ISSN 1904-6022 www.otherness.dk/journal Otherness and the Urban Volume 7 · Number 1 · March 2019 Welcoming the interdisciplinary study of otherness and alterity, Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, full-text, and peer-reviewed e-journal under the auspices of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. The journal publishes new scholarship primarily within the humanities and social sciences. ISSUE EDITOR Dr. Maria Beville Coordinator, Centre for Studies in Otherness GENERAL EDITOR Dr. Matthias Stephan Aarhus University, Denmark ASSOCIATE EDITORS Dr. Maria Beville Coordinator, Centre for Studies in Otherness Susan Yi Sencindiver, PhD Aarhus University, Denmark © 2019 Otherness: Essays and Studies ISSN 1904-6022 Further information: www.otherness.dk/journal/ Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, non-profit journal. All work associated with the journal by its editors, editorial assistants, editorial board, and referees is voluntary and without salary. The journal does not require any author fees nor payment for its publications. Volume 7 · Number 1 · March 2019 CONTENTS Introduction 1 Maria Beville 1 ‘Some people have a ghost town, we have a ghost city’: 9 Gothic, the Other, and the American Nightmare in Lauren Beukes’s Broken Monsters Carys Crossen 2 Sanctuary City: 27 Pynchon’s Subjunctive New York in Bleeding Edge Inger H. Dalsgaard 3 Anthony Bourdain’s Cosmopolitan Table: 47 Mapping the ethni(C)ity through street food and television Shelby E. Ward 4 Eyeing Fear and Anxiety: 71 Postcolonial Modernity and Cultural Identity in the Urban Space of Gin Gwai Shana Sanusi 5 Miraculous Migrations throughout a Chicanx Los Angeles: 99 Negotiating Othered Spaces in John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez Michael Moreno 6 Interrogating Identity in the City of Chicago 123 Geography as Culture in Susan Power’s Roofwalker Courtney Lynn Whited 7 Uncanny Retrofuturism and the Urban Other: 143 Victorian London as Steampunk Cyber-City Helena Esser 8 The Fire Ants of Hurricane Harvey: 169 Displacement and Belonging in Houston Nathaniel Otjen Abstracts: Otherness and the Urban 194 iii Volume 7 · Number 1 · March 2019 CONTRIBUTORS Carys Crossen was awarded her PhD from the University of Manchester and since then has been researching the Gothic, gender, horror and monsters, especially werewolves. She has published several articles on these subjects and her first monograph, entitled The Nature of the Beast: Transformations of the Werewolf from the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century is forthcoming from University of Wales press. She thinks Detroit would be an interesting place to visit but that Manchester UK is the best city in the world. Inger H. Dalsgaard holds a doctorate in American studies from King’s College, University of London, and M.I.T. She is associate lecturer in American Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, and the editor of Thomas Pynchon in Context (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2019) and, with Brian McHale and Luc Herman, The Thomas Pynchon Companion (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Helena Esser is pursuing a PhD at Birkbeck College, London. Her research examines how steampunk fiction repurposes a shared urban imaginary of Victorian London. She has published articles on steampunk London in the London Literary Journal (11:2, 2014), on steampunk post-humanism in the Cahiers victoriens et éduardiens (87, 2018), and on representations of London’s East End in the TV series Ripper Street in Neo-Victorian Studies (11:1, 2018). Michael P. Moreno is a Professor of English & Diversity Studies at Green River College in the American state of Washington. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Riverside in 2007 in English with disciplinary concentrations in Latinx literature & culture, 20th / 21st century American literature, and spatial theory. Publications include Term Paper Resource Guide to Latino History; book chapters in Narratives of Place in Literature and Film; Strange Phenomena: Time, the City and the Literary Imagination; We Wear the Mask: Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the Representation of Black Identity; Speaking desde las heridas: Cibertestimonios Transfronterizos / Transborder (September 11, 2001-March 11, 2007); and Reel Histories: Studies in American Film; as well as journal articles in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture; Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies; Journal X: A Journal in Culture & Criticism; and British Association for American Studies Journal. iv Nathaniel Otjen is a doctoral student in Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy at the University of Oregon. His dissertation research examines how animals, plants, and material objects function as characters in autobiographical texts that tell stories of entanglement and becoming. His forthcoming and published work on multispecies literary characters can be read in Journal of Modern Literature, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, The Annals of Iowa, Humanimalia, and