Reclaiming Urban Space: Fighting Unequal Representation and Spatial Marginalization in Urban Narratives

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores how literary, musical and other artistic representations from East and Central Europe foster resistance against spatial oppression on a discursive level, particularly during periods of economic, political, and societal transformation processes. How do (non-)fictional texts, songs, or films construct the urban "Other," the marginalized, visible, and endow it with (spatial) agency? How do urban narratives 'from below' alter official urban narrations? And to what extent can literature, music, or art empower urban dwellers and promote their emancipation from repressive structures in cities where official discourse seeks to influence not only how urban spaces are used and conceived, but also how they are imagined and remembered?
Methodologically, this panel is anchored in the studies on urban space by Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space, 1974) and Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980). Both highlight how institutions appropriate urban spaces and seek to transform them into containers with distinct attributions through intensified conceptualization. At the same time they observe that urban dwellers can reclaim these spaces through their practices within the urban realm. Through their everyday practices, they can recode spaces, diversify their meaning and usage, thereby presenting a counterpoint to institutional, repressive spatial hegemonies - a potential which is also inherent to literary, musical, and other artistic representations of urban space.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Jagoda Wierzejska, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• The 'Other' Warsaw: Narrating Marginalized Urban Experience as Cultural Ecology - Anna Seidel, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)

• Accounts on Forced Migration: A Gender Sensitive View on Contested Urban Fabric - Elisa-Maria Hiemer, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe (Germany)

• Gendered Bodies, Objects, and the City in Olga Tokarczuk’s Short Story 'Sabina’s Wish' and Feliks Falk’s Film 'The Debt Collector' - Svetlana P. Vassileva-Karagyozova, U of Kansas

• From the Invisible Ghetto to the Big Stage: Staging Contested Urban Space in Czech Rap - Ruben Höppner, U of Potsdam (Germany)

Discussant

• Szilveszter Sándor Csernus-Lukács, U of Szeged (Hungary)