10th Annual Indiana University Landscape, Space, and Place Conference 2016
Indiana Memorial Union
March 3-5, 2016
Acknowledgments
The 10thanniversary of the Landscape, Space, and Place conference was made possible with the hard work and generosity of many individuals.
We would like to thank the Department of Geography for continuing to provide this vital annual forum where a diverse range of scholars can present their work and exchange ideas. Special thanks to Dan Knudsen, chair of the Geography Department, for his strong and ongoing support. Also thank you to Kristi Carlson, Fiscal Officer, for making the complex financial and logistical issues we encountered easier to navigate.
Thank you as well to our keynote speakers, Jillian Rickly and Chris Post, for sharing their scholarship with us. Additionally, we thank Chris Lukinbeal, Joan Hawkins, Susan Alt,and Andy Uhrich for their commitment to graduate education and efforts to make this a more cohesive and collaborative conference.
Thank you to the Poynter Center, in particular Emma Young and David Smith, and the AAG Landscape Specialty Group for coordinating further faculty participation to expand this conference and for securing contributions to publicize this event.
Thank you to past and current LSP committee members and organizers. This conference would not have been as successful without your contributions.
And finally, thank you to all of the presenters traveling from both near and far to participate in this 10th annual conference. Thank you for adding your voices to the valuable ongoing conversations developing around issues of landscape, space, and place.
Dan Johnston, Katie Lind, and Saul Kutnicki
Landscape Conference Organizers
Cover image comes from
Keynote Speakers
Jillian Rickly
Assistant Professor of Tourism Marketing and Management in the Nottingham University Business School at The University of Nottingham. She is a tourism geographer working in the areas of geohumanities and mobilities studies. Her work weaves together environmental perceptions, identity and bio-politics, and performance theories to consider the relations between travel motivation and experience. From this foundation, she has published widely on the concept of authenticity in tourism studies, and has contributed a series of chapters to edited volumes regarding tourism mobilities as well as landscape perspectives for tourism studies. Dr.Rickly is a co-author ofTourism, Performance, and Place: A Geographic Perspective(Ashgate) and a co-editor ofEvent Mobilities: Politics, Place and Performance(Routledge) andTourism and Leisure Mobilities: Politics, Work, and Play(Routledge). She earned her PhD in Geography from Indiana University.
Chris W. Post
Associate Professor of Geography at Kent State University at Stark, with a BS in Social Studies Education from the University of Oklahoma and MA and PhD in Geography from the University of Kansas. His research as a cultural and historical geographer focuses on the heritage of place, particularly as it becomes manifest on the cultural landscape through commemoration, place naming, and sense of place. Dr. Post has published chapters in the books Company Towns in the Americas and Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies. He has also published in the journals Area, Professional Geographer, Geographical Review, Journal of Cultural Geography, Journal of Geography, and Historical Geography. He has chaired the Cultural Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and serves on the board of the International Society of Landscape, Place, and Material Culture. His two favorite places on Earth are Chicago and the Colorado Rockies. When not teaching, reading, and writing, he spends time with his family and his guitars (which are like an extended family).
Schedule
Thursday, March 3rd
11:00a.m. -12:00p.m.Toxic Places: Water, Landscape, Space, and Place in Flint, Michigan; Bloomington, Indiana; and Beyond
Panel discussion among:
Todd Royer Associate Professor and Aquatic Ecologist, SPEA
Joe VargaProfessor of Labor Studies, Landscape Historian
Jeff White Professor and Director of the SPEA Integrated Program on the Environment, past President of Bloomington’s Utilities Service Board
12:00p.m.-12:45p.m.LUNCHBREAK
12:45 p.m.-2:00 p.m.Mapping Film Culture and Aesthetics
Chris Lukinbeal
“‘On Location’ Filming in San Diego County from 1985-2005: How a Cinematic Landscape is Formed Through Incorporative Tasks and Represented Through Mapped Inscriptions”
Carolin Kirchner
“Towards an Aesthetic of the Revolutionary Sublime: Counter-Aesthetic and Counter-Culture in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970)”
Joan Hawkins
“Downtown Cinema and Exhibition 1975-2001”
2:00p.m. – 2:15 p.m.BREAK
2:15 p.m.- 3:15p.m.Designs on Urban Media
Joshua Singer
“Creating Landscape Fictions as Narrative in Digital Space: The ‘Interchangeable City Surface Modules of Detroit and Stockholm’”
Alexander Svensson
“All Eyes on L.A.: The Strain Billboard and Affective Horrors in the Media City”
Response by Prof. Lukinbeal
3:15p.m. - 3:30p.m.BREAK
3:30p.m. – 4:45p.m.Keynote Address I
Jillian Rickly, University of Nottingham,
