Nick Dunn (editor) - Rethinking darkness : cultures, histories, practices

This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualised.

Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to make sense of the world. This book throws light on the neglect of these social patterns to emphasise how the diverse values, meanings and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights how normative attitudes towards it have emerged, while also emphasising its cultural complexity by considering a contemporary range of alternative experiences and practices. Challenging notions of darkness as negative, as the antithesis of illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of darkness to stimulate our senses and deepen our understandings of different spaces, cultural experiences and creative engagements.

Offering a rich exploration of an emergent field of study across the social sciences and humanities, this book will be useful for academics and students of cultural and media studies, design, geography, history, sociology and theatre who seek to investigate the creative, cultural and social dimensions of darkness.

Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of Imagination, the design research lab at Lancaster University, UK. He is senior fellow at the Institute for Social Futures. Nick has authored numerous books, journal articles and reports on cities, futures and darkness.

Tim Edensor is Professor of Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017), and Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality (2020).

Research on ambiances and atmospheres has grown significantly in recent years in a range of disciplines, including Francophone architecture and urban studies, German research related to philosophy and aesthetics and a growing range of Anglophone research on affective atmospheres within human geography and sociology.

This series offers a forum for research that engages with questions around ambiances and atmospheres in exploring their significances in understanding social life. Each book in the series advances some combination of theoretical understandings, practical knowledges and methodological approaches. More specifically, a range of key questions which contributions to the series seek to address includes:

• In what ways do ambiances and atmospheres play a part in the unfolding of social life in a variety of settings?

• What kinds of ethical, aesthetic and political possibilities might be opened up and cultivated through a focus on atmospheres/ambiances?

• How do actors such as planners, architects, managers, commercial interests and public authorities actively engage with ambiances and atmospheres or seek to shape them? How might these ambiances and atmospheres be reshaped towards critical ends?

• What original forms of representations can be found today to (re)present the sensory, the atmospheric, the experiential? What sort of writing, modes of expression or vocabulary is required? What research methodologies and practices might we employ in engaging with ambiances and atmospheres?

Rethinking Darkness

Cultures, Histories, Practices

Edited by Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Ambiances-Atmospheres-and-Sensory-Experiences-of-Spaces/book-series/AMB

Cultures, Histories, Practices

Edited by
Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor

First published 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2021 selection and editorial matter, Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor; individual chapters, the contributors

The rights of Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-20115-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-25965-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra

TIM EDENSOR AND NICK DUNN

PART I
Histories of the dark

APRIL NOWELL AND NANCY GONLIN

ELISABETH BRONFEN

ALICE BARNABY

NOAM M. ELCOTT

PART II
Cultural practices in the dark

ANKIT KUMAR

GUY BORDIN

ROB SHAW

NINA J. MORRIS

PART III
Sensing darkness

KATRN ANNA LUND

NATALIE MARR

DAMIEN MASSON

SIMON ROBINSON

PART IV
Designing with darkness

MARTIN WELTON

SHANTI SUMARTOJO

LENI SCHWENDINGER

CHRIS LOWE AND PHILIP RAFAEL

NICK DUNN AND TIM EDENSOR

Alice Barnaby is Associate Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University. Her research and teaching expertise lie in the literature and material culture of the long nineteenth century. Her work investigates the relationship between perceptual experience and nineteenth-century modernity. She conducts historicised readings of literary and visual sources in light of current debates concerning theories of affect, ontology and material agency. This work rethinks established methodologies of cultural materialism. Her publications include the recent monograph, Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illimuniation, London 18001900 (2017).

Guy Bordin