Sibley and Sources - Inquiring into Method

From p. 500 in CEWT "One cue for my analysis comes from Paul Rabinow, who has suggested that 'we need to anthropologize the West.' Rabinow argues that we need to 'show how exotic [the West's] granted as universal (this includes epistemology and economics); [and] make them seem as historically peculiar as possible.' To me this implies that we need to recognize as problems those aspects of life which you might be unaware, particularly if you happen to be while, adult, male, and middle- class, but which contribute to the oppression of others." *** From p. 500 in CEWT "I would agree with Jane Flax, however, that there is no single oppressive reality, no single structure obscured by the images of dominant culture, to uncover. She suggests that Perhaps reality can have 'a' structure only from the falsely universalizing perspective of the dominant group. That is, only to the extent that one person or group can dominate the whole will reality appear to be governed by one set of rules or to be constituted by one privileged set of social relations. One part of the problem, then, is to identify forms of socio-spatial exclusion as they are experienced and articulated by the subject groups." *** From p. 501 in CEWT "As Shields has observed in an account of the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, the model for several very large retailing developments in North American and Europe: It fragments conventional geographical spaces and historical time with its wild combination of interior settings; evoking disparate times and places while it seeks to impose its own stable order on the ensemble. At the turn of a corner, one is in a simulated 'New Orleans.' Another corner--'Paris.' In comparable British developments, including the Meadowhall Shopping Centre, near Sheffield, which similarly recreates the romance of Paris and Florence under one roof, and the Metro Centre in Gateshead, their exoticism has stimulated a new form of holiday experience." [Note: Much of page 501 is wrangling with Shields; Sibley returns to Shields near the bottom of 501, invoking him a second time as a setup for his critique of quasi-public spaces.] *** From p. 503 in CEWT "The policing of Rittenhouse Square, a rather unsubtle example of social control, might be compared with many instances of exclusion where boundaries are drawn discretely between dominant and subordinate groups. Martin Walker notes the spread of the private pool club in the United States, an institution, like the whites-only golf club, which continues 'the discrete and self-deceiving way of modern American apartheid. It is now justified as a way to avoid the crowds, crime and drugs of the municipal pools, these being code words which are used to signify black people.' Elsewhere, Mike Davis has captured the helplessness of the poor and homeless in the large North American city, faced with exclusionary developments by corporate capital. Talking to a black, homeless man in downtown Los Angeles, Davis comments: 'In front of us, tens of thousands of poor people, homeless people; at back opulence, affluence, Bunker Hill, the new L.A.' He then asks: 'Could you walk up there?' and the man replies: 'If they were to catch me in that building, they would have so much security on my ass, I would probably be in jail in five minutes.' Again, exclusion is felt acutely, but the homeless are rendered invisible by the affluent downtown workers by the spatial separations of city centre development which keep the underclass at a distance. These examples give some indication of the concerns of this book, exclusions in social space which may be unnoticed features of urban life. It is the fact that exclusions take place routinely, without most people noticing, which is a particularly important aspect of the problem."

Contact Information

Derek Mueller Office: HBC 002 Fall '04 office hours: [Adj. 10/26] Wed., 10:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Phone: (315) 443-1785 AIM: ewidem dmueller@syr.edu http://writing.syr.edu/~dmueller/