Madness decolonized?: Madness as transnational identity in Gail Hornstein’s Agnes’s Jacket

The US psychologist Gail Hornstein’s monograph Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009) is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an “anti-colonial” struggle to reclaim the experiential world “colonized” by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals make recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad, as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the “inner” world “colonized” by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornstein’s rhetoric, however. Her “ethnicity-and-rights” response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornstein’s porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic “re-colonization” of mad experience

New South(Ern) Landscapes: Reenvisioning Tourism, Industry, and the Environment in the American South

Commenting on two distinct bodies of visual culture, this thesis examines how the American South has been depicted in photography, advertisement, and popular media. Exploring images of the South ranging from Depression-era Virginia to present day lower Louisiana, these papers seek to better incorporate views of a region traditionally underrepresented in visual depictions of the American landscape. Underlying both projects is an interest in utilizing visual culture as a means to understand humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. Taking a closer look at promotional materials from the early years of Shenandoah National Park, as well as the (post)industrial/posthumanist landscapes of Cary Fukunaga’s television serial True Detective - and the Richard Misrach photographs that inspired them - this thesis works to better understand how Americans came to understand the nonhuman world around them

Seeing sense: the visual culture of provincial Ireland 1896-1906

The objective of this research is to examine what is meant by visual culture in the context of provincial Ireland between 1896 and 1906 and the argue for a particular conception of its meaning, range and influence. This study defines visual culture in terms of the interaction between viewer and viewed, recognising the complex interplay between the images produced and circulated within a culture, the viewing apparatus(es) by which such images are made available and the cultural consciousness, competences and preferences which accompany and influence our viewing experiences. By surveying the reception of Magic Lantern and Cinematograph entertainments in rural Ireland between 1896 and 1906, it becomes possible to suggest a distinction between historically and culturally grounded ‘ways of seeing 5. In presenting evidence of a complex of receptive patterns, it is argued that the exhibition and reception of such media in conjunction with cultural repertoires and ideological influence forms the basis from which the era’s visual culture can be described and mapped

Deforestation and Decolonization: Lafcadio Hearn’s French Antillean Writing

Looking outside at my breadfruit tree reminds me how European colonialism shaped Caribbean landscape through the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonization of their lands, followed by the theft, commodification and dispersal of indigenous plants and botanic knowledge. Furthermore, these processes were accompanied by the production and hierarchization of race and the enslavement and exploitation of African and Asian populations. As Elizabeth Deloughrey, Renee Gosson, and George Handley note, ‘there is probably no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation and settlement than the Caribbean’. Yet, our ability to detect ecoimperialist activities by reading Caribbean landscapes is hampered by ‘the ever-expanding and ambitious imaginative symbolism’ through which the colonizers constituted the islands as tropical paradises’. As Deloughrey explains, ‘at the height of the process of altering and damaging island landscapes, tropical islands were interpellated in Edenic terms, removed in space and time’ and segregated from human agency. This interpellation, still active in today’s tourism advertisements, naturalizes the altered landscapes, thereby effacing the violent ecological history of the Caribbean plantation economy

Digital Restoration Attempt on Jindeyuan Temple in Jakarta

Jindeyuan Temple was on fire at March 2nd 2015. It burned 300+ years old heritage building of oldest Chinese temple in Jakarta. Since then, various attempts were done to build it up again. Within so many people that interested on Jindeyuan, they are roughly divided into two general groups; one try to preserve, while the other try to revive. These groups made any attempt to rebuild again Jindeyuan become almost impossible. The other problem lies on the decision makers. Jindeyuan Temple, beside its heritage and cultural functions, still a legal private property; belongs to individual. Any archaeological preservation and conservation design that was not approved by the owner (or owner’s board), will fail to apply. In this paper, writer tries to outline the big problem and the attempt to gather sample data from real visitors of this temple and some from observers to this temple by online questionnaire. Many interesting findings and interpretations are shown here, leading to various design preliminaries. The research itself only using simple quantitative method on interpreting data gathered from questionnaire. When the right design still on hot debate, simpler alternative with tendency to restore the original building already on progress. Digital restoration through gathering old data about the temple, its measurements and its old photographs. Digital restoration using software 3D Max will generate comprehensive image of the old building without any alteration. This work is not completed yet by this time, since intricate decorations and carvings that adorned the building need some more measurement to draw