Celebrating Temple University Press Books at the Urban Affairs Association conference

This week in North Philly Notes, we spotlight our new Urban Studies titles, which will be on display at the Urban Affairs Association conference, April 24-27 in Los Angeles, CA.

On April 25, at 3:30 pm, Latino Mayors, edited by Marion Orr and Domingo Morel, will be the subject of a panel discussion.

On April 26, at 2:05 pm, Alan Curtis, co-editor of Healing Our Divided Society, will participate in a presentation entitled, The Kerner Commission 50 Years Later. 

Temple University Press titles in Urban Studies for 2018-2019

Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968, edited by Mark Shiel
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the worldwide mass protest movements of 1968—against war, imperialism, racism, poverty, misogyny, and homophobia—the exciting anthology Architectures of Revolt explores the degree to which the real events of political revolt in the urban landscape in 1968 drove change in the attitudes and practices of filmmakers and architects alike.

Constructing the Patriarchal City: Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto, and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940s, by Maureen A. Flanagan
Constructing the Patriarchal City compares the ideas and activities of men and women in four English-speaking cities that shared similar ideological, professional, and political contexts. Historian Maureen Flanagan investigates how ideas about gender shaped
the patriarchal city as men used their expertise in architecture, engineering, and planning to fashion a built environment for male economic enterprise and to confine women in the private home. Women consistently challenged men to produce a more
equitable social infrastructure that included housing that would keep people inside the city, public toilets for women as well as men, housing for single, working women, and public spaces that were open and safe for all residents.

Contested Image: Defining Philadelphia for the Twenty-First Century, by Laura M. Holzman
Laura Holzman investigates the negotiations and spirited debates that affected the city of Philadelphia’s identity and its public image. She considers how the region’s cultural resources reshaped the city’s reputation as well as delves into discussions about official efforts to boost local spirit. In tracking these “contested images,” Holzman illuminates the messy process of public envisioning of place and the ways in which public dialogue informs public meaning of both cities themselves and the objects of urban identity.

Courting the Community: Legitimacy and Punishment in a Community Court, by
Christine Zozula
Courting the Community is a fascinating ethnography that goes behind the scenes to explore how quality-of-life discourses are translated into court practices that marry therapeutic and rehabilitative ideas. Christine Zozula shows how residents and businesses participate in meting out justice—such as through community service, treatment, or other sanctions—making it more emotional, less detached, and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders. She also examines both “impact panels,” in which offenders, residents, and business owners meet to discuss how quality-of-life crimes negatively impact the neighborhood, as well as strategic neighborhood outreach efforts to update residents on cases and gauge their concerns.

Daily Labors: Marketing Identity and Bodies on a New York City Street Corner, by Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky
Daily Labors reveals how ideologies about race, gender, nation, and legal status operate on the corner and the vulnerabilities, discrimination, and exploitation workers face in this labor market. Pinedo-Turnovsky shows how workers market themselves to conform to employers’ preconceptions of a “good worker” and how this performance paradoxically leads to a more precarious workplace experience. Ultimately, she sheds light on belonging, community, and what a “good day laborer” for these workers really is.

Democratizing Urban Development: Community Organizations for Housing across the United States and Brazil, by Maureen M. Donaghy
Rising housing costs put secure and decent housing in central urban neighborhoods in peril. How do civil society organizations (CSOs) effectively demand accountability from the state to address the needs of low-income residents? In her groundbreaking book, Democratizing Urban Development, Maureen Donaghy charts the constraints and potential opportunities facing these community organizations. She assesses the various strategies CSOs engage to influence officials and ensure access to affordable housing through policies, programs, and institutions.

Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture: The Educational Legacy of Lewis
Mumford and Ian McHarg, by William J. Cohen, With a Foreword by
Frederick R. Steiner
Lewis Mumford, one of the most respected public intellectuals of the twentieth century, speaking at a conference on the future environments of North America, said, “In order to
secure human survival we must transition from a technological culture to an ecological culture.” In Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture, William Cohen shows how  Mumford’s conception of an educational philosophy was enacted by Mumford’s
mentee, Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect and regional planner at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg advanced a new way to achieve an ecological culture through an educational curriculum based on fusing ecohumanism to the planning and design disciplines.

Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 2018

In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based
policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work.

Latino Mayors:  Political Change in the Postindustrial City, edited by Marion Orr and Domingo Morel
As recently as the early 1960s, Latinos were almost totally excluded from city politics. This makes the rise of Latino mayors in the past three decades a remarkable American story—one that explains ethnic succession, changing urban demography, and political contexts. The vibrant collection Latino Mayors features case studies of eleven Latino mayors in six American cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford, Miami, and Providence.

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter, by
Caitlin Frances Bruce
Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emotion, creativity, and experimentation. In Painting Publics,
Caitlin Bruce explores how various legal graffiti scenes across the United States, Mexico, and Europe provide diverse ways for artists to navigate their changing relationships with publics, institutions, and commercial entities.

Celebrating Temple University Press Books at the Association for Asian American Studies conference

This week in North Philly Notes, we spotlight our new Asian American titles, which will be on display at the Association for Asian American Studies conference, April 25-27 in Madison, Wisconsin. Several Temple University Press titles will be celebrated at a reception for new books on Thursday, April 25, at 6:00 pm in the Madison Concourse Hotel.

But wait, there’s more!…

Temple University Press is hosting a reception at 2:00 pm on Friday, April 26 to celebrate 50 years of publishing. Our Asian American History and Culture series editors are expected to attend.

 

Temple University Press titles in Asian American Studies for 2018-2019

From Confinement to Containment: Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War, by Edward Tang, examines the work of four Japanese and Japanese/American artists and writers during this period: the novelist Hanama Tasaki, the actor Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the painter Henry Sugimoto, and the children’s author Yoshiko Uchida. Tang shows how the film, art, and literature made by these artists revealed to the American public the linked processes of U.S. actions at home and abroad. Their work played into—but also challenged—the postwar rehabilitated images of Japan and Japanese Americans as it focused on the history of transpacific relations such as Japanese immigration to the United States, the Asia-Pacific War, U.S. and Japanese imperialism, and the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans.

Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern, by Shirley Jennifer Lim, re-evaluates the pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong who made more than sixty films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and even starred in her own television show. Her work helped shape racial modernity as she embodied the dominant image of Chinese and, more generally, “Oriental” women between 1925 and 1940. Lim scrutinizes Wong’s cultural production and self-fashioning to provide a new understanding of the actress’s career as an ingenious creative artist.

America’s Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire, by Marguerite Nguyen, challenges the prevailing genealogy of Vietnam’s emergence in the American imagination—one that presupposes the Vietnam War as the starting point of meaningful Vietnamese-U.S. political and cultural involvements. Examining literature from as early as the 1820s, Marguerite Nguyen takes a comparative, long historical approach to interpreting constructions of Vietnam in American literature. She analyzes works in various genres published in English and Vietnamese by Monique Truong and Michael Herr as well as lesser-known writers such as John White, Harry Hervey, and Võ Phiến. America’s Vietnam recounts a mostly unexamined story of Southeast Asia’s lasting and varied influence on U.S. aesthetic and political concerns.

Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return, by Patricia P. Chu. In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents’ ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic “returns”: first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory.

Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire, by Cynthia Wu, examines representations of same-sex desires and intraracial intimacies in some of the most widely read pieces of Asian American literature. Analyzing canonical works such as John Okada’s No-No Boy, Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, as well as Philip Kan Gotanda’s play, Yankee Dawg You Die, Wu considers how male relationships in these texts blur the boundaries among the homosocial, the homoerotic, and the homosexual in ways that lie beyond our concepts of modern gay identity. Wu lays bare the trope of male same-sex desires that grapple with how Asian America’s internal divides can be resolved in order to resist assimilation.

Art in the Age of Magnetic Reproduction

This week in North Philly Notes, Laura Holzman, author of Contested Image, appreciates a magnet of Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic, one of the artworks featured in her new book.

