Comparing Democracies: A Spatial Method with Application to Ancient Athens

This chapter deals with the genesis of architectural knowledge. In particular, it explores those rare moments when early modern English authors wrote about newly discovered examples of ancient architecture, the most important forms of architectural knowledge that existed. I will discuss three such accounts (all published in the Philosophical Transactions) of Roman York, Palmyra, and ancient Athens. These three texts share a preoccupation with truth and accuracy, as befitted the task of communicating highly sought-after architectural knowledge. They also demonstrate the degree of confidence of English writers in this period, not only in how they interpreted ancient architecture, but also in how they sought to criticize previous European authors on the subject. But most importantly, these texts reveal the extent of English intellectuals’ knowledge of the architectural principles of the ancient world and how that knowledge was in a state of flux.

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Epilogue

10.1093/oso/9780199651634.003.0012 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Erika Fischer-Lichte

Keyword(s):

Central Position ◽

Short Discussion ◽

German Culture ◽

Ancient Athens

The book concludes with an epilogue entitled ‘The Return of Dionysus. From Festive Performances to Global Spectacle’. It very briefly retraces the exchange of productions of Greek tragedies between Germany and other countries and ends with the role played by productions of Greek tragedies today, at German as well as international theatre festivals, thus linking them back to the most important festival in ancient Athens, the Great Dionysia. After explaining how such festivals in Germany reassert the central position held by theatre in German culture, the epilogue ends with a short discussion of Jan Fabre’s twenty-four-hour performance Mount Olympus—to Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (Berliner Festspiele, June 2015) as an allegory of and a reflection on Greek tragedy’s endurance on the German stage.

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Michael J. Rinella. Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010.

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs ◽

10.1086/shad25010187 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 25 (1-2) ◽

pp. 187-189

Author(s):

Harold Tarrant

Keyword(s):

Ancient Athens ◽

Drug Culture

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Urban specters

Environment and Planning D Society and Space ◽

10.1177/02637758211030286 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 026377582110302

Author(s):

Asha Best ◽

Margaret M Ramírez

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Black Women ◽

Urban Space ◽

Women Artists ◽

Social Life ◽

The United States ◽

Spatial Method ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Black Life ◽

The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

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