Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

7R
Space and signification (Chair, Jessica Pacella)
Mary McDonaldReading Sport Stadiums Critically: Icons of Accumulation and Sustainability
Discourses discussing the environmental impacts of sporting events are proliferating. Organizers of such
large-scale events as the Olympic and Paralympic Games have proclaimed commitments to “go green” to
lower the mega-events’ collective carbon footprints and these efforts have met with various levels of
success. Professional sports team franchise administrations are also promoting the use of green technologies
to reduce environmental impacts and to enhance sustainability. Rather than reporting upon the successes
and failures of the efforts to “go green,” this paper draws upon cultural studies sensibilities to contextualize
these efforts. This analysis suggests that discourses about “green sports stadiums” are not just about
environmental concerns. They are part and parcel of neoliberal development strategies, which scholars
suggest have helped to constitute “spectacular urban space” (Harvey, 1989). This analysis discusses the
effects and consequences of one mega-project Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium, which exist as a spectacle
of accumulation and sustainability.
Anneke Coppoolse* & Brian Kwok
Signs of Desire: consumption and urban space in Hong Kong
This paper engages a historical inquiry into Hong Kong’s consumer culture through a visual and material
study of neon signs. It attends to visual and material culture as it construes Hong Kong’s turn to
consumerism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Starting out with a visual analysis of an extensive
collection of old hand-painted neon sign designs, which allows unique insight into decades of consumer
culture and the visual specificities of the urban space in which this culture was set to evolve, the paper
connects the cultural meaning of neon signs to the social and spatial contexts they illuminated since the
1960s. Indeed, neon signs are not only visual makers of a city that represents consumption and global trade,
they are records of distinctive societal change. Especially in light of the imminent disappearance of the signs
from today’s urban landscape, they demand new attention.
Christopher Lirette
“It’s in my Blood”: Industrial Identity for Fishermen in a Civilization without Boats
In my fieldwork among shrimp fishermen on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, I heard one phrase over and over: “It’s
in my blood.” I was asking why shrimp when the confluence of coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion,
cataclysmic oil spills, and an influx of underpriced foreign imports threatens to kill off the once booming
Louisiana shrimp fishery. There is no future in shrimp, and yet, the shrimpers I spoke to imagine shrimping as
a blood right, a genealogical destiny, as a life-giving substance in their bodies. Only one shrimper argued
against the thematics of blood. And we could argue, like Michel Foucault, that at the dawn of
anthropological discourse, we have moved from a “society of blood,” in which “power spoke through blood,”
to one governed by sexuality, where “the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what
causes it to proliferate” (History of Sexuality I 147—148). But we should not discount the power of blood to
the shrimpers who explain their cruel attachment to a dying industry that way. There is something visceral in
attaching to an industry that is bleeding out for reasons of genealogical loyalty. And yet, we also cannot
discount the fact that things have changed in terms of blood: the shrimpers who trawl the waters in coastal
Louisiana are not subject to a power that spills blood and the constraints of kinship no longer have the same
pull over labor in a world of international fiber optic cables and global capital. Even as the shrimpers cling to
blood, they too are concerned with futurity, the hope that they will have enough stamina to provide, that
their children might grow up in health and live a prosperous life among others. They want to proliferate. This
paper proposes to rethink blood as both a symbolic and a material force – an imaginative force – that
anchors these shrimpers to their work, their family, and their world. Blood becomes a biopolitical metaphor
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