Occupying Our Space

"Rhetorical impact that pioneering and revolutionary Mexican female journalists had in shaping a new direction for women in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century"--Provided by publisher.

"Rhetorical impact that pioneering and revolutionary Mexican female journalists had in shaping a new direction for women in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century"--Provided by publisher.

The Hotel: Occupied Space explores the hotel as both symbol and space through the concept of “occupancy.” By examining the various ways in which the hotel is manifested in art, photography, and film, this book offers a timely critique of a crucial modern space. As a site of occupancy, the hotel has provided continued creative inspiration for artists from Monet and Hopper, to genre filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sofia Coppola. While the rich symbolic importance of the hotel means that the visual arts and cinema are especially fruitful, the hotel’s varied structural purposes, as well as its historical and political uses, also provide ample ground for new and timely discussion. In addition to inspiring painters, photographers, and filmmakers, the hotel has played an important role during wartime, and more recently as a site of accommodation for displaced people, whether they be detainees or refugees seeking sanctuary. Shedding light on the diverse ways that the hotel functions as a structure, Robert A. Davidson argues that the hotel is both a fundamental modern space and a constantly adaptable structure, dependent on the circumstances in which it appears and plays a part.

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.

It is said that by thought, we attract the thing. By taking action, we receive the thing. We decide what our thoughts should be. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he (Prov. 23:7). The book encourages us to think using the mind of God (Phil 2:5). Thinking with the mind of God makes success inevitable because God knows all things. The book encourages readers to let go of many things, including the past. But to never give up on the power of believing in oneself. Readers are encouraged to allow their higher self to control the inner conversations. Many people rent out their mind to sources void of credibility but get no compensation in return. Furthermore, they have no “rental clause” to protect them from their mind being highjacked. More often than not, even if their mind is returned to them, it is under the control of envy, jealousy, fear, worry, and “can’t do.” Before the mind is returned to its original owner, it would have forged an intimate relationship with “lack,” “procrastination,” and “the past.” Who is controlling your mind?

For four decades, the Rev. Dr. Jonathan R. Wilson has cultivated an imagination for “kingdom realism” as a pastor, teacher, theologian, and friend. To celebrate his seventieth birthday, Kingdom Come has gathered reflections from fellow theologians, popular authors, poets, and practitioners to mark both the range of Wilson’s influence on the Christian church and the consistency of his prayer and work for God’s kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven.