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2011-2012 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Performing nostalgia: body, memory, and the aesthetics of past-home

Since its etymological beginnings, the meanings and usages of nostalgia have shifted markedly. In the shifting, nostalgia’s associations with the body and with the concept of home has diminished. This study of African American nostalgia for Africa uses genealogical inquiry, personal and autoethnographic narrative, and performance theories and practices to reinvigorate the relations between body, memory, aesthetics, past, and home. Attending to operations of time and space, I theorize the aforementioned relations in order to build a theory of critical nostalgia. Following Debbora Battaglia, I argue and illustrate that nostalgia is an act realized in performance, and I develop my theory of critical nostalgia by investigating three primary sites of memory: two African American genealogy websites, Elmina Castle, a slave castle located on Ghana’s West coast, and my own staged theatre production Copious Notes: A Nostalgia Tale. Informed by Michel Foucault’s method of critical genealogy and Joseph Roach’s genealogies of performance, I offer critical nostalgia as a method of scholarly inquiry, as an active practice of personal and cultural memory, as a tool for representing memories of past-homes, and as a compositional aesthetic. In the study, I interrogate the history of nostalgia and its use for scholars as a critical category. Theorizing the positionality of the corporeal black body within nostalgic appeals of home, homeland and community, I attend to the relations between origin, roots, and identity. Further, I explore the performative possibilities of nostalgia in relation to affective bodily experience and in relation to narratives of trauma. Finally, I illustrate the utility of critical nostalgia for creating aesthetic performances sensitive to time and space, and I synthesize the major tenants of critical nostalgia for use in performance praxis

Negotiation and Design for the Self-Organizing City

An understanding of cities as open systems whose agents act on them simultaneously from below and above, influencing urban processes by their interaction with them and with each other, is replacing the simplistic debate on urban participation which asks whether cities should be organized bottom-up or top-down. This conceptualization of cities as complex systems calls for new collaborative city-making methods: a combination of collaborative planning (which already embraces various agencies and derives decision-making from negotiations between them) and collaborative design (existing methods rely on rule-based iterative processes which control spatial outcomes). While current collaborative planning methods are open and interactive, they fail to simulate realistic power negotiations in the evolution of the physical environments they plan; collaborative design methods fall short in modelling the decision-making mechanisms of the physical environments they control. This research is dedicated to building an open negotiation and design method for cities as self-organizing systems that bridges this gap. Gaming as a tool for knowledge creation and negotiation serves as an interface between the more abstract decision-making and material city-making. Rarely involved in the creation of our environment, it has the unexplored potential of combining the socio-spatial dimensions of self-organizing urban processes. Diverse agents, the collaborations and conflicts within and between interest groups, and the parameters provided by topological data can all be combined in an operational form in gaming: potentially a great unifier of multiple stakeholder negotiations and individual design aspirations through which to generate popularly informed policies or design. The simple language and rules of games will allow jargon-free communication between stakeholders, experts and non-experts alike. The interactive and iterative nature of city gaming encourages the development of collective intelligence, derived from the real lives of players to be redeployed in their real urban futures. Vitally, city gaming enables the negotiation of this future, as players with conflicting interests are given an opportunity to develop compatible, even shared, visions. By transforming serious issues into a playful and engaging (although no less serious) experience, city gaming unlocks difficult conversations and helps to build communities in the long term. The urban design, policy and action plans generated collaboratively through gaming will increase social coherence and local agency, as well as cutting costs and time in urban development processes. This thesis proposes Generative City Gaming as an innovative urban planning and design method built on the tradition of serious gaming. Going beyond the educational scope of other serious games, the ultimate aim of city gaming is to become operational in urban processes – a goal in the process of making a reality since 2008, when Generative City Gaming was first applied to a real urban questions in the Netherlands, later expanding to Istanbul, Tirana, Brussels, and Cape Town. “Negotiation and Design for the Self-Organizing City” reports on six of the twelve city games played to date which were instrumental in the evolution of the method: Play Almere Haven tested whether a game based on self-organizing mechanisms could provide an urban order; Play Rotterdam questioned whether game-derived design could be implemented in urban renewal of a central Rotterdam neighborhood; Yap-Yaşa was played with real urban stakeholders for transforming Istanbul’s self-built neighbourhoods; Play Noord investigated a masterplan on hold could be fixed by unconventional stakeholders; Play Oosterwold jumped up a scale to test the rules of a flexible urban expansion plan for 4500 hectares; Play Van Gendthallen, was the first to enable stakeholders to make the leap from design to reality within the game process. The Generative City Gaming method evolves continuously. Every new case tests and proves the applicability of city gaming to a specific urban complexity, while challenging the method to adapt itself and develop new features tailored to tackle each unique urban question. Through use, this gaming method is finding its place within existing city-making procedures in a number of countries. The next big question is whether cyclical and open-ended city gaming can move beyond being a consultancy and research tool to become the principal medium of processing and executing city planning

Mustang Daily, April 24, 1981

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/3908/thumbnail.jp

Game theoretic modeling and analysis : A co-evolutionary, agent-based approach

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930

This dissertation traces the impact and influence of Ireland\u27s Great Famine (145-1852) on the formal developments of Irish and British modernism. The Famine is arguably the founding event for colonial Ireland\u27s entry into modernity. This forceful event and forced legacy allows us to rethink modernism\u27s developmental trajectory; rather than a movement deriving out of metropolitan experimentation, I argue for modernism\u27s colonial roots. Colonial events like the Famine or what I term colonial atrocities are marked by mass death and cultural degradation, and further facilitated by the technological, ideological, and exploitative practices deriving from modernity. Representative practices that arise in response to atrocity---like stream of consciousness, fragmentation, large and elusive allusions---precede and develop ahead of the later consolidation of these practices as modernism .;At its most ambitious, this dissertation\u27s philosophical, postcolonial, and formal emphases allow us to rethink the ontological notions of modernity and postcolonial theory while also recasting the relations between colonialism and modernism as generative rather than antagonistic. For writers composing in the aftermath of colonial atrocities, a viable anti-colonial and resistant narrative can be fashioned once the atrocity as pitfall of despair and victimization is seen in another light. My conception of atrocity becomes a mode of analysis that fits Alain Badiou\u27s philosophy of the event. The Famine, then, is the event that generates truth and revolutionary subjects capable of shifting atrocity\u27s legacies from victimization and dehumanization to an egalitarian force opposed to colonial hegemony. On a textual level, I see these revisionary Famine legacies played out in the formal practices of Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula, Rudyard Kipling\u27s Kim, and James Joyce\u27s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.