Rethinking darkness : cultures, histories, practices

Description

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 emphasize 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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Venturing into the Dark: Gloomy Multiplicities Part I: Histories of the Dark 2 Affordances of the Night: Work After Dark in the Ancient World 3 Shakespeare’s Darkness: A Stage and State of Mind 4 In the Night Garden: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London 1800–1859 5 A Brief History of Artificial Darkness and Race Part II: Cultural practices in the Dark 6 Purda: The Curtain of Darkness 7 Inuit’s Perception of Darkness: A Singular Feature 8 Darkness in Video Game Landscapes: Corporeal and Representational Entanglements 9 Dancing in the Darkness to the Darkness Part III: Sensing Darkness 10 Creatures of the Night: Bodies, Rhythms and Aurora Borealis 11 Contact Zones: The Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park as Creative Milieu 12 How Does the Dark Sound? 13 Ghosts and Empties Part IV: Designing with Darkness 14 Going Dark: The Theatrical Legacy of Battersea Art Centre’s Playing in the Dark Season 15 On Darkness, Duration and Possibility 16 Darkness as Canvas 17 Designing with Light and Darkness 18 Afterword: Revisiting the Dark: Diverse Encounters and Experiences References Index