Do individual cities matter? Negotiating the particular

In this article, I reflect on how urban scholars negotiate between the general and the particular not by turning to sampling strategies or statistical techniques but by situating the city in a favourable rhetorical space. In effect, they attempt to close the gap theoretically. My substantive and specific focus is urban scholarship that addresses individual cities and that frames that city either as a laboratory in which to do urban research, a lens through which to see other cities, or as the archetype for a school of urban studies. I concentrate mainly on the work of US urban scholars.

Agency in Action

In 2014, Rawlins and Wilson proposed a typology of agential interactions between users and designers of interactive data displays. This article tests that typology by studying 20 users working with three different types of interactive data displays and answering questions, which were coded by verb and actor and analyzed for themes. The authors show that rhetorical agency is marked by thoughts, actions, and language. Affordances by the designer open a shared rhetorical space where user and designer are coparticipants. As interactivity increases, participants see themselves as rhetorical agents in a community of rhetorical agents rather than as conduits of information.

The Transnational Film Remake in the American Press

American film critics commonly deride Hollywood’s practice of remaking foreign films as an indication of the industry’s creative bankruptcy and imperialist tendencies. Such sentiments occur as early as the 1930s, just as Hollywood gained institutional cohesion and as various countries fostered their local “national” cinemas. This suggests that American critics have consistently held an ambivalent stance toward Hollywood, particularly when situated in relation to the world’s cinemas. Critics have participated in an enduring conflation of the “foreign” with artistic quality and Hollywood with crass commercialism and, concomitantly, reinforced simplistic notions about transnational cinematic flows. Yet within and alongside such reviews, American critics created a rhetorical space for a more nuanced approach to transnational cinema through their use of different critical keywords, points of analysis, and methods of evaluation. This chapter explores the historically changing criteria by which American film critics have evaluated Hollywood’s transnational film remakes as a means of uncovering how the “transnational” operated in popular American film discourse, even if it was not named as such.