I have a Gross Clinic magnet on my refrigerator. That’s right—a reproduction of Thomas Eakins’s celebrated 1875 painting helps keep coupons, family photos, and wedding invitations in their place. When I reach for the yogurt I see Dr. Samuel Gross leading a surgical procedure to remove infected bone from his patient’s thigh. If I glance up while chopping carrots, I see a body on an operating table. How did an image that was once deemed too gory for display in an art gallery come to be a regular view during meal prep?

My dad gave me the magnet a few years ago. He knew that I had been studying the painting, so when he saw the magnet in the gift shop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he couldn’t resist. He’d picked out other magnets for me in the past—usually from national parks where he’d gone hiking. But this one surprised me. I did an amused double-take when he put it in my hand. It wasn’t that a famous artwork had been reproduced on an everyday object—anyone who’s been to a museum gift shop has seen the likenesses of notable works of art printed on mugs, t-shirts, umbrellas, and more. I was struck instead by this particular image. In The Gross Clinic, doctors perform an innovative operation while an audience observes from their seats in the surgical theater. Visually, the striking contrast between deep shadows and bright highlights directs a viewer’s attention to the lead surgeon and the patient. A team of doctors hold the patient still, keep him sedated, and probe the incision in his leg. There is blood on Dr. Gross’s hands. A cringing woman averts her eyes. The medical team focuses on their work. This is undeniably an intense scene. It’s apparently also one that makes a good souvenir from a visit to the museum.

The Gross Clinic has taken on different meanings since Eakins completed it. It has been rejected from and embraced in fine-art settings. It has been used to tell stories about the artist, the period when he lived and worked, the history of art, and Philadelphia. Eakins conceived of the painting as a submission to the Centennial Exhibition, the 1876 world’s fair held in Philadelphia. The organizers of the festival, concerned about the raw imagery, decided that it was more appropriate for display in a medical exhibit than in an art gallery. By the time Eakins died in 1916, the painting had been included in prominent art exhibitions, and essays memorializing the artist gave the painting high praise. For more than 120 years the painting was part of the collection of Jefferson University, the medical school where Dr. Gross had been a beloved faculty member. In 2006, when Jefferson University announced plans to sell The Gross Clinic—potentially to an out-of-state collector—the painting acquired yet another layer of meaning. Local audiences who helped the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts jointly purchase the painting embraced it as a city icon that belonged in Philadelphia and nowhere else.

The fundraising and public relations campaign to keep The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia is one of the key episodes I examine in Contested Image: Defining Philadelphia for the Twenty-First Century. The book demonstrates how passionate, wide-reaching public conversations about where art belongs in the city were tied to Philadelphia’s changing reputation around the year 2000. By examining the public discourse surrounding The Gross Clinic sale and by looking closely at the painting itself, I show how the identity of the painting and the identity of the city became intertwined.

This important part of the painting’s recent history affects how viewers today encounter The Gross Clinic. In the museum, visitors are invited to connect the story of the sale with their understanding of the artwork because the credit line on the object label acknowledges the thousands of people who contributed to the fundraising campaign. At home, there’s no credit line to provide that context, but the magnet itself reframes the nineteenth-century artwork depicted on its surface. The diminutive scale—just 9 by 6.5 centimeters—and the flatness of the print discourage close looking. When I see the magnet, I recognize the image as The Gross Clinic, but I don’t look carefully the way I would look at the actual painting. Downplaying the artwork as object shifts the emphasis to what it represents: Eakins’s artistry, medical excellence, a trip to the museum, the city of Philadelphia. When I look at the magnet, I don’t see the bloody wound. I see a reminder of a place (Philadelphia) and an activity (visiting the museum, raising money to keep the painting local). In that way it’s not so different from the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone magnets that hang on the door nearby.

Exploring Public Art Worlds

This week in North Philly Notes, Caitlin Frances Bruce, author of Painting Publics, writes about the transnational graffiti art scenes she discovered. 

