TROUBLED GROUND

hambers was interviewed in October as part of the Image lab’s 2017-2018 conversation series Architecture, Landscape, Environment.  Chambers shares with us pedagogical, personal, and political insights on his formative years at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He speaks candidly about his friendships and collaborations with Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and other key figures from that intellectual milieu, contextualizing his education sentimentale in the political malaise of an England then ailing from a “post-colonial melancholia” (Gilroy).  After moving to Naples, Chambers set in motion his important studies of the “uprooted geographies” of the Mediterranean, “tapping into the baroque logic of the ‘fold’ (Gilles Deleuze) that creases the simple maps composed of historical events, taxonomies, and chronologies. Here, the tabular space—of the map, the canvas, the textbook—comes to be transformed into a topology that rapidly acquires depth when it is bent and deviated…” (Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings, p. 28).   Chambers’ intellectual biography evokes here a dissonant interplay between the life of the metropolis and philosophical life, clearing a” troubled ground” that connects  the architecture of cities to the architecture of thought.  These entanglements, Elhaik suggests to his guest, have perhaps kinship with what the situationist Henri Lefebvre has called “rhythmanalysis.” Like a rhythmanalyst equipped with a metronome, Chambers helps us “listen to a house, a street, a town, as one listens to a symphony, an opera.”  Difficult questions are also put on the table, and Elhaik invites Chambers to reflect on his relationship to the discipline of anthropology. Both frankly share their respective insights on the frictions between cultural studies and anthropology, specifically with regards to the post-ethnos moment in anthropology and the challenges this poses to Cultural Studies.

 ain Chambers is Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes at the Oriental University in Naples (Italy) where he is director of the doctoral programme on Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. He studied at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK) and has worked as a researcher in the Getty Institute of Los Angeles and as a visiting professor at several universities of Europe and the United States. His research work is in different fields, including migration processes in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the reviews Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author of several books, including Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008) and more recently Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).