Spaces of Culture : City, Nation, World

by Mike Featherstone

• ISBN13: 9780761961215
• ISBN10: 0761961216
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-17
• Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd

Summary

What is culture? How are we to understand the relation between social structure and culture in a world that is becoming increasingly global and which new technologies are making increasingly vital? Spaces of Culture is a critical interrogation of the key coordinates of this global and virtual world: the nation state; modernity and reflexivity; post-Fordism and the spatial logic of the informational city. This discussion extends into a complementary analysis of the public sphere, that questions the reductive representation of technology as a forma of instrumentality, demonstrating how new technologies can offer new spaces of culture. The analysis of public space is essential to an understanding of issues like global citizenship and multicultural human rights. Spaces of Culture will be required reading for students and scholars in sociology, social theory and cultural studies. It will be an essential reference in any critical discussion of the relations between globalization and technology; and culture, politics and the public sphere.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash

PART ONE: TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE

Growth and Failure - Richard Sennett

The New Political Economy and Its Culture

Simulated Sovereignty, Telematic Territoriality - Timothy W Luke

The Political Economy of Cyberspace

Digital Networks and Power - Saskia Sassen

PART TWO: CULTURAL MAPPING

The Postmodern Urban Condition - Michael Dear and Steven Flusty

Roaming the City - Hilary Radner

Proper Women in Improper Places

PART THREE: REFLEXIVE SPACE

Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air - Heidrun Friese and Peter Wagner

Modernity and Contingency

Moving Culture - Ron Eyerman

Radiated Identities - Barbara Adam

In Pursuit of the Temporal Complexity of Conceptual Cultural Practices

PART FOUR: CARTOGRAPHIES OF A NATION

Triumphalist Geographies - Michael J Shapiro

The Anti-Reflexivist Revolution - G[um]oran Dahl

On the Affirmationism of the New Right

PART FIVE: TRANSCULTURAL PLACE

Transculturality - Wolfgang Welsch

The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today

Towards a Multicultural Conception of Human Rights - Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush - Jonathan Friedman

Narrating the Postcolonial - Couze Venn