Walls, Adam;
(2023)
Twilight Spaces: Firelight, Racial Atmosphere and Imperial London.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
The late Victorian period is often presented as the moment when “firelight” or older lighting technologies waned and were replaced by even, pure and rational ones. By contrast, this thesis argues that this moment actually marked the peak of firelight’s use, with gas burners extending into interior environments and the introduction of a new, electric form of fire: the open electric arc. The thesis provides a detailed phenomenology of these two forms of firelight, including the atmospheres they produced. By reading historical texts alongside images, it attempts to anchor impressions back to the material atmospheres within which they were based, and which they helped constitute. The result is an assemblage of media and voices, gathered to form a thick and situated account of historical experience. The thesis is also a postcolonial and critical race revision of liberal histories of the period. Although municipal governments used lighting infrastructure to produce a visual, sanitary and freely circulating form of liberal space and subjectivity, these processes never fully disenchanted nor rendered space transparent. Instead, the uneven distribution of light technologies in London produced a new array of what I call “twilight spaces” and subjectivities. These were liberal, imperial and sometimes resistant. Not only was lighting used to embody what Frantz Fanon calls the “Manichean” aesthetics of empire, it played a central role in imperial modes of spectacle, as well as the racialisation of both spaces and bodies. Within “twilight zones” of metropolitan encounter, different lighting aesthetics could either augment or disorientate the perception of race and, with it, London’s newly forming racial identities and orders. All this contributed to what Renisa Mawani calls a distinctive “racial atmosphere”. By exploring this atmosphere, the thesis aims to render the whiteness of lighting visible, while also foregrounding the positive, disorienting affects of darkness. More broadly, it stresses light’s role in the construction of subjective difference, complicating and contesting usual accounts of normative liberal subjectivity.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Twilight Spaces: Firelight, Racial Atmosphere and Imperial London |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | Lighting, race, imperialism, London, atmosphere, fire, infrastructure |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10164050 |
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