Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents the second semester’s first and the year’s seventh event,
a lecture by
Dr Rod Giblett of Edith Cowan University.
As usual excellent wine (and orange juice) will be available.
Abstract:
For some late nineteenth-century writers the modern city has a dark underside figured as jungle, swamp, abyss, nether world or dreadful night. The commonplace responses of dread and horror that were projected on to the natural swamp at the time are displaced on to the artificial swamp of the urban underside. By contrast, for some early twentieth-century this underside is both fascinating and horrifying. Recently for one early twenty-first century writer the back blocks of the hypermodern city are characterised as regions of rust and ruin steeped in swamps. All these writers express anxiety or dread about the city. Those who characterise the underside of the city as swamp are ‘placist’ in that they ascribe characteristics to a (man-made) place (the city) that were previously ascribed to a place not made with human hands (the swamp). The natural (swamp) is used to figure and legitimate the cultural (city). The negative connotations that attach to the swamp are initially attached to the urban underside. Later the negative connotations of the underside of the city become attached to the swamp in a self-fulfilling circuit. City as swamp is bad because swamp is bad and swamp is bad because it is like city as swamp.
About the speaker:
Rod Giblett is a PhD graduate of Murdoch University and has taught there, at Curtin University of Technology and at Edith Cowan University where he is currently Programme Director (Communications) in the School of Communications and Contemporary Arts and the leader of the Space, Place, Body and Technology research group. He is the co-editor with Hugh Webb of Western Australian wetlands: The Kimberley and South-West (Black Swan Press/ Wetlands Conservation Society, 1996). He is the author of Postmodern wetlands: Culture, history, ecology (Edinburgh University Press, 1996); Living with the earth: Mastery to mutuality (Salt Publishing, 2004); Forrestdale: People and place (Access Press, 2006); and Sublime communication technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The present paper is drawn from a work-in-progress entitled Quaking zone.
