Browsing by Subject "Liminality"

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At the threshold : liminality, architecture, and the hidden language of space
(2013-05) Wilbur, Brett Matthew; Benedikt, Michael
Intersubjectivity is the acknowledgment that the subject of the self, the I, is in direct relations with the subject of the other. There is an immediate correspondence; in fact, one implies the existence of the other as a necessary state of intersubjective experience. This direct relationship negates a need for any external mediation between the two subjects, including the idea of a separate object between the subject of one individual and that of another. The essay proposes that our confrontation with the other occurs not in physical geometric space, but in liminal space, the space outside of the mean of being, at the threshold of relativity. The essay endorses the idea that liminality is not a space between things, but instead is an introjection, an internalization of the reflected world, and a reciprocal notion of the externalized anomaly of the other within each of us. We meet the surface of the world at the edge of our body but the mind is unencumbered by such limitations and as such subsumes the other as itself. Through symbolic language and myth, the surfaces and edges of things, both animate and inanimate, define the geography of the intersubjective mind. Inside the self the other becomes an object and persists as an abstraction of the original subject. We begin to perceive ourselves as the imagined projections of the other; we begin to perceive ourselves as we believe society perceives us. The process applies to the design of architectural space as a rudimentary vocabulary that is consistent with the language of the landscape.
Liminal lives : Haitian migration to the Barrio of La Zurza, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
(2017-12-06) Rubio-Zepeda, José Daniel; Sletto, Bjørn
Immigration by Haitians to the Dominican Republic is a long-standing phenomenon, and today, an estimated 210,000 Haitians live as undocumented immigrants in the Dominican Republic. Immigration from Haiti has been driven by a variety of factors, including historic labor programs designed to attract cheap labor; and poverty, political turmoil and lack of economic opportunities in Haiti. In the Dominican Republic, Haitians tend to primarily live in ethnic enclaves, including a high concentration in the capital, Santo Domingo, and particularly in the informal settlement of La Zurza. Using the concepts of “black sense of place,” liminality, and maroonage, I contend that Haitians in La Zurza have built support networks that create community and a sense of solidarity, serving as a source of resilience to contend with the precarious conditions they encounter in La Zurza daily. A survey conducted with two dozen Haitian-born residents of La Zurza shows that Haitians remain in the community for several years, suggesting that their informal support network helps them contend with racialized violence in places such as the Duarte Market in La Zurza, which serves as the principal source of employment for Haitians. However, while Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent have thus created a black sense of place through the constant (re)negotiation of their identities, their liminal, undocumented status also serves to reproduce their state of displacement and placelessness. In particular, their vulnerable position has been exacerbated by the passage of Law TC 168-13 in 2013, retroactively stripping Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship and further intensifying anti-Haitian rhetoric. Undocumented Haitians thus must contend with an ambivalent legal status, which limits their social and geographic mobility and their access to economic opportunities
So this is a man : renegotiating Italian masculinity through liminality
(2011-05) Mabrey, Beatrice Giuseppina; Bini, Daniela, 1945-; Bonifazio, Paola
In Italy, the period directly following World War II was marked by confusion and turbulence as the people struggled to reconstruct both the ideological and physical infrastructure of the nation. While much study has been dedicated to the evolution of femininity and the figure of the woman in this particular period, comparatively little has been written on the refashioning of masculinity in the texts produced in the period between 1940 and 1955. After the fall of the Fascist Regime, Italian masculinity undergoes a drastic transformation as the generation of young men born and raised under the tutelage of Mussolini’s reign attempt to separate themselves from the now-tainted codes of conduct governing male behavior. This report analyzes the renegotiation of Italian masculinity in G. Silvano Spinetti’s non-fictional account Difesa di una generazione (scritti e appunti), Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Beppe Fenoglio’s short story “Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita. These works, written and published in the postwar period, manipulate the vi marginality and privation experienced by the Italian population during the war and postwar period into a liminal state brimming with revolutionary potentiality. The protagonists of these texts (both fictional and non-fictional), isolated from the larger social context and deprived of individual identity, property and privilege, circumvent their polluted patriarchal lines in favor of an alternative ideological patriarchy. While Spinetti, Calvino and Fenoglio’s works advance their liminal narratives as a means of creating an emblematic Italian man capable of rejoining the generative discourse, Pasolini’s text renounces such a progressive view. In Ragazzi di vita, the only possibility for a masculine identity free of Fascism resides in a maintaining a perennial liminality.