Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Embodying the Periphery is an interdisciplinary publication sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiatives at the University of California Berkeley.

This book combines approaches from the design disciplines, humanities, and social sciences to foster interdisciplinary engagement across geographies around the identities embodied in and of peripheries. Peripheral communities bear human faces and names, necessitating specific modes of inquiry and commitments that prioritize lived human experience and cultural expression. Hence, the peripheries of this book are a question, not a given, the answers to which are contingent forms assembled around embodied identities. Peripheries are urban fringes, periphery countries in the modern world-system, Indigenous lands, occupied territories, or the peripheries of authoritative knowledge, among others.

Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” assume a diffusionist model of literature that situates the origins of literary modernity in the West. This model has found particular favour in the privileged case of the novel, but how do things stand with other genres? This essay examines the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types. Popularly associated with the figure of the urban flaneur and subsequently critiqued by Walter Benjamin, the physiology peaked under the July Monarchy in France and gained unprecedented success in Russian letters where it served to generate the basis of a non-bourgeois public sphere, after which it was also adapted to the circumstances of Russia’s own imperial borderlands. This paper outlines the essential contours of the physiology as it arose in France, in terms of its internal poetics as well as its social currency, and compare its French life with its Russian metropolitan counterpart, where it was transformed from a paraliterary genre to one that would occupy the centre of the Russian literary life in the transition from romanticism to realism. Its subsequent life in the Caucasus region reveals the rise of a colonial urban aesthetics of the picturesque. Does this story confirm or confound the diffusionist model? The essay’s external trajectory confirms the European origins of the genre and its subsequent circulation throughout the Russian empire, from metropole to periphery. A discussion of genre, however, requires more than an account of its its immanent structural features or its subordination to a singular external socio-spatial logic. The social life of circulating genres points to their divergent role in different literary systems, and to the distinct formal and ideological solutions they propose within regional or local contexts. It would appear, then, that the diffusionist model is pertinent to the movement of some hegemonic genres in the modern era, but that the centre/periphery model needs to be complemented by greater attention to the trans/regional and the local as defining levels of geographic scale in the realm of cultural production. Only a trans-scalar analysis, moving between multiple spatial levels, allows us to honour what humanists celebrate as cultural specificity without sacrificing the global perspective offered by world-systems theory.

Looking to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites and traditional ecological knowledge-based infrastructures (Lo–TEK), we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. This article suggests that by hybridizing Lo–TEK with high-tech systems, the GIAHS sites could offer designers a toolkit towards economically, ecologically, culturally, and technologically innovative systems that can improve productivity and resilience. Whereas urban development results in the erasure of history, identity, culture and nature, this idea explores how urbanization can be an agent for the migration and reapplication of agricultural heritage systems, rather than their greatest threat. Cities can leap-frog the typical Western model of displacing indigenous diversity for homogenous high-tech. Instead, catalyzing localized, agricultural heritage landscapes like those designated as globally important agricultural heritage systems, as scalable, productive and resilient climate change solutions and technologies. It requires a shift in the thinking about traditional agriculture and about the relationship to Nature, from superior to symbiotic.

Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta is a publication produced by the Global Urban Humanities Research Studio, University of California, Berkeley.

Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at University of California, Berkeley.

This exhibition is the product of a research studio focusing on the interactions between art, villages and cities in China’s Pearl River Delta. It is the second in a series of three research studios sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is a collaboration between the College of Environmental Design and the Arts & Humanities division of the College of Letters and Sciences. Initiated and co-taught by Margaret Crawford (Architecture) and Winnie Wong (Rhetoric) during the spring semester of 2015, the studio critically investigated a wide range of urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta, exploring their historical development, current state, and future potential. These sites ranged from Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, which exports hundreds of thousands of trade paintings around the world, to Xiaozhou Village in Guangzhou, where local artists and art teachers transformed village houses into studios and galleries, and to the collaborative architectural project of Japanese architect Fujimoto and Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. During a spring break trip through the region, students documented and analyzed the ways in which villagers, artists, officials, migrants, developers and entrepreneurs leverage art practices in order to reimagine urban life and urban citizenship. Students and faculty then spent the summer transforming these research materials into an exhibition. The exhibition aims to communicate complex narratives without being reductive and to convey the physical reality of our sites through multiple media including video, dioramas, largescale maps, models, ephemera and objects.

Read through its most visible characteristics, the neighborhood in the morro (hill) can be anywhere in the peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, and cities of the global South. Its specificities might disappear within general frameworks used to study urban peripheries, including center-periphery dichotomies, informal urbanism, and the essentialized identity of the poor. This portrait, instead, is about the neighborhood as a landscape of multiple histories, where heterogeneity and difference have produced specific spaces, rhythms, and their sensory emanations. Such an ethnographic approach provides a deeper understanding of emergent forms of the periphery assembled around certain visibilities, practices, and subjectivities, and engaged in uneven patterns of democratic city-making.

