Framing Spaces in Motion

'Framing Spaces in Motion' explores how communities come to terms with earthquakes as well as the risk of their recurrences and how these moments of physical and ideological rupture emerge as sites of negotiation for preexisting cultural, political, and economic conflicts. From an in-depth examination of the early modern European textual and visual repertoires of making sense of earthquakes, 'Framing Spaces in Motion' traces the development of earthquake discourses and framing patterns into the nineteenth-century United States. A profound discussion of the historical protocols of disaster discourses in the San Francisco Bay Area paves the ground for an extensive analysis of the earthquake framings of one of the most prolifically visualized events at the turn of the century, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. 'Framing Spaces in Motion' is the first comprehensive study to investigate the rhetorical and pictorial conventions of framing earthquakes from a transnational perspective and also one of the first to devote ample attention to the visual culture of natural disasters by assessing earthquake pictures in their interpictorial relationships, (in)visibilities, and strategic manipulations. In addition to its grounding in Transnational American Studies, the analysis is located at the intersection of visual culture studies, disaster studies, ecocriticism, and memory studies.

Klappentext

How can a prospering city come to terms with earthquakes and the risk of their reoccurrence? Which cultural functions do visual representations assume in these processes and what are their ideological implications? 'Framing Spaces in Motion' explores these and related questions in its examination of how San Francisco negotiated earthquakes during its rise from frontier town to Pacific coast metropolis. An in-depth examination of distinct practices of visualizing earthquakes from the first stable repertoires of the early modern European broadsides to their transnational appropriations and visual innovations in nineteenth-century North America clears the way for a profound discussion of the interpictorial relationships, (in)visibilities, and manipulations of the earthquake visuals of San Francisco. The volume concludes with an extensive analysis of the earthquake images of one of the most prolifically visualized events of the turn of the century, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.