Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: The critical turn in the social sciences has produced an impressive body of studies which has highlighted previously neglected aspects of social life as well as contributed substantially to our understanding of the role of culture in social formations.Underlying most critical analyses of place naming is an understanding that the (re)writing of the toponymic landscape demonstrates the connections between cultural and political processes.In particular, it shows how power relations shape commemorative priorities and produce certain geographies of public memory.Interestingly, much of the recent scholarship on the politics of place naming has been associated with the issue of street naming as a strategy of toponymic commemoration (e.g., Azaryahu, 1996;Alderman, 2000;Rose-Redwood, 2008).Consequently, I shall focus my attention here on questions of commemorative street naming and the need to rethink the relation between power, meaning, and toponymic inscription.Despite the growing interest in the critical study of place naming, scholarship in English is relatively rich for some periods and places but weak for others.Critical toponymic studies of North America and Europe, for instance, are quite numerous, whereas relatively few English-language publications have explored the politics of place naming in Latin America, Asia, or Africa.Even among European countries, the critical place-name literature is quite uneven in its coverage, with few 1
Source: ACME
Author: Azaryahu, Maoz
Institution: University of Haifa
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1819178405