Western American Literature. Shana Sanusi teaches film and media studies at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. She is also a PhD candidate at the School of Arts and Social Sciences in the Malaysian campus of Monash University. Her dissertation explores the intersection between familial trauma and domestic architecture in Japanese and South Korean horror films. Her research interests include representations of subjectivities, gender discourse and contemporary East Asian literature. Shelby E. Ward is a doctoral candidate in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) program at Virginia Tech, where she teaches for the Political Science and International Relations Department. Ward is a transdisciplinary scholar with backgrounds in critical, feminist, and postcolonial theories, and an emphasis on narratives, who investigates neocolonial power relations within current international relations Courtney Lynn Whited is currently pursuing a master’s degree from Oklahoma State University in Literature. Her research focuses on the Indigenous literature of North America with a special interest in women writers. She is currently working on a single-author study of Susan Power. v Introduction: Otherness and the Urban by Maria Beville The city is a unique and subjective space. It is fragmented and indistinct. It is, at once, place and text: to walk the city is to read it. In “Semiology and Urbanism” (The Semiotic Challenge), Roland Barthes notes that the city is a discourse and a language: “[t]he city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it”. However, in this discourse, there exists “a conflict between signification and reason, or at least between signification and that calculating reason which wants all the elements of the city to be uniformly recuperated by planning”. Our desire to map the city is a desire to map and to write the self: a process without closure that constantly reminds us of our own inherent Otherness. In this way the city is multivalent. It is both the location and the sign of the Other. And rather than merely existing as a physical place, the city is experience; individualised and multiplied in its alterity. While the city exists as a place to be read and is therefore unique in every individual reading, it is also a place to be written, inspiring writers, artists, and thinkers to become lost in city streets and locales as they struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge of representing the unrepresentable. Thus, the city is where the subject and space become intertwined. Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 7 · Number 1 · March 2019 © The Author 2019. All rights reserved Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.1 While the city becomes part of the subject and the subject a part of the city, urban space, in its resistance of representation, remains an unvarying challenge to notions of self, of sameness, of homogeneity. The city is therefore bound to exist in tension with identity, both individual and collective. Just as is the case with the self, there can be no cohesive vision of the city because the city not only resists mapping, it resists unified narrative; in its flux and in its phantasmagoria. And yet the Otherness of the city remains a part of the definition of urban selfhood and understanding this is best achieved through a balanced view of the city’s physical and metaphysical dimensions. No examination of the textuality of the city should overlook the materiality of the city and its impact on the city experience. City design, city building, city governance and city use form the structures of the city which carry and mediate its otherness. The series of multidisciplinary articles in this special volume address these aspects of the city and Otherness to form a body of research which examines the nature of identity construction in relation to the Otherness of the city. By approaching the Other in the city, they also consider the city as Other. Topics explored include: urban otherness in literature, food culture and otherness in the city, the postmodern city, ethnicity, urban minorities and spatial identity, and animal otherness in an urban context. Spanning representations of the city in and of Asia, North and South America, and Europe, the articles in this issue present research which is positioned at the intersections of Gothic Studies, theories of postcolonialism and transnationalism, food studies, ethnic studies, media studies, and genre literature. What they share in common is a preoccupation with the imagined city, and with the magic of the urban: the potential of the cityspace to reflect and contain the multiplicity of identity in all of its fluidity and ambiguity. Chris Jenks refers to the city as “a magical place”. However, “the magic is not evenly distributed” (2004). The intense flux that the city presents renders it impossible. It exists in a state of ontological non-conformity. As such it has been 2 Introduction: Otherness and the Urban Maria Beville an ideal context and subtext for literary and artistic modes such as the Gothic, Science-fiction, and postmodernism.