{"id":1782,"date":"2020-04-23T16:01:40","date_gmt":"2020-04-23T16:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=1782"},"modified":"2020-04-23T13:47:27","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T13:47:27","slug":"building-supernatural-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=1782","title":{"rendered":"Building Supernatural Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this post, Karl Bell, reader in cultural and social history, talks about his new book Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, bringing together scholars from across the globe working on the relationship between supernatural beliefs and urban cultures.\u00a0 He describes what the book is about, and what he learned from the process of international academic collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In my most recent book I brought together and led an international group of scholars in an exploration of magic, monsters, ghosts and storytelling in urban cultures around the world.\u00a0 Examining these ideas from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality<\/em> (Boydell and Brewer, 2019) challenges the assumption that supernatural beliefs and magical practices died out under the impact of modern urbanisation.\u00a0 Engaging with urban supernatural cultures across five continents, the contributors demonstrate how such ideas played a role in evolving urban cultures, and how they continue to serve a cultural function up to the present day.\u00a0 Underlying the broad historical and geographical scope of the book is the argument that the supernatural has continually been adapted and updated to accommodate and express our cultural, economic and environmental fears.<\/p>\n

\"Heart<\/a>

Heart Amulet from the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford<\/p><\/div>\n

The book takes its title from my faculty-funded research project (www.supernaturalcities.com<\/a>), and originated from the project\u2019s first conference, held at the University of Portsmouth in 2016.\u00a0 Both the conference and the subsequent book brought together a diverse range of academic approaches, with contributions from historians, geographers, anthropologists, folklorists and literary scholars.\u00a0 When approached by the publisher, Boydell and Brewer, to develop it into a book, I was encouraged to expand the scope beyond a predominantly European focus.\u00a0 This represented an ambitious scaling up from my previous research and publications, which have focussed on magic, ghosts, and urban legends in nineteenth-century Britain.<\/p>\n

To facilitate that broader scope, I had to seek out scholars around the world who shared an interest in the themes of the book, and that led to a fascinating trawl through Academia.edu.\u00a0 Long before we were all working online due to the Coronavirus, this meant collaborating with scholars who I have never met, in places as varied as Russia, South Africa, the USA and Australia.\u00a0 Given that a third of the contributors were complete strangers to me, I was hugely impressed by their consummate professionalism and the way they got behind the publication.<\/p>\n

My previous book editing experience was as a co-editor on Port Towns and Urban Cultures<\/em> (2016) (See http:\/\/porttowns.port.ac.uk\/port-towns-book\/<\/a>), a collaboration with fellow UoP historians, Professor Brad Beaven and Dr Rob James.\u00a0 For Supernatural Cities<\/em>, the challenges of structuring the book, reviewing chapters, and steering it to completion fell solely to me.\u00a0 This necessarily resulted in a slower process and, again, I was impressed with the contributors\u2019 patience and commitment.\u00a0 Engaging with chapters that ranged from witchcraft in nineteenth-century Paris, to the Goat Man scare near Washington DC in the 1970s, to Manchester\u2019s post-industrial psychogeography and the ghost lore of twenty-first century Beijing certainly took me out of my comfort zone.\u00a0 However, as I have repeatedly found in my research, it is often when we dare to take that step that we develop as scholars.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Goat Man of Washington D.C.<\/p><\/div>\n

The book sets out three ways of understanding the relationship between the supernatural and the urban environment.\u00a0 The first section on enchantment considers the empowering influence of magical beliefs and the ability of folkloric tales to transform and enrich our understanding of the urban environment.\u00a0 Examples are drawn from Paris, London, Limerick and the emerging modern cities of South Africa.\u00a0 Focussing on less positive aspects, the second section uses the supernatural and the Gothic to explore social fears, environmental anxieties, and the demonising of various urban \u2018others\u2019.\u00a0 Here, case studies are drawn from New York, Manila, Washington D.C., Tokyo, the post-Soviet era industrial cities of the Urals, and the London Underground.\u00a0 The third section explores ghosts, spectrality, and their links to haunting, historical guilt and trauma, and memory.\u00a0 Chapters focus on the Australian goldfield town of Ballarat, Mexico City, Beijing and Manchester. Across the collection, and the broad geographical sweep of its examples, it is fascinating to see the way these themes prove universal while taking on their own local cultural and historical expressions.<\/p>\n

\"H.P.<\/a>

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror at Red Hook (1927)<\/p><\/div>\n

The book seeks to make an important contribution to our understanding of how urban environments, both past and present, inspire our imaginations, prompt cultural insecurities, and generate spatial fears.\u00a0 If it helps stimulate greater multidisciplinary discussion between scholars of the supernatural and urban cultures, and if it can encourage dialogue between eastern and western perspectives (and northern and southern hemispheres), then it will have more than fulfilled my ambitions and hopes for the project.<\/p>\n

For a full outline of the book\u2019s contents see https:\/\/boydellandbrewer.com\/supernatural-cities.html<\/a>.\u00a0 If inspired to read more, Supernatural Cities<\/em> is available as an ebook <\/a>via the University Library<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post, Karl Bell, reader in cultural and social history, talks about his new book Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, bringing together scholars from across the globe working on the relationship between supernatural beliefs and urban cultures.\u00a0 He describes what the book is about, and what he learned from the process of international academic collaboration. In my most recent book I brought together and led an international group of scholars in an exploration of magic, monsters, ghosts and storytelling in urban cultures around the world.\u00a0 Examining these ideas from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality (Boydell and Brewer, 2019) challenges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[48,526,14,525,11,103,332],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new_publications","category-research-in-focus","tag-folklore","tag-global-history","tag-history","tag-publications","tag-slider","tag-supernatural","tag-urban-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/history.port.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/munch-plus-cities.jpg?fit=620%2C302&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p91PlX-sK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1782"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1791,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions\/1791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}