CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

City, Memory and Performing Body

Organiser: Reena Tiwari

Stanley- Niaah, Sonjah (University of West Indies, Jamaica) THE STORY OF SPACE AND CELEBRATION IN KINGSTON'S DANCE HALL MEMORY
From 'Limbo' to 'Butterfly' and the 'Jerry Springer', dances throughout Jamaican dancehall history have mostly been created in the urban Kingston Metropolitan Area. The city of Kingston is therefore a site of collective memory in respect of dancehall. The paper will look in detail at the spatiality of select venues and some of the dances that were popular at those venues, as a way of making a statement about spaces used over the period 1986-2001. Do these spaces hold any significance for Kingston's memory or not? What do they say about the psychology of urban Kingston's dancehall and dancehall culture in general?

Reyes-Ruiz, Rafael (Oberlin College, USA) REPRODUCING CULTURE: LATIN(O) AMERICAN NIGHTCLUBS IN TOKYO
Altough Latin(o) American music arrived in Japan as early as the 1930's, its popularization is linked to Latin American immigration since the late 1970's and the current global prominence of Latin sounds in the global stage. In this paper, I will discuss the role of Latin(o) American dance music at popular nightclubs in Tokyo in disseminating "tropical" imaginaries of Latin America. I will also discuss the role of dancing in the organization of immigrant life of Latin Americans in Japan.

Palonen Emilia (University of Essex, United Kingdom) COLLECTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL MEMORIES IN POSTCOMMUNIST CITY-TEXT OF BUDAPEST
Postcommunism brought another wave of changes in the city-text of Budapest. Street names were changed in the early 1990s, while new statues and memorials are still supplementing the socialist ones. Writing the city-text is a series of attempts at reconstructing the past and building a common set of heroes. Besides political attempt at legitimacy, these provide an individual experience of nowtime, a mix of memories - both collective and individual - and presence. The proposed paper will account for the ways in which politics of memories have been inscribed in the city of Budapest through the street names and statues. It especially tackles their role in construction of identities of places and identifications through space.

Jamieson Kirstie (Napier University, Scotland) EDINBURGH, A TIME OR A PLACE
Festivals provide a rich pool of visual symbols through which national and urban identity is communicated to potential tourists and corporate investors, but would it be too reductive to define the existence of festivals by their economic or political function? The manipulation of space and time, identities and identification takes place through a magnified re-interpretation of the urban landscape. What is the nature of this particular festival logic of image-making? What does the gaze of the festival reveal and conceal in its representations? Within the temporal and cyclical conditions of Edinburgh's festivals, the city, the state and the nation are visualised in representations of urban bohemianism, corporate sponsorship, cosmopolitan consumerism, interculturalism and, high and popular culture. This paper explores the production of symbols, spaces, atmospheres, reputations and identities in Edinburgh's festivals.

Motohashi, Yayoi (Waseda University, Japan) DREAM AND CONTRADICTION OF CREATING NATIONAL STYLE: NATIONALISITC MOVEMENTS OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN HUNGARY AND FINLAND AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY
At the turn of the 20th century, there were movements to seek for creating a national style in Hungary and Finland. At this time, Hungary became independent under the Austria-Hungary Double Monarchy. Budapest, the new capital of Hungary, was full of zeal to have their own state. Finland was, at this time, under the pressure of "Russification", and seeking for the independence. The nationalistic movements were flourished there. Architects tried to express their national identity with the inspiration from their own history. They used folk art motifs for creating the national style. Artists had to face with contradiction. The national style should be the style, which identify the nation. However, there was no such style. They had to create this partly artificially. Above all of artificiality and contradiction, or may be because of that, their national style represents the "golden era", reflecting their strong will and their dreams.