Cluster on Materialities/Aesthetics of Port City Environments

Scholarship on port cities often focuses on long-distance exchange and the circulation of materials, people, and capital across complex systems. Such analyses have produced major insights into transoceanic trade networks, global politics, and long-term diasporas, moving research beyond the area studies paradigm in important ways. But such studies also often deploy macro-scale perspectives, emphasizing movements across vast spaces and temporalities. But what happens to things and people once they stop moving in a network and come to rest in a local place? After all, while ports are in many ways first and foremost transport and travel hubs, they are also local places with a lively and energetic materiality of their own. This cluster seeks to address this materiality by orienting the study of port cities toward the cultural. Members of this cluster will ask questions about the kinds of modes of being and seeing port cities embody and enact. A focus on the materiality — as opposed to the discursive – also foregrounds the affective and the “real” of life in maritime cities. That is, how are the physical spaces of port harbors, its architectures, urban plans, food cultures, and arts of self-fashioning sites of cultural inscription and symbolic expression? Beyond facilitating circulation and exchange, how do port cities address, even constitute people as mobile or even immobile subjects? How can accounts of the physical matter and popular culture of port city encompass the politics of territoriality and also reveal its creative and imaginary dimensions? Further, a focus on ports as cultural spaces foregrounds how maritime and land-based places must be brought into the same analytical frame.