United Kingdom
Assistant Professor of Tourism Marketing and Management, Business School
“Employing Place: Negotiating Authenticity, Authority,
and Ethics with the Politics of Exclusion in Adventure Tourism”
Friday, March 4
9:45 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Introductions
10:00 a.m. -11:15amMemory and Heritage
Kathryn Hannum
“Mapping the Transnational Commemoration of Alfonso R. Castelao”
Skylar Calvert
“The Cycle of Public Memory in an Industrialized Town”
Mark Rhodes
“The Power of Place and Performance in Call Mr. Robeson: TayoAluko’s representation of Paul Robeson and the 1949 Peekskill Riots”
Meredith Wadlington
“Pan-African Pastoral: Reimagining the Natural Spaces of Harlem Renaissance Poetics”
11:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.BREAK
11:30 a.m. - 12:45p.m.Cinematic Urges: Narrating Landscape, Space, and Place
Jin Lee
“‘Reverie’ and ‘Irony’: ‘Reverse Mimicry’ of the White Travelers in King Solomon’s Mines”
Panagnimba Parfait Bonkoungou
“Landscapes of Liberation in Buud Yam (1997) and Yeelen(1987)”
Laura Sharp
“Vision, Loss, and the Sociality of Absence in Kurosawa’s DersuUzala”
Julie Le Hégarat
“Queer Families and the Transgression of Space: A Case Study of Wild Side”
12:45p.m. - 2:15p.m.LUNCH BREAK
[All Friday afternoon sessions will be in theOak Room]
2:15p.m. –3:30p.m.A Place by Any Other Name
JörnSeemann
“From Aaron to Zulu: Revisiting Indiana Place Names and their Spatial Histories”
Lance Howard with Will Rice, Lucy Rummler, Jacob Nikkila, and Michael Hollan
“The Clemson University Campus as an Historical and Experimental Landscape Text”
Susan Alt
“Converting the Sacred: How Landscapes of Worship Became Landscapes of Power in Ancient Native America”
3:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.BREAK
3:45p.m. –5:00p.m. Edible Landscapes
KatjeArmentrout
“Becoming a Cosmopolitan Farmer: The Case of the Millennial Generation’s Migration Back to the Agrarian Middle Landscape”
Megan Betz, Joe Betz
“A New Midwestern Pastoral”
Michael Bryant
“The Cultural Economy of the Döner Kebab”
Lindsay Knapp
“Near Nature: The Role of Native Botany in the Geography of Everyday Life”
Saturday, March 5
9:50 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Announcements
10:00 a.m. -11:15 a.m.Envisioning the Empire
Casey Monroe
“A Vision of Empire: William Henry Jackson and the Mexican Railroad”
Leila Saboori
“Oil as Agent of Landscape Change: Abadan and Masjid Suleman in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”
Dinah Holzman
“‘Putting Decolonization on Stage’: Comparative Analysis of Photographs of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Capitol Complex”
Meaghan O’Dea
“An Opera Out on the Turnpike: Geography, Masculinity, and Ethnicity in Manuel Munoz’s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and Breece D’J Pancake’s The Complete Stories”
11:15 a.m. -11:30 a.m.BREAK
11:30 a.m. - 12:15p.m.Landscape Projections
IU Libraries Moving Image Archive
Andy Uhrich, Co-Director
12:45 p.m.-2:15 p.m.LUNCH BREAK
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.Locating Home Space
Sana Iqbal
“Swahili Women as Social Agents Enunciating Changing Use of Space”
Lora Smith
“The [Forgotten] Home Site of W.E.B. DuBois: A Rhetorical and Ethnographic Approach”
Hongyan Yang
“Spatial Negotiations: Shifted Publicity and Privacy in Hmongs' Everyday Domestic Landscapes”
3:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. BREAK
3:45 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.Keynote Address II
Chris Post, Kent State
University at Stark, North Canton, OH
Associate Professor, Department of Geography
“Going Beyond May 4: Memorialization and Public
Pedagogy at Kent State”
Abstracts
Susan Alt, Indiana University Bloomington,Department of Anthropology
“Converting the Sacred: How Landscapes of Worship Became Landscapes of Power in Ancient Native America”
Keywords: Cahokia, Shrines, Mounds Native American, Religious landscapes
The Emerald Acropolis, located in Lebanon, Illinois was part of the Ancient Mississippian Cahokia polity and our new research reveals that it was a place that tells the story of how people came to be Mississippian. It is also a place where it is possible to trace the transformation of religious to secular power by following pulses of change in landscapes and architecture. Emerald was chosen as shrine center by ancient Native Americans because of natural landscape features, a ridge, hills, and a spring that would have been perceived as a place to gather supernatural forces and powers. Even so, Cahokian people re-sculpted the landform to better reference lunar movements and then covered it with mounds, shrines, and buildings of all sorts. The atmospheres and affects created by the builders of Emerald were meant to cite the traditional while yet finding new ways to honor and connect with the spirits of water, wind, fire, and the moon. In so doing they created a new Mississippian religion, but as I will explain, somewhere along the way the places of religious import took on political motivations as sacred places and structures came to be seats of secular power.
