1st Edition
Rethinking Darkness Cultures, Histories, Practices
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.
Introduction
Venturing into the Dark: Gloomy Multiplicities
Tim Edensor and Nick Dunn
Part 1: Histories of The Dark
1. Affordances of the Night: Work After Dark in the Ancient World
April Nowell and Nancy Gonlin
2. Shakespeare’s Darkness: A Stage and State of Mind
Elisabeth Bronfen
3. In the Night Garden: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London 1800-1859
Alice Barnaby
4. A Short History of Artificial Darkness and Race
Noam M. Elcott
Part 2: Cultural Practices in the Dark
5. Purda: The Curtain of Darkness
Ankit Kumar
6. Inuit’s Perception of Darkness: A Singular Feature
Guy Bordin
7. Darkness in Videogame Landscapes: Corporeal and Representational Entanglements
Rob Shaw
8. Dancing in The Darkness To The Darkness
Nina J. Morris
Part 3: Sensing Darkness
9. Creatures of The Night: Bodies, Rhythms And Aurora Borealis
Katrin Lund
10. Contact Zones: The Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park as Creative Milieu
Natalie Marr
11. How Does the Dark Sound?
Damien Masson
12. Ghosts and Empties
Simon Robinson
Part 4: Designing with Darkness
13. Going Dark: The Theatrical Legacy of Battersea Art Centre’s Playing In The Dark Season
Martin Welton
14. On Darkness, Duration and Possibility
Shanti Sumartojo
15. Darkness as Canvas
Leni Schwendinger
16. Designing with Light and Darkness
Chris Lowe and Philip Rafael
Afterword
Revisiting the Dark: Diverse Encounters and Experiences
Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor
Biography
Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of Imagination, the design research lab at Lancaster University, UK. He is senior fellow at the Institute for Social Futures. Nick has authored numerous books, journal articles and reports on cities, futures and darkness.
Tim Edensor is Professor of Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017), and Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality (2020).
