Journal ArticleDOI
The Power of Commemorative Street Names
TLDR
In this article, the authors explore the semiotic and political operation of commemorative street names and reveal that street names are a powerful mechanism for the legitimation of the sociopolitical order.Abstract:
Street names are ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious. This might be the reason why social scientists have hardly addressed the issue of street names in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power. In this paper the author explores the semiotic and political operation of commemorative street names. He sheds light on the procedures of the naming and the renaming of streets and the utilization of street names for commemorative purposes as a fundamental feature of modern political culture. Further, he elaborates on how street names, in addition to their fundamental role in the spatial organization and semiotic construction of the city, are also participants in the cultural production of shared past. In addition, the author uncovers commemorative street names as a powerful mechanism for the legitimation of the sociopolitical order. Commemorative street names provide for the intersection of hegemonic ideological structures with the spatial practices...read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Memory and place: geographies of a critical relationship
TL;DR: The authors assesses some of the major trends in this burgeoning literature, especially those works spatial in nature, which they find to be of considerable cross-disciplinary importance, and provide a modest overview of that critical, dynamic relationship.
Journal ArticleDOI
Geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies
TL;DR: The authors provide a selective genealogy of the critical turn in place-name studies and consider three complementary approaches to analyzing spatial inscription as a toponymic practice: political semiotics, governmentality studies, and normative theories of social justice and symbolic resistance.
Journal ArticleDOI
Memorial landscapes: analytic questions and metaphors
Owen J. Dwyer,Derek H. Alderman +1 more
TL;DR: A review of the literature indicates that geographers scrutinize memorial landscapes through three conceptual lenses that may be understood via the metaphors of "text,", "arena, and performance".
Journal ArticleDOI
Street names and the scaling of memory: the politics of commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American community
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the politics of naming these streets as a "scaling of memory" -a socially contested process of determining the geographic extent to which the civil rights leader should be memorialized.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South
TL;DR: The naming of streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) is an important subject for African Americans as they rewrite the landscape of southern identity and commemoration.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Ethnic Origins of Nations
Richard Jenkins,Anthony D. Smith +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the Durability of ethnic communities in pre-modern and modern history, including the formation of small nations, and their formation in the modern era.
Journal ArticleDOI
Society, Action and Space: An Alternative Human Geography.
Neil Smith,Benno Werlen +1 more
Book ChapterDOI
The Betweenness of Place
TL;DR: The geographer's concept of specific place draws attention to the relation between particularizing and universalizing discourses and between subjective and objective perspectives specific place refers to the conceptual fusion of space and experience that gives areas of the earth's surface a "wholeness" or an "individuality" as discussed by the authors.
Related Papers (5)
Geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies
Place-Names in Israel's Ideological Struggle over the Administered Territories
Saul B. Cohen,Nurit Kliot +1 more