Abstract
As the upsurge of terrorism and natural catastrophes over the past year attests, our world remains home to a wide array of monstrosities. In April 2015 the fourth Interdisciplinary.Net conference dedicated to the theme of Monstrous Geographies was held, this time taking place in the Portuguese city of Lisbon. Ravaged by an earthquake in 1755, which reverberated all over Europe through the writings of Voltaire and Leibniz, Lisbon was an eerily apt location to discuss such matters, and participants came from a variety of countries and disciplines, each representing a different theoretical and methodological approach to investigate manifestations of monstrosity in geographical settings. The present volume is a snapshot of this conference.
The monstrous is, in one way or another, a distorted reflection of what we fear and against which we define ourselves. Monsters have been with us since time immemorial. They have been present in the earliest creation myths and today populate all media of fantasy, horror, action and adventure, as well as science fiction.
Over the past years, scholars have attentively studied the prominent presence of vampires, zombies, and other monsters in films and TV series that breathed new life into long-forgotten stories and monstrous characters. Simultaneously, the past decades have witnessed an increase of public and scholarly interest in space and place, resulting in what is known in academia as the Spatial Turn, leaving its mark on fields ranging from geography through literature and cultural memory studies. The resurgence of interest in monsters and the turn towards space as a cultural and political entity have been a driving force behind the annual conferences organized around the theme of Monstrous Geographies over the past four years.
The contributors understand the two words of the conference theme in their broadest possible senses. The monstrous entails the affective registers of fear, anxiety, trauma, as well as forms of excess and transgression. Likewise, geographies are both physical and metaphorical, corporeal and psychological, rural and urban, real and imagined. Apart from offering an insight into the conference, this book bears witness to the diversity of approaches to studying the intersections of monstrosity and geography.
The first cluster of chapters explore monstrosity in the realms of space and the body. Alexander John Bridger’s chapter takes the reader to Ground Zero of the 9/11 attacks in New York in the form of a psychogeographical mapping of trauma and practices of commemoration. Similarly, the physical site of violence as genius loci is crucial to Hans Christian Post’s discussion of visual representations of the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-79 that expose gruesome details of captivity, torture and death, which he uses as a platform to critically reflect on well-embedded codes of reverence, observed in commemorations of European genocides. Space emerges in a different form in Rhiannon Firth’s chapter, where monstrous shapes in graffiti and street art in London give expression to public resentment towards gentrification. In the first cluster’s final chapter which analyses contemporary art pieces dealing with and/or employing menstrual blood, Ruth Green-Cole explores how the female body operates as a site of heterotopia through the tabooization of menstrual blood.
The second cluster of chapters concerns itself with myth, the occult, the virtual, and concludes with monsters applied to educational purposes. Zoila Clark’s discussion of the monstrous mermaid-fairy Mélusine, featured in Starbucks’s Logo, takes the reader onto mythological terrains in order to explore and possibly reintroduce the critical and disruptive potentials of the figure, while Cavan McLaughlin’s chapter problematizes the notion of evil in Aleister Crowley’s occult religion of Thelema. In his discussion of the virtual geography of the image, Jad Khairallah locates the emotionlessness of the culture of spectatorship as an ‘overwhelming plague’ to contend with. Finally, Joshua Paddison examines the omnipresence of monsters in popular culture as a rich reservoir of case studies to investigate interrelations of religion, space, and culture in education.
The landscape that these chapters explore is historical and mythical, physical and virtual, corporeal and architectural, and textual and visual. They are of the past, as well as of the present and the future. Featuring a variety of theoretical and methodological apparatuses, the chapters you are about to read are individual expeditions into this monstrously fascinating terrain.
The monstrous is, in one way or another, a distorted reflection of what we fear and against which we define ourselves. Monsters have been with us since time immemorial. They have been present in the earliest creation myths and today populate all media of fantasy, horror, action and adventure, as well as science fiction.
Over the past years, scholars have attentively studied the prominent presence of vampires, zombies, and other monsters in films and TV series that breathed new life into long-forgotten stories and monstrous characters. Simultaneously, the past decades have witnessed an increase of public and scholarly interest in space and place, resulting in what is known in academia as the Spatial Turn, leaving its mark on fields ranging from geography through literature and cultural memory studies. The resurgence of interest in monsters and the turn towards space as a cultural and political entity have been a driving force behind the annual conferences organized around the theme of Monstrous Geographies over the past four years.
The contributors understand the two words of the conference theme in their broadest possible senses. The monstrous entails the affective registers of fear, anxiety, trauma, as well as forms of excess and transgression. Likewise, geographies are both physical and metaphorical, corporeal and psychological, rural and urban, real and imagined. Apart from offering an insight into the conference, this book bears witness to the diversity of approaches to studying the intersections of monstrosity and geography.
The first cluster of chapters explore monstrosity in the realms of space and the body. Alexander John Bridger’s chapter takes the reader to Ground Zero of the 9/11 attacks in New York in the form of a psychogeographical mapping of trauma and practices of commemoration. Similarly, the physical site of violence as genius loci is crucial to Hans Christian Post’s discussion of visual representations of the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-79 that expose gruesome details of captivity, torture and death, which he uses as a platform to critically reflect on well-embedded codes of reverence, observed in commemorations of European genocides. Space emerges in a different form in Rhiannon Firth’s chapter, where monstrous shapes in graffiti and street art in London give expression to public resentment towards gentrification. In the first cluster’s final chapter which analyses contemporary art pieces dealing with and/or employing menstrual blood, Ruth Green-Cole explores how the female body operates as a site of heterotopia through the tabooization of menstrual blood.
The second cluster of chapters concerns itself with myth, the occult, the virtual, and concludes with monsters applied to educational purposes. Zoila Clark’s discussion of the monstrous mermaid-fairy Mélusine, featured in Starbucks’s Logo, takes the reader onto mythological terrains in order to explore and possibly reintroduce the critical and disruptive potentials of the figure, while Cavan McLaughlin’s chapter problematizes the notion of evil in Aleister Crowley’s occult religion of Thelema. In his discussion of the virtual geography of the image, Jad Khairallah locates the emotionlessness of the culture of spectatorship as an ‘overwhelming plague’ to contend with. Finally, Joshua Paddison examines the omnipresence of monsters in popular culture as a rich reservoir of case studies to investigate interrelations of religion, space, and culture in education.
The landscape that these chapters explore is historical and mythical, physical and virtual, corporeal and architectural, and textual and visual. They are of the past, as well as of the present and the future. Featuring a variety of theoretical and methodological apparatuses, the chapters you are about to read are individual expeditions into this monstrously fascinating terrain.
| Original language | English |
|---|
| Place of Publication | Oxford |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Inter-Disciplinary Press |
| Number of pages | 101 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-84888-370-3 |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 |
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