Borderline bodies

This chapter is about borders that are made and broken at gay pride parades. Specifically, I examine the discursive and material borders maintained in tourism discourse. Binary oppositions such as self/other, straight/gay, and tourist/host provide a focus for this chapter. I am interested in where these borders wear thin and threaten to break and disrupt social order. I explore the bodies of gay pride parades because it is bodies such as these that threaten the borders of corporeal acceptability

Independence Day 1866

The grand national holiday was a quiet one in Adams County in 1866. Gettysburg was a ghost town. No fireworks. No parades. No mass celebrations. In the woods around the county, small knots of citizens gathered for picnics. Escaping the hot, dusty streets of the towns was obviously a boon for anyone who, as the Adams Sentinel put it, “embraced the opportunity of rusticating for the day.” [excerpt

Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators

This report introduces a definition of cultural vitality that includes the range of cultural activity people around the country find significant. We use this definition as a lens to clarify our understanding of data necessary, as well as the more limited data currently available, to document arts and culture in communities in a consistent, recurrent and reliable manner. Specifically, we define cultural vitality as evidence of creating, disseminating, validating, and supporting arts and culture as a dimension of everyday life in communities. We develop and recommend an initial set of arts and culture indicators derived from nationally available data, and compare selected metropolitan areas based on these measures. Policy and planning implications for use of the cultural vitality definition and related measures are discussed

Phantom German Air Raids on Canada: War Hysteria in Quebec and Ontario during the First World War

In late August of 1914, Canada entered the First World War following the unanimous vote of a special session of Parliament. This event occurred amid great exuberance and unanimity, and was marked by parades, decorations, cheering crowds and patriotic speeches. Canada was situated far from the European front lines, and its distant, vast land mass and cold climate also contributed to a feeling of insulation from attack or invasion. However, despite a general feeling of distance from the war\u27s unfolding events, there was a rapidly growing realization that German sympathizers and enemy agents might pose a more immediate threat

Post-Katrina Suppression of Black Working-Class Political Expression

New Orleans politicians, with the aid of the federal government, used the destruction and displacement caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to implement policies that discouraged low-income and working class black residents from returning to New Orleans. Impacted communities felt the need to revitalize street parades (second-line parades), a traditional communal neighborhood activity, as an instrument of political protest. In response the City used minor municipal ordinances to more vigorously regulate these parades, doubling the fees imposed for street parades and effectively shutting them down. The City’s response raised important constitutional questions about government suppression of speech and freedom of association. This article is an examination of how the racially biased use of city permitting structures impacted working-class blacks in New Orleans post-Katrina. It is a cautionary tale about how cities can enforce social control by manipulating tiny details in municipal laws. It is a lesson for other diverse communities about what can happen to minority subcultures in the wake of recovery efforts after a natural disaster. The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and its aftermath dramatically impacted the City’s black working-class, almost half of whose residents were spread across the country (McKernan and Mulcahy 2008). The collapse of the levee walls flooding eighty percent of the city “not only caused immense damage to homes and public institutions... [it] also destabilized the culture of New Orleans, perhaps irrevocably ” (McKernan and Mulcah

Culture in translation: the case of British Pathé News

At the risk of serving and betraying two masters, the intellectual and practical work of the translator is best characterized as an ethical problem: to navigate our anxieties of otherness by making difference accessible while also protecting the ‘other’ from appropriation. This article locates these concerns within the context of international motion picture news production, during which the need to make far-off people, events, and cultural practices accessible to audiences at home suggests a similar translation process. Using Paul Ricoeur's notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ as its point of entry, it maintains that as cultural translations engaged in the description and explanation of frames of reference different to those of the spectator, newsreels took their audiences on an intercultural journey of discovery, bridging both the physical and the metaphorical gulf that separated them from the images projected on their cinema screens and the experience of life elsewhere. By placing this discussion within the concrete practice of British Pathé News, this article advances a powerful example of not only the complex intercultural negotiations that exist at the heart of newsreel production as a form of cultural translation but also the ways in which these negotiations echo across our relationship to otherness more generally

The trouble with sectarianism

This chapter attempts to situate the moral panic around sectarianism in Scotland in wider relations of social power. Sectarianism valorizes symbolic distinction and separation as prohibitions against social and ideological promiscuity and contamination between established and outsider groups (Weber, 1946). Sectarianism in this sense has been eroded by widening circles of identification in Scotland. Sectarianism today takes the form of a civilising offensive mobilised by the legitimate sources of symbolic nomination to regulate and discipline outsiders defined by a chronic maladaptation to the civilising canopy of the national habitus in Scotland

'The Greek Fall: Simulacral Thanatotourism in Europe'

The paper explores the socio-cultural dynamics of Greek demonstrations in 2011, suggesting that their function exceeds that of social movements as we know them. A form of what I term ‘simulacral thanatotourism’, including marches and demonstrations to Greek cities in protest for austerity measures, actualised in this context a form of mourning about the end of Greece’s place in European polity. This mourning, which places Greece at the centre of a withering European democratic cosmos, inspires in today’s dystopian Greek Raum two conflicting forms of social action: one is geared towards consumption of the country’s political history in terms similar to those we examine as ‘tourism’. This symbolic consumption of history re-writes the European past from a Greek standpoint while simultaneously promoting relevant entrepreneurial initiatives – in particular, the global circulation of imagery linked to riots and protests and thus the movement of the abject aspects of Greek culture in global spaces. The second form of action is directed against the image of contemporary Greece as a corrupt topos that does not deserve a place in Europe’s political Paradise; this places the blame for the nation’s demise on its political factions. The two forms of action may be antithetical but do coexist in Greek social movements to the date, articulating a cosmology of nostalgia for Greece as an idyllic tourist object. The paper explores these themes through the proliferation of imagery in recent demonstrations, highlighting how a tourist-like marketing of activist visual culture partakes in reproductions of theological ideas rooted in Europeanist discourse