In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker (eBook, PDF)

Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making
Redaktion: Bennett, Luke

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

During the Cold War military and civil defence bunkers were an evocative materialisation of deadly military stand-off. They were also a symbol of a deeply affective, pervasive anxiety about the prospect of world-destroying nuclear war. But following the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 these sites were swiftly abandoned, and exposed to both material and semantic ruination. This volume investigates the uses and meanings now projected onto these seeming blank, derelict spaces. It explores how engagements with bunker ruins provide fertile ground for the study of improvised meaning making, place-attachment, hobby practices, social materiality and trauma studies. With its commentators ranging across the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this multi-disciplinary collection sets a concern with the phenomenological qualities of these places as contemporary ruins - and of their strange affective affordances - alongside scholarship examining how these places embody, and/or otherwise connect with their Cold War originations and purpose both materially and through memory and trauma. Each contribution reflexively considers the process of engaging with these places - and whether via the archive or direct sensory immersion. In doing so the book broadens the bunker's contemporary signification and contributes to theoretically informed analysis of ruination, place attachment, meaning making, and material culture.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 280
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Juni 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798881872427
• Artikelnr.: 74846791

Autorenporträt

Luke Bennett is Reader in Space, Place & Law in the Department of the Natural and Built Environment at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents / List of figures and tables / Acknowledgements / Part I: Introducing the bunker: Ruins
hunters and motives / 1. Approaching the bunker: Exploring the Cold War through its ruins
Luke Bennett / 2. Entering the bunker with Paul Virilio: The Atlantic Wall
Pure War and trauma
Luke Bennett / Part II: Looking at the bunker: representation
image and affect / 3. Peripheral artefacts: Drawing [out] the Cold War
Stephen Felmingham / 4. Sublime concrete: The fantasy bunker
explored
Kathrine Sandys / 5. Processual engagements: Sebaldian pilgrimages to Orford Ness
Louise K. Wilson / Part III: Embracing the bunker: Identity
materiality and memory 6. Torås fort: A speculative study of war architecture in the landscape
Matthew Flintham / 7. Bunker and cave counterpoint: Exploring underground Cold War landscapes in Greenbrier County
West Virginia
María Alejandra Pérez / 8. Recuperative materialities: The Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival
J.J. Zhang / 9. Once upon a time in Ksamil: Communist and post-communi