With its all-female leadership and its balance of black nationalism, experimental art, and the politics of respectability, the Berkeley cultural center Rainbow Sign suggests some of the hidden complexities of the Black Arts Movement as it translated itself into the 1970s. Reflecting on their digital curation of the Rainbow Sign archive, the authors suggest that, while a computation-driven strain of digital history has broken much new methodological ground, another strain of digital history-oriented to a larger public and interested in dramatizing the complexities of primary sources through the affordances of digital media-can also yield fresh arguments through the pressure it puts on primary sources to speak to one another. We suggest that the work of digital curation is especially suited for dramatizing the often invisible curatorial work performed by black women such as Mary Ann Pollar, the founder of Rainbow Sign.

Populism on the far left and the far right is reshaping the contemporary city and the urban condition. In this special short-form section, we put forward populism, art and the city as a linked theoretical and methodological framework through the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Our conversations brought together new research in urban studies, art, architecture, public policy, and performance studies into what many people described as a decidedly populist age. Following a short introduction, we share a collection of four papers from such conversations that offer ‘focus sites’ from San Francisco to Palm Springs, Hong Kong to Mexico City, with a diverse set of theoretical proposals that branch from our discussions and shared readings in art, populism, and the city.

Student Articles include-• “Demanding the city: Traces of the UN 50 protests in San Francisco” by Jeff Garnard• “Is forensic architecture the new muralism of the Mexican state? A reflection on racialized violence and the construction of Mexican identity” by Tania Osario Harp• “All that is solid? Movement, repurposed lives and a cardboard citizenry” by Connie Zheng• “Gay desert modern: Sexuality, architecture and indigeneity in Palm Springs, California” by Xander Lenc

Borderwall Urbanisms: Dispatches from the US/Mexico Border is a publication produced by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative as part of the Global Urban Humanities Advanced Resaerch Studio, at the University of California, Berkeley, and supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the GUH, or of the board of the foundation.

There are fourteen major sister cities along the United States - Mexico border whose urban, cultural, and ecological networks have been bifurcated by a borderwall. With 650 miles of wall already constructed, and the population in these urban areas expected to grow to over 20 million inhabitants over the next decade, the long-term effects of the wall’s construction must be carefully considered now in order to anticipate the consequences of its incision into a context of rapid growth and massive migratory flows, especially as the current political climate calls for further wall construction. Using the U.S.- Mexico borderwall as a site of investigation, this experimental graduate seminar/studio class explored the American borderwalled city as an evolving political, societal, historical, and cultural phenomena. Using experimental methods of analysis, fabrication, and collaboration, students were challenged with examining the complex conditions of borderwall urbanism, creating objects and artistic responses to site and space. Several field trips brought students directly to border sites and provided context and examples of innovative reactions that challenge preconceived notions of boundaries and territories. Students learned from examples of artists, writers, and designers whose work is in reaction to the wall. The final project consisted of individual or collaborative works that were deployed at a site along the border.

In 1972, the black artist and writer Romare Bearden traveled from his home in New York to spend ten days in the capital of counterculture—Berkeley, California. He visited on an official commission from the city of Berkeley to create a new artwork for its City Council Chambers. The result was the monumental work Berkeley—The City and its People, which hung for decades until the extensive seismic trouble that plagues City Hall forced its removal to a storage facility. Painted in bright colors, featuring a rainbow and a series of Berkeley’s best-known sites, the complete mural is often read as a celebration of urban harmony.

The efforts in research and teaching that fly under the flag of the “urban humanities” represent one example of a much larger set of phenomena that have emerged across humanistic disciplines for the past two decades. That hybrid initiatives like this have appeared alongside many more broad-based interdisciplinary efforts is telling of the challenges involved in attempting to transform the knowledge and practices that had settled into more or less stable institutional configurations. The existing configurations have proven difficult to change because our institutions are less malleable than we might wish, and because they provide a sense of permanence—some would say a false sense of permanence—in the face of broad shifts in the external conditions surrounding the academic enterprise such as the withdrawal of public support for state institutions and the privatization of higher education across all sectors. But the naturalization of disciplines cannot be a good thing because it leads us to forget that the disciplines are human constructs, and that neither the objects of their study nor their methodological predilections are natural features of the world. It is not that disciplines are intrinsically pernicious, since specialization has led to greater insight and practical interventions, but that academic disciplines have progressively narrowed an appreciation of the meaning of human existence and ways in which it can be bettered.