KatjeArmentrout, Purdue University, American Studies
“Becoming a Cosmopolitan Farmer: The Case of the Millennial Generation’s Migration Back to the Agrarian Middle Landscape”
Keywords: transregionalism, back to the land movement, millennial counterculture, cosmopolitanism
Many scholars such as Michael Pollan, Philip Deloria, bell hooks, and Leo Marx have argued that the middle landscape has created a liminal space of residence. These in-between spaces are considered a border culture, in which the participants are neither one thing nor another. With these scholars’ arguments in mind, my paper approaches the liminal space of the agrarian middle landscape with special attention given to how the millennial generation is restructuring the farm. Specifically, in my project, I will be looking at how the contemporary, neoliberal “hipster” is migrating back to the farm from areas of urban decay. I argue that white, middle-class millennials are infiltrating rural, agrarian neighborhoods that are in economic decline and establishing communities that are structured on principles of rural sustainability. These individuals are moving back to the farm to creating spaces of rural romanticization by crossing long-established socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Their migration is a reaction to the modern, as well as a revolt against industrial failure in metropolitan areas. In conclusion, by “playing farmer” these cosmopolitan farmers question the authenticity of what is characteristically asserted by rural residents and therefore, challenge the fluid relationship between the urban and the rural.
Megan Betz, Joe Betz, Indiana University Bloomington, Department of Geography; Ivy Tech-Bloomington, Department of English
“A New Midwestern Pastoral”
Keywords: pastoralism, agriculture, poetry, literature, food studies
The landscape tradition of geography combines field work with representations of the landscape in literary, tactile, and visual arts that “[give] voice to the gestalt, the spirit and holism of landscape and place” (Henderson 2003, p. 180), making it an ideal lens for exploring the role of analyzing the changing form and function of pastoral writing in contemporary American culture. Using the works of Ross Gay and Maurice Manning, we explore the face of the pastoral in contemporary American poetry being written in the Midwest. Their differing perspectives and experiences, with Gay’s pastoral coming into the urban built environment and Manning’s imagery heavily featuring rural America, converge in a new turn for this tradition: performing the pastoral. For these authors, the contemporary pastoral seems to come with an increasing burden of authenticity. In addition to carrying on the themes of pastoralism, the two follow a tradition championed by Wendell Berry of reclaiming the land and immersing oneself in the building of a better agricultural future. While Virgil’s canonical pastoral turned the urban eye on the rural landscape, these poets immerse themselves in the pastoral and use the mode as a means of connecting art to a passion for food system reform.
Panagnimba Parfait Bonkoungou, University of Texas at El Paso, Department of Languages and Linguistics
“Landscapes of liberation in Buud Yam (1997) and Yeelen(1987)”
Keywords: African cinema; filmic landscapes; visual semiotics; postcolonial discourse
Landscape of liberation is a visual concept proposing a perspective on social relationships based on notions of a territory, and community relations and identities associated with that territory. In this regard, two African movies explore the relations between identities and geographical boundaries and how they express a factor of belonging. The featured movies Yeelen(1987) and Buud Yam (1997), respectively by AbdoulayeCissé from Mali and Gaston Kaboré from Burkina Faso are using wide variety of landscapes of liberation ranging from deserts to valleys and forests so as to convey a sense of place and space in both representations of Africa.
This presentation will be highlighting three functions of landscape of liberation in Yeelenand Buud Yam. First, I will be showing how filmic landscapes in both movies can perform visual, narrative, and aesthetic functions that invest the filmic experience with greater meaning and significance. Secondly, I will be illustrating how these functions provide an excellent paradigm of social, cultural and national identities. Finally, I will show during my presentation the postcolonial discourse behind the representations of landscapes of liberation in both movies and why they came to be a filmic pattern in Sub-Saharan Africa’s cinema.
