Full Description
This collection of essays expands upon an emerging topic within and beyond the field of communication studies that challenges students and scholars of the built environment to peer beyond the somewhat typical collection of monuments, museums, and memories often found in essays related to space and place, to consider the role of ruins as lenses upon modernity.
These locales, which include economic ghost towns, industrial relics, prison sites, and other places associated with so-called dark tourism generally conjure feelings of melancholy, connotations of failure. While their assemblages of moldy floors, waterlogged walls, shattered windows, and sagging roofs do not make for traditional tourist snapshots, ruins possess a potential to inspire awe, an awareness of the tenuous nature of modern confidence, a reverence for the passing of things. In their inquiry and investigation, one may encounter oddly sublime traces and fragments of the contemporary age.
Seeking to better understand the rhetoric and performances of ruins, contributors to this book have crafted chapters that are theoretically sophisticated and vividly authored. The resulting collection of nine essays surveys ruins within and beyond the United States to examine a unique and unexpected constellation of ideas related to authenticity, identity, memory, representation, and power.
Contents
Introduction
Andrew F. Wood
Chapter 1: On the Ruins of a Black Utopia: Moving Memories of Buxton, Iowa
Faber McAlister and Dylan Rollo
Chapter 2: Communicative Spaces of Abjection: Rust, Ruination, & Renewal in Gary, Indiana
Austin D. Hestdalen
Chapter 3: Performing Industrial Heritage in the Ruins of Bethlehem Steel
Christopher Lee Adamczyk
Chapter 4: "Today I Found a Rotting Experimental Prison in the Woods": Re-Assessing Ruins of the Past for the Sake of the Present
Evan R. Jones
Chapter 5: Restoration Rhetoric and the Ruins of Nauvoo: Creation, Memory, Destruction, and Modernity
Isaac James Richards
Chapter 6: A Discursive Ruin of Modernity: Exploring Motivations for Dark Tourism at the Colosseum
Aneilya Barnes and Clay M. Craig
Chapter 7: Rhetoric of Memories at Alcatraz National Park: Mediated Texts and Experiencing Dark Tourism
Edwin S. Lee and Nathan J. Ruiz
Chapter 8: Manufactured Ruins: Tourism, Comfort Colonialism, and Imperial Nostalgia Within Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom
Derek T. Buescher
Chapter 9: Ruins, Remembrance, and Pedagogy: Teaching the Topography of Terror
Andrew F. Wood and Tabitha Hart
