Thursday 1 August 2013

Forthcoming edited collection to be published by Ashgate around August 2014 
Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space
edited by Tricia Cusack

Thursday 29 November 2012

Review of  'Art and Identity at the Water's Edge' edited by Tricia Cusack (Ashgate, 2012):

http://arlisna.org/pubs/reviews/2012/11/cusack.pdf

Monday 16 July 2012

Sunday 8 July 2012

Viewing Thames Pageants

The idea of a river pageant - a great show of different crafts to delight and intrigue a public audience - is a lovely one and it would be nice to have lots of them. The grand 2012 Thames Pageant - in London England - there is also London and the Thames in Ontario - however turned out to be both too populist, and too 'corporate', with lightweight commentary from comperes, and large privileges for commercial interests, including the occupation of our public bridges.

London's Thames as a site of pageantry and the parade of political interests have an interesting  history. The Thames has long been connected with elaborate ritual and displays designed to enhance the monarchy, as well as to mark the civic and corporate leadership of the capital. Such processions have been depicted in painted riverscapes in which the Thames presented a glittering surface for the passage of the Royal Barge and other ceremonial vessels.

An elaborately carved and gilt barge built for the Prince of Wales in 1732 was still used into the nineteenth century, and ceremonial journeys marked the movement of royal persons and imperial or civic dignitaries between palaces, or to Westminster, or official functions. The City of London with its Lord Mayor had achieved a certain autonomy from the Crown and civic pageantry had a long tradition intimately associated with “English freedoms” with the City represented as “the bulwark of liberty”. London’s own State Barge was used for water pageants including an annual procession or “Triumph” to Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Day, depicted in Canaletto’s panoramic riverscape The Thames and the City (1746-7) illustrated below. This image shows the river thronged with ceremonial barges bearing flags and hundreds of small craft, the motley scene contained by the shoreline and the monumental architecture of St Paul’s, reiterating the river’s symbolic function as a site for national ritual and display.  Not unlike the pageant in 2012.
See also: "The Victorian Thames: England’s Silver Stream or Britain’s 'Monster Soup'?" in Tricia Cusack, Riverscapes and National Identities, Syracuse University Press 2010.



Friday 29 June 2012

 Art and Identity at the Water's Edge 




This collection shows how the marginal territory of the water’s edge
has been represented in art in different places at various times and
how such art contributed to the formation of cultural and national
identities. Essays explore visual cultures of the Jordan and Vltava
Rivers; the South African seaside resort of Durban; post-Hurricane
Katrina New Orleans; and the French Riviera, among other margins of
river and sea.

Thursday 31 May 2012

H-Nationalism: Landscapes/Waterscapes new bibliography

The H-Nationalism list has an ongoing bibliography that it runs on the 'Zotero' website, including specialised bibliographies, one of which, just started, is for Landscapes/Waterscapes.

If you have suggestions for this bibliography, send them to me and I will add them. I don't know the size of the likely audience for it but it will pretty large and international.