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Reading Ruins Against the Grain: Istanbul, Derbent, Postcoloniality


Rebecca Gould


Yale-NUS College; University of Iowa

February 23, 2012

Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 1-18, 2012

Abstract:     
The ruins of church-mosques, museums, and ancient cities inform material culture as allegories inform spiritual life, invoking transcendence amidst desacralization. Drawing on Benjamin, Jameson, and Koselleck to advance our understanding of the functioning of ruins across time, this ethnography of ruins engages with the paradoxes generated by monuments in diverse urban spaces. Istanbul's Hagia Sophia and Museum of Islamic Art, and the ancient city of Derbent (contemporary Daghestan), foreground the ruin as a site of political life across space and time. By revealing the persistence of the past in the present, ruins, it is argued, reimagine colonial modernity.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 19

Keywords: ruins, memory, modernity, postcoloniality, museums, urban, Caucasus, Daghestan, Dagestan, Turkey

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Date posted: February 27, 2012 ; Last revised: September 3, 2012

Suggested Citation

Gould, Rebecca, Reading Ruins Against the Grain: Istanbul, Derbent, Postcoloniality (February 23, 2012). Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 1-18, 2012. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2009912

Contact Information

Rebecca Gould (Contact Author)
Yale-NUS College ( email )
Singapore
HOME PAGE: http://works.bepress.com/r_gould/cv.pdf
University of Iowa
Department of Asian & Slavic Langs & Literatures
United States
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