This volume explores modes of urban representations that focus on the visual and on movement, both in the media of literature and film, as well as in discourses of migration, tourism and social movements. The collection of essays thus addresses the visual both in its materiality, as in architecture, art, film, photography, and in the imagination, as in literature and writing in general.
Urban spaces are conceptualized as potential contact zones for different ethnic and social groups which, increasingly, are not necessarily characterized by a territory of their own, but are often translocal, discontinuous, displaced, and displacing. The essays investigate the tensions between various kinds of hybrid texts about New York City whose simultaneity is an articulation of the "creative energy" of city life. They are a contribution to the analysis of the cultural work of contemporary urban fiction, film, and other urban discourses.
Table of Contents:
Introduction. -
In the Shadow of 9/11
Peter Brooker: Terrorism and Counternarratives: Don DeLillo and the New
York Urban Imaginary
Kristiaan Versluys: Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World or 9/11 as the End of Irony
Embattled Urban Spatialities and Moving Images
Steven Jacobs: Between Main and Mean Streets: Martin Scorcese's Fragmented New
York
Kim Förster: ABC No Rio's Oppositional Spatiality and Iconography: A Study
of the Politics of Space, Community, and Art
Dorothea Löbbermann: The Homeless Body and New York City: Spectacle, Representation, Embodiment
Camille Fojas: Boxing Women and the New Spectator: Gender, Race, and the City in Girlfight
The Transnational Imaginary and Cinematic Perspectives in Film and Fiction
Holger Henke: Brooklyn Babylon: The Reproduction and Consumption of
Cosmological and Epistemological Space in New York City
Karl-Heinz Magister: Trans-Caribbean CinematoGraphic Narratives in Jamaican
Urban Diasporas
Sladja Blazan: I See You: Cinematic Perspectives and the Hyper-Other in Literature
New EthniCities and In/Visible Cities
Günter H. Lenz: Re-Envisioning Metropolitan Spatialities, Diasporic Identities, and
Intercultural Narratives: Fictional Strategies and Visual Discourses in 1990s New York Novels
Antje Dallmann: ConspiraCity: The Literary Discourse of the In/Visible New York
Jeroen Lievens: The Woman at the Window: Spatial, Visual, and Sexual Dislocation
In Lynne Tilman's No Lease on Life
Showcase New York-New Trajectories
Bart Eeckhout (Ghent): Creative Destruction of Times Square: Redefining Space and
Understanding New Trajectories at the Crossroads of the World
