VLVL2(3): Casbah Topography

Fri Aug 8 16:33:29 CDT 2003

"The arrangements of hillside levels, alleyways,
corners, and rooftops created a Casbah topography that
was easy to get lost in quickly, terrain where the
skills of the bushwacker became worth more than any
resoluteness of character, an architectural version of
the uncertainty, the illusion, that must have
overtaken his career for him ever to've been assigned
there in the first place." (VL, Ch. 3, p. 25)

Casbah

Main Entry: Cas·bah  
Pronunciation: 'kaz-"bä, 'käz-
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Arabic dialect qasbah
Date: 1944
1 : a No. African castle or fortress
2 : the native section of a No. African city 

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

See ...

La Barthe, Henri.  Pepe Le Moko.  1931.

In 1931, the year following the centenary of the
French conquest of Algeria, the Exposition coloniale
was staged in Paris. It was the culmination of the
celebration of French colonialism. Designed to “give
the French an awareness of their Empire,” the
exhibiton reconstructed habitats, and displayed
folkloric dances, artifacts and merchandise, from
North and West Africa, Indochina, and other far-flung
colonies. The same year, Pépé Le Moko, a thriller
written by “Détective Ashelbé” (a pseudonym for Henri
La Barthe – Ashelbé is a homophone for the initials
H.L.B.), was published. The book, a tale of French
petty criminals sheltering in the Casbah at Algiers,
belongs to the colonialist mentality pervasive in
French culture at the time. Primarily, though, it
aimed to thrill its readers with a vicarious dive into
an exotic underworld, spiced with eroticism. Ashelbé
wrote at a time when the thriller was undergoing a
spectacular boom in France. Yet, unlike his
contemporary Georges Simenon, who published his first
Maigret books also in 1931, he did not leave a great
mark on French culture. The film of Pépé Le Moko, on
the other hand, did.

http://www.filmforum.com/pepeprod.html

Pepe le Moko (1937)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0029453

http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/reviewpages/MDPepeleMoko.htm

http://frenchfilms.topcities.com/nf_Pepe_le_Moko_rev.html

Algiers (1938)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0029855

http://www.san.beck.org/MM/1938/Algiers.html

Casbah (1948)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0040214

The Casbah of Algiers

The Casbah of Algiers was added to the World Heritage
List at the 16th session of the Committee in December
1992. 

What is usually meant by the 'Casbah of Algiers' is
the area covering the Casbah itself (the fortress) and
all of the old city of El-Djazair located between this
fort and the coast. 

In 1516 the Turkish pirate Khair al-Din established
his capital at Algiers. He turned it into a fortified
city by building impressive ramparts that were at the
origin of the Casbah. Six gates linked the old city to
the port and the rest of the country. The city grew
through the spread of more built-up areas,
particularly two-storey houses. Although at the time
the Ottomans occupied much of the Algerian coast, the
Turkish government interfered very little in local
Algiers affairs. The bey Khair al-Din made the city
prosper by combining military might with the
development of trade, and it thrived until the 17th
century, mingling Turkish and Arabic traditions. 

Around 1920 a genuine interest in protecting the old
city started to emerge. The first surveys aimed at
preserving the site of the Casbah of Algiers were
carried out in the 1970s and a development plan was
implemented starting in 1981. It focused on buildings
dating from 1816 to 1830 with a view to upgrading the
city as it was at the time of Ottoman influence; the
political and administrative centre was transferred to
the citadel in 1816, leading to further migration
towards the upper levels of the city. An action
plan-priority programme followed in 1985, and a master
plan for urban development in 1992. The current
restoration programme is in perfecTharmony with the
needs of the old city - its main purpose is to restore
and renovate the historic urban fabric. In addition to
its artistic diversity, the old city provides valuable
insights into the history of Algeria. 

The Casbah covers 45 hectares and is an example of a
homogenous urban design on an unusual, uneven site
(the difference between the highest and lowest points
is 118 metres). The wealth of the city is displayed in
the interior decorations of the houses, which are
often laid out around a square central courtyard
functioning as an atrium. The steep, winding streets
are another typical characteristic of the old city. It
also has twelve mosques, including the
eleventh-century Djamaa El-Kebir mosque. The citadel,
which contained several residential palaces and
religious buildings that were the seat of the Algerian
government until 1830, has been the subject of a
massive restoration programme since 1985.

http://whc.unesco.org/news/9newseng.htm#story3

http://whc.unesco.org/news/9newseng.htm

"Casbah topography"

>From Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991),
Ch. 1, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," pp.
1-54 ...

... Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one
hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession,
on the other, along with alarming new kinds of
literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of
textuality or écriture ... The list might be extended
indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental
change or break than the periodic style and fashion
changes determined by an older high-modernist
imperative of stylistic innovation?

It is in the realm of architecture, however, that
modifications in aesthetic production are most
dramatically visible, and that their theoretical
problems have been most centrally raised and
articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates
that my own conception of postmodernism - as it will
be outlined in the following pages - initially began
to emerge....

[...]

... distance in general (including "critical distance"
in particular) has very precisely been abolished in
the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in
its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the
point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of
spatial coordinates and practically (let alone
theoretically) incapable of distantiation; meanwhile,
it has already been observed how the prodigious new
expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating
and colonising those very pre-capitalist enclaves
(Nature and the Unconscious) which offered
extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for
critical effectivity.

[...]

... the alienated city is above all a space in which
people are unable to map (in their minds) either their
own positions or the urban totality in which they find
themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in
which none of the traditional markers (monuments,
nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain,
are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the
traditional city, then, involves the practical
reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or
reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be
retained in memory and which the individual subject
can map and remap along the moments of mobile,
alternative trajectories.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

So I come finally to my principal point here, that
this latest mutation in space--postmodern
hyperspace--has finally succeeded in transcending the
capacities of the individual human body to locate
itself, to organize its immediate surroundings
perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a
mappable external world. It may now be suggested that
this alarming disjunction point between the body and
its built environment--which is to the initial
bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities
of spacecraft to those of the automobile--can itself
stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper
dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least
at present, to map the great global multinational and
decentered communicational network in which we find
ourselves caught as individual subjects.

http://www.culik.com/weatherr/Pomo/JamesonHotel.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

Soja, Edward W.  Postmodern Geographies: The
   Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.
   London and New York: Verso, 1989.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/soja_postmodern_geos.shtml

"the skills of the bushwacker"

Main Entry: bush·whack 
Pronunciation: 'bush-"hwak, -"wak
Function: verb
Etymology: back-formation from bushwhacker
Date: 1866
transitive senses : AMBUSH; broadly : to attack
suddenly : ASSAULT
intransitive senses : to clear a path through thick
woods especially by chopping down bushes and low
branches
- bush·whack·er noun

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

Any reference to any member of the executive branch 
in office or otherwise is purely coincidental ...

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