Michael Bryant, Indiana University Bloomington, Department of Germanic Studies
“The Cultural Economy of the Döner Kebab”
Keywords: foodscape, multiculturalism, tourism, urban, visual grammar
The Döner Kebab has made its mark on the the German foodscape, especially in urban areas, and even if one objects to the Döner on principles of taste, its widespread popularity is hard to refute. Not only are Germans consuming the Döner at a pace that outstrips the well-established Currywurst - American students who have traveled to Germany rave about the German-Turkish specialty when asked about German cuisine.
Few things are more immediate or effective at shrinking the gap between ‘the (kn)own’ and ‘the other’ than food, because it allows for a performative, embodied engagement with culture that is at once familiar and exotic. German-language textbooks invariably contain chapters on food, usually drawing attention to multicultural aspects of the German foodscape. Nevertheless, the Döner, a “German” food that many perceive to be a fundamental component of German culture, is conspicuously absent from the seven textbooks used most frequently in the U.S. The Döner’s absence from the officially sanctioned food narrative is counterintuitive, because urban dwellers and tourists alike encounter Döner shops with regularity. If learning about culinary habits offers a gateway to a more nuanced understanding of the multicultural dimensions of a place, could there be a political-cultural reason for why these textbooks ignore the ubiquitous Döner’s contribution to Germany’s foodscape?
My talk begins by composing a portrait of the Döner’s role as a contested site of intercultural contact within the larger conversation about Germany’s increasingly multicultural society. Then I deconstruct the responses of an online questionnaire I sent to high school and university students of German, in which I assessed their knowledge of German cuisine. Finally, I analyze how the Döner’s visual grammar and its distribution throughout the urban landscape contributes to its popularity amongst American students.
Skylar Calvert, Indiana University Bloomington, School of Informatics and Computing
“The Cycle of Public Memory in an Industrialized Town”
Keywords: industrial heritage, local memory, industrial sanctification, community identity, communal narrative
Over the past 30 years, manufacturing jobs have been fleeing the Midwest to southern states and international soil. These jobs are the source of industrial heritage in small towns and big cities across the nation. When the jobs are removed from a community, the heritage remains, but the communal loss of identity has left communities in existential crises. To exemplify these outcomes, I focus my research on the community surrounding the rural town of Connersville, IN, where a rally was held that sanctified an abandoned factory and provided identity while promising a complete economic rebound; however, the events following the rally left the community hopeless and without an identity once again.
In July of 2009, The American Jobs Rally took place at 4974 Western Ave, the empty manufacturing plant that once stimulated a third of Connersville’s economy. The ritualistic events that took place during the rally signified the community’s industrial heritage was still intact and even stronger than when it left. It also marked the peak of the community’s progressive narrative, where hope and optimism for the second coming of their industrial heritage was at its max. I ask, in the years and events following the rally, what effects did it have on the community’s public memory and understanding of their cultural heritage?
To answer this question, I called upon personal memories surrounding the events, talked to community members, and spent most of my time in local newspaper archives to develop the setting. I then analyzed the setting by using Kenneth Foote’s definition of Sanctification and Designation of tragic sights, along with Edward Linenthal’s progressive and toxic narratives to portray the cycle of drastic fluctuation in emotion/mindset of the overarching public memory of the Connersville community.
Kathryn Hannum, Kent State University, Department of Geography
“Mapping the Transnational Commemoration of Alfonso R. Castelao”
Keywords: Memorial Landscape, Toponimic Landscape, Spain
Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao (1886-1950) was a Galician author and philosopher, now widely considered to be the father of the Galician nationalist movement, and a man who is purposefully memorialized in the landscape of several nations. Through his writing of the monumentally influential text SempreenGaliza (1944), essays for the Galician republican journal A Nosa Terra and other Spanish and Galician republican publications, Castelao unified Galicians, Galician exiles, and Galician emigrants, into one trans-national Galician nation with the articulation of an identity as something other than Spanish. This mapping project analyzes Castelao on the toponimic memorial landscape in the vein ofTretter (2011), and utilizes concepts outlined by Alderman’s (2003) scaling of commemorative street names. Coupling Castelao’s ideology and impact upon Galician communities and the general public in Spain and Argentina with the spatiality and scale of memorials dedicated to him in these two countries reveals two things: the strong transnational connections felt between Galicians and Argentines, and the various levels of affiliation with Castelao each community utilizes to complement their narrative. Analysis of the scaling of the toponimic memorials to Castelao in Spain and Argentina show that Castelao’s presence as a memorial entity fluctuates with the political leaning of the Spanish locale at question, and unites Galician diaspora communities though solidification of a national hero abroad.