The Cultural Construction of London’s East End

Newland, Paul

doi:10.1163/9789401206242

Cited by 26 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…After being long considered as the description that interrupts the flow of temporality or the setting that functions as a static background for the plot, space in narrative poetics has recently acquired a new generative function. As Paul Newland underlines (Newland 2008), there has been a topographical turn in literary and cultural studies that has unveiled the link between geography and social constructions, places and ideologies, space, and imagination. In Atlas of the European Novel (Moretti 1998), Franco Moretti argues that the spatial trajectories of narrative not only establish linkages but also actively set the plot in motion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

Cavalcanti

2024

Humanities

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The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where locations acquire a personality and significantly contribute to the shaping of gender identities. Although most of these narratives portray female protagonists who develop strategies of resistance and sisterhood within traditional domestic spaces, the widely praised transnational novels Brick Lane and The Mistress of Spices show that women can also achieve independence and self-realization in the bustling urban environment. Drawing on cultural geography as well as gender and social studies, this essay argues that the global dimension of the city offers diasporic women the opportunity to forge new empowered selves in the above-mentioned books. First, the article maintains that London and Oakland, CA, where the main characters live, exert a centripetal force on women, thus triggering change and mobility, both in physical and psychical terms. Second, it claims that the two cities are gendered “heterotopias”, i.e., heterogeneous spaces where border-crossing women, like those featured in the two novels at hand, can overcome alienation and develop creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. In conclusion, urban spaces serve as “safe houses” for immigrant women, where they can cure their emotional and physical diseases and become figures of adaptive hybridity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

Cavalcanti

2024

Humanities

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“…It is not, and has never been, a village, town or borough." 17 Thus, seeing, as Newland does, the East End more "as a potent and enduring spatial idea," 18 this article transfers the term to Hamburg. In the following, the neighborhoods of Rothenburgsort, Veddel, the South of Hammerbrook and those parts of today's Billwerder which made up the historic district of Billwärder Ausschlag until 1970, comprise Hamburg's East End.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forgotten Fun: Recollecting the Working-Class Pleasurescape of Hamburg’s East End, 1880s-1950s

Just

2022

Journal of Urban History

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In the early twentieth century, St. Pauli was not the only place in Hamburg to go to have fun. In the city’s East End, a wide range of pubs, clubs, and ballrooms turned working-class quarters into a vibrant pleasurescape. Based on historical-topographic and archival research, this paper explores eastern Hamburg’s forgotten pleasurescape with the aim of drawing attention to pleasure culture as a social driving force and of redressing the balance in the city’s one-sided history of pleasure culture. In the course of the study, the term “pleasurescape” is more clearly nuanced and geo-spatial historical mapping further explored as a tool for urban history.

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“…These may be generative for thinking about Northern Ireland in the Troubles as an audio-visual place which has a particular iconography in which certain events occur, certain characters are found and certain stories are told (Moretti, 1998: 5). The chronotope, which Bakhtin elaborated in relation to the literary pastoral, has been used by cinema scholars Paula Massood (2003) to conceptualise 'the hood' in LA-set African American cinema and Paul Newland (2008) to consider the 19 th century East End of London. Michael Pigott characterises Bakhtin's idea as 'at once brilliantly simple and brilliantly opaque' in the way in which it identifies a 'conjunction of time and space in the novel ' (2018: xx).…”

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confidence: 99%

The New Northern Ireland as a Crime Scene

Brunsdon¹

2023

Journal of British Cinema and Television

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This article explores the increased attractiveness of a ‘post-conflict’ Belfast as a television setting for British television police series. The Fall (2013, 2016), Bloodlands (2021) and Marcella (2021) are all set in Belfast, while most of the hit series Line of Duty (2012–) has been filmed in Northern Ireland. How do these new Belfast-set crime dramas negotiate the tropes and iconography of twentieth-century Troubles Belfast, while also participating in the transformation of the city associated with the arrival of transnational audiovisual industries? While recognising that much recent scholarship focuses on the creation of the Titanic Quarter through the redevelopment of the Harland & Wolff shipyard and the production of the HBO-Warner series, Game of Thrones, this article pursues the recent appearances of contemporary Belfast on screen in Bloodlands, Marcella (2021) and Line of Duty. Building on scholarship, such as the work of John Hill, Martin McLoone and Ruth Barton which has established the contours of the Troubles film, the history of Belfast on film and genre in the Northern Ireland context, the existence of an identifiable chronotope ‘Troubles Belfast’ is proposed. Is Belfast recognisable as a specific place outside a Troubles chronotope? What are the stories that can be told of Northern Ireland outside a Troubles chronotope? In particular, which is pertinent to an industry desperate to maintain its attractiveness to transnational productions, the tension between the identification of Belfast as a specific place and the generation of new and different stories is explored in the case studies. To what extent is the televisual use of the new screen Belfast caught in the paradox that it is the old Belfast which makes it an attractive setting for crime drama?

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The Cultural Construction of London’s East End

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

Forgotten Fun: Recollecting the Working-Class Pleasurescape of Hamburg’s East End, 1880s-1950s

The New Northern Ireland as a Crime Scene

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