Those of us who live in the United States are experiencing the daily effects of a media and political sphere that is deeply polarized due to ideological but also algorithmic frameworks that make transformative dialogue difficult, if not impossible. As we are bombarded with images of white supremacist violence, environmental catastrophe, and warnings about social alienation, it is not surprising that many are drawn to histories of political intervention that are spectacular and dramatic. We need such interventions. But, I would argue, and many other public theory scholars have, such a focus on the drama of revolutionary praxis elides the ordinary labor and infrastructure maintenance that often goes on behind the scenes.

While Painting Publics is focused on graffiti, a rich and engaging scene for scholarly study and creative practice, its insights go beyond legal graffiti worlds. It emerged out of homesickness. When I moved to Evanston, Illinois for undergraduate studies I was in a new suburban environment and acutely missed the density, heterogeneity, and intensity of New York City. When I went into Chicago it was a surprise to be met by gargantuan blocks and, in the downtown Loop, a distinct lack of the kind of dwelling and use of parks that was common in my native Inwood, Manhattan. I was lucky to take a course on Urban History from Gergeley Baics and Contemporary Art from Hannah Feldman where I learned about different philosophies of urban planning and development that helped to explain how and why cities like New York and Chicago evolved differently, producing different possibilities and models of encounters, and why different frameworks for artmaking and relationships to site and publics shifts the meaning of the work in public space. With some funding from Northwestern I conducted a survey of murals in Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other Latin American neighborhoods in Chicago: Humboldt Park, Logan Square, and Pilsen. This was in 2006 when intense debates about Tax Increment Funding and gentrification were going strong. It was after the displacements caused by UIC’s expansion, but before the creation of the 606 walking trail that seems to have cemented a new kind of dispossession in South and West Chicago. Though graffiti came up in my interview with Jon Pounds of the Chicago Public Art Group who framed it as a kind of evolution of muralism, I was unsure of how to meet or understand an art form that primarily seemed to be based on anonymity and illegality.

In 2009 a colleague in Art History, Angelina Lucento, invited me along for a mural tour led by Kymberly Pinder. On the tour, which largely focused on iconic murals from the Chicago Mural Movement and the Black Arts Movement Pinder mentioned a legal graffiti festival: the Meeting of Styles. I went to the Chicago iteration of the festival in September, 2010, and my whole definition of graffiti, of public art, and of site specificity changed. At the festival, I was met with boisterous publicity, racial heterogeneity, and a kind of deep connection to site by artists who practiced a form of public communication (graffiti writing) that was often condemned as thoughtless vandalism, empty words, visual pollution. After attending my first Meeting of Styles in Chicago, between 2010 to 2017 I attended different iterations of this festival in Mexico City/Ciudad Neza, Mexico, Chicago, Illinois, Perpignan, France, and Wiesbaden, Germany where I met and interviewed about 100 artists.

Through exploring public art worlds in Chicago, and then in Mexico, France, and Germany, I learned about global frameworks for mentorship, friendship, solidarity, and worldmaking. Following scholars like Lauren Berlant, Bonnie Honig, Jessica Greenberg, Éduoard Glissant, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière and Robert Hariman, this project seeks to explore how public intimacy, public objects, social practice and public visual cultures oriented towards abundance create more mid-level but important scenes of creativity and solidarity. Such spaces are crucial in creating a renewed sense of possibility in the wake of structural violence and the long shadow of the given.

The festival, part of a transnational network, reveals scenes of “spaces for encounter”: “spaces for encounters across difference” that might be “contact, convergence or conflict…routine, repeated, or rare. It is infused with contingency…a physical or virtual locale that is framed in such a way as to encourage transformative engagements, even when its initial purpose may have been very different.” Painting Publics, which explores scenes of publicity and public making through visual culture seeks to expand conversations in visual communication beyond a focus on official/vernacular, resistance/cooption, text/image, and icon/ordinary binaries to attend to the “grey areas” and social processes that are also part of the rhetorical warp and weave of public life. Encounters are crucial if we are to “meaningfully address social and political inequalities and forms of violence, micro and macro, because spaces for encounter function to reactivate the sense of the contingent in social and political space.”