Review of  'Art and Identity at the Water's Edge' edited by Tricia Cusack (Ashgate, 2012):

http://arlisna.org/pubs/reviews/2012/11/cusack.pdf

Piranesi and Preservation

The following links to an intriguing article sent by a reader of this blog:

http://chronicle.com/article/Behind-Historic-Preservation/132119/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Viewing Thames Pageants

The idea of a river pageant - a great show of different crafts to delight and intrigue a public audience - is a lovely one and it would be nice to have lots of them. The grand 2012 Thames Pageant - in London England - there is also London and the Thames in Ontario - however turned out to be both too populist, and too 'corporate', with lightweight commentary from comperes, and large privileges for commercial interests, including the occupation of our public bridges.

London's Thames as a site of pageantry and the parade of political interests have an interesting  history. The Thames has long been connected with elaborate ritual and displays designed to enhance the monarchy, as well as to mark the civic and corporate leadership of the capital. Such processions have been depicted in painted riverscapes in which the Thames presented a glittering surface for the passage of the Royal Barge and other ceremonial vessels.

An elaborately carved and gilt barge built for the Prince of Wales in 1732 was still used into the nineteenth century, and ceremonial journeys marked the movement of royal persons and imperial or civic dignitaries between palaces, or to Westminster, or official functions. The City of London with its Lord Mayor had achieved a certain autonomy from the Crown and civic pageantry had a long tradition intimately associated with “English freedoms” with the City represented as “the bulwark of liberty”. London’s own State Barge was used for water pageants including an annual procession or “Triumph” to Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Day, depicted in Canaletto’s panoramic riverscape The Thames and the City (1746-7) illustrated below. This image shows the river thronged with ceremonial barges bearing flags and hundreds of small craft, the motley scene contained by the shoreline and the monumental architecture of St Paul’s, reiterating the river’s symbolic function as a site for national ritual and display.  Not unlike the pageant in 2012.
See also: "The Victorian Thames: England’s Silver Stream or Britain’s 'Monster Soup'?" in Tricia Cusack, Riverscapes and National Identities, Syracuse University Press 2010.

 Art and Identity at the Water's Edge 



This collection shows how the marginal territory of the water’s edge

has been represented in art in different places at various times and

how such art contributed to the formation of cultural and national

identities. Essays explore visual cultures of the Jordan and Vltava

Rivers; the South African seaside resort of Durban; post-Hurricane

Katrina New Orleans; and the French Riviera, among other margins of

river and sea.

"Time for academics to withdraw free labour"
at: http://deevybee.blogspot.ca/2012/01/time-for-academics-to-withdraw-free.html

H-Nationalism: Landscapes/Waterscapes new bibliography

The H-Nationalism list has an ongoing bibliography that it runs on the 'Zotero' website, including specialised bibliographies, one of which, just started, is for Landscapes/Waterscapes.

If you have suggestions for this bibliography, send them to me and I will add them. I don't know the size of the likely audience for it but it will pretty large and international.

We Need an Academic Spring!

My research focuses on how imaginings of place and identity have been constituted through visual art. This is great fun and has resulted in quite a few publications - books and articles.

While working as university lecturer in the UK, I have had unfettered and free access to numerous academic journals, but without such affiliation all of this stops abruptly. Suddenly, the researcher is cut adrift and being a university alumnus does not generally help at all.

Without the enabling affiliation to a university or college, researchers are expected by publishers ("Buy Now!") to fork out £20-£25 pounds to view ONE ARTICLE. This clearly makes research and publication - already largely unfunded especially in the Humanities - impossible. It  represents a great loss of ideas, talent and motivation, and I was going to say benefits no-one.

However, publishing houses presumably make something of a profit on this (although I don't know how many independent researchers can actually afford to pay) and universities must have reasons (exclusivity?) for colluding in such a patently unfair system.

We need an Academic Spring!
Tricia
See also: http://academicspring.blogspot.co.uk/

The Riverbank and Connectivity 
From Art and Identity at the Water's Edge (Ashgate 2012) edited by Tricia Cusack

Rachel May (2006) analyses different concepts of “connectivity” in relation to the riverbank. Ecologists, for example, focus on the use of the river edge as a special habitat and corridor for plants and animals, and on its function as a channel between land and water. In this view, connectivity means that the riverbank is part of a natural system, including the potential to flood, thereby exchanging nutrients with the surrounding land. Urban designers and planners, on the other hand, employ a concept of connectivity to mean providing people with access to the riverbank, and “linking the river visually and conceptually to the city (greenways, parks, attractive riverfront destinations, integrated design elements, vista points, identifiable images and logos)” (May 2006, 480). However, urban development may disrupt the river’s ecological “connectivity”, as well as change the way people relate to the river.
Reference:
Rachel May. 2006. “‘Connectivity’ in Urban Rivers: Conflict and Convergence between Ecology and Design’. Technology in Society 28, 477-88.

River as national metaphor

Based on Riverscapes and National Identities by Tricia Cusack, Syracuse University Press, 2010

Many nations and capital cities are closely identified with a national river, for instance, London with the Thames, or Prague with the Vltava. Rivers have long been central to cultures; one reason is their necessity for human survival, but another is to do with the nature of flowing water and its appropriateness as a metaphor for time passing. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argued that the essential shapelessness of liquids and their movement and changeability over time means that liquids draw attention to time in a way that solids do not (2). Rivers therefore have presented a potent metaphor for the passage of time, for life and for renewal in a way that solid landscape cannot do so easily. Not surprisingly, rivers have been associated with fertility and regeneration and sacralised in many religions. The growth of nationalism from the nineteenth century created a demand for representations of the national territory, and as rivers provided significant points of reference, riverscapes proved ideal for this purpose.  Since rivers signify life and renewal they have been appropriated as symbols of national vitality, and in representing the passage of time, they offer an excellent metaphor for the uninterrupted ‘flow’ or ‘course’ of national history. For some nations, this course has been regarded as a sacred as well as a historical one, their national mission merging with a spiritual destiny.

Reference: Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.