects of historical change. His experiences with post-Kantian dialectical philosophy, in particular Johann Gottlieb Fichte's derivation of the concept of space and matter, had been a stronger dialectical background for his own 1918 studies in purely infinitesimal geometry and the early geometrically unified field theory of matter (extending the Mie-Hilbert program). Although now Weyl distantiated himself from the speculative features of his youthful philosophizing and in particular from his earlier enthusiasm for Fichte, he again had deep doubts as to the cultural foundations of modern mathematical sciences and its role in material culture of high modernity. For Weyl, philosophical «reflection» was a cultural necessity he now turned towards Karl Jaspers' and Martin Heidegger's existentialism to find deeper grounds, similar to his turn towards Fichte's philosophy after World War I. The discussion in the late 1940s can be read as a kind of post-World-War-II «Nachtrag» to Weyl's more widely known philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s.     

基于居民移动-活动行为的城市空间研究

在以人为本及后现代思潮的大背景下,人文地理学研究越来越关注个体人的行为以及生活质量问题,基于居民移动-活动行为的城市空间研究正成为人文地理及城市规划学等学科的焦点。论文在对城市活动空间研究及城市交通出行研究中的问题进行梳理的基础上,提出一个基于居民移动-活动行为的城市空间研究新框架,强调行为与空间之间的互动关系,强调RP法和SP法的结合,强调现实行为、现实空间与理想行为、理想空间之间的和谐。     

‘Life in Happy Land’: using virtual space and doing motherhood in Hong Kong

This paper examines how a group of Hong Kong working mothers use the internet in performing and realizing their paid work and domestic role identities. The internet is a technology-enabled space and also what Michel de Certeau calls a ‘practiced place’, where its nature and functions are necessarily determined by the actions and practices of agents. Through participant observation and the analysis of a sample of chatroom and forum messages from a user-driven Hong Kong-based parenting website called Happy Land, I examine the relationship between this virtual space and its users. I find that the website has developed beyond its technology-mediated nature into a community of face-to-face friendships and social and emotional support. In effect, this virtual space plays a role in the social reproduction of the contemporary dual-earner family by enabling working mothers who use the website to perform roles in production and reproduction respectively.     

Yellowstone embodied: Truman Everts' ‘Thirty-seven days of peril’

In September 1870, explorer Truman C. Everts, a member of the Washburn-Doane expedition to the then little-known region of the Upper Valley of the Yellowstone River, became separated from the main party and found himself without his horse and supplies alone in the ‘wilderness’. Everts spent 37 days struggling to effect his escape from his life-threatening predicament before being rescued by a two-man search party. The news of his separation, conjecture as to his possible fate, and reports of his subsequent rescue caused a sensation both locally and nationally and consequently earned celebrity for Everts and, crucially, for the place where the calamity occurred. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and non-representational work in cultural geography which explores the relation between self and world, body and landscape, this article revisits Everts' 1871 account of his ‘perilous’ misadventure to consider how his encounter with Yellowstone was embodied and, through its retelling, ultimately became inscribed on the place itself.     

南宋临安节日活动的时空结构研究

在城市地理学研究中,由于缺乏有关历史城市物理空间的基础性研究工作及受研究资料所限等原因,关于历史时期的城市居民生活空间方面的研究较少开展。本文选择南宋时期的临安作为城市空间研究对象,在全面梳理相关历史文献记载的基础上,尝试结合目前应用最广泛的功能分区法和时间地理学两种方法,对南宋临安节日活动空间进行剖析,揭示其城市节日活动的时空间结构特征。同时,文章还探讨了城市社会空间的形成机制,提出物理空间奠定了临安节日活动空间的基本格局、都城地位是临安节日活动空间形成的控制因素、城市经济主导了临安节日活动的空间分异过程等结论。     

Han Chinese,Manchu, and Western Spaces: The Changing Facade of Imperial Education in Qing Beijing

The physical spaces of imperial education during the Qing were carefully constructed sites of political architecture that sought to shape the behavior of princes, emperors, and their teachers while projecting dynamic images of power. This article examines a range of buildings associated with the Qing pedagogical apparatus. It argues that the changing spaces of imperial education drew on both classical ideals and international iconographies of power to create and disseminate a fluid vision of rule. In the eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor ordered the construction of the Biyong Hall at the center of the Imperial Academy in Beijing for exclusive use by the emperor during the Imperial Lecture, combining classical Han Chinese and Manchu expressions of authority. Throughout the nineteenth century, heirs to the throne and young emperors were trained in classrooms filled with calligraphy penned by their ancestors. Aphorisms drawing on the Confucian classics, as well as Daoist and Buddhist texts, urged the young rulers to strive for dynastic renewal. Finally, at the start of the twentieth century as the Qing worked to transition to a constitutional monarchy, imperial classrooms around Beijing were infused with Western architectural styles, incorporating new strands of authority for the reforming Qing dynasty.     

Villagizing the city: turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China

This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on three interrelated themes: the discourses by which town leaders and planners have conceived the heritage development project as one of improvement, the spatial practices by which those discourses have been realised in the built environment, and the ways residents themselves have appropriated and ‘inhabited’ this new ‘villagized’ city as they go about their everyday urban lives. Based on ethnographic field work, a survey, and extended interviews over a period of four years, the paper finds the town leadership’s faith in the ability of the built environment to shape and improve the conduct of citizens to be overstated. While the town’s transformation has generated a new sense of urban modernity among residents, their ways of inhabiting and using urban space have little relevance to the ‘heritagized’ environment in which they now live.