Abstract
Far from being the purely solitary stage of commerce and transit defined twenty years ago by Marc Augé as a “non-place,” the global hub airport is rather a space in which cosmopolitanist and nationalist allegiances and logics are contested in complex ways. This chapter redresses Augé’s binary of place and non-place by bringing together thinking from cultural theorists on thirdspace as a site of cultural contestation, and various invocations of the airport as global city, terraformer and heterotopia. Taking further the claim for the airport as “in-between,” the chapter uncovers how citation of place occurs here in ways that echo the strategies of museum display, while emplaced experiences of the “anywhere/nowhere” cosmopolitan space can also happen. This chapter extends work done by geographer Edward Soja, adapting Homi Bhabha’s conception of a thirdspace of cultural contestation.
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Notes
- 1.
Please wait a moment! Thank you! in honorific form or keigo, respectful language.
- 2.
A national referendum in 1967 gave full rights of citizenship to Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. See Card (1997) for detail on the modernist appropriation of indigenous and other cultural practices within Australian dance ; see, for example, Meduri (1996), Srinivasan (2012) for more on the contribution of classical dance to India’s nation-building project.
- 3.
At my time of writing, the deal has not yet been signed as it is awaiting a period of consultation with and final approval from the Musqueam members.
- 4.
- 5.
It is worth noting that the YVR Airport Authority began discussion with Musqueam artists at the beginning of their redesign of the international terminal in 1994–1996, acquiring and commissioning works before the terminal design was complete. See Leddy (1997) for an invaluable discussion of the use of indigenous art in the terminal design written at the time of the new terminal opening.
- 6.
Bhabha uses the typesetting Third Space, and Soja uses a slight realignment, Thirdspace. For simplicity, I use a lower-cased general term thirdspace throughout, except when in direct quotation.
- 7.
For more on the use of hybridity as a politicised anti-authoritarian strategy within postcolonial conceptions of identity and society, see Said (1978); Said and Ali (2006); Appadurai (1996, 2001); Spivak (1990); Gandhi (1998); Gilbert and Lo (2009); Lo (2000); Ang (2001, 2003); Hall and du Gay (1996); Hall et al. (1996); Young (1995).
- 8.
- 9.
Soja calls “Of Other Spaces” a “rough and patchy picture” (1996, 154), and goes to some length to qualify his attention to these lecture notes, noting that while exhibited in the public domain shortly before Foucault’s death in 1984 they were never reviewed for publication by Foucault himself and so remain somewhat unofficial to most Foucauldian scholars.
- 10.
Many of the airports I visited as part of my fieldwork are terraformers, made from reclaiming land at the shoreline of Sydney’s Botany Bay (SYD), or building new islands or merging smaller ones in Tung Chong Bay (HKG ) and Osaka Bay (KIX) as some examples. For more on terraforming see Fuller and Harley (2004, 102–109). The “floating” nature of airports can still be felt in those that are land locked, however, sitting, as terminals do, in the midst of a sea of tarmac, as planes dock at terminal edges.
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Shih Pearson, J. (2018). Persistent Place or Thirdspace?. In: Choreographing the Airport. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69572-3_2
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