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.

IntroductionVenturing into the Dark: Gloomy MultiplicitiesTim Edensor and Nick Dunn Part 1: Histories of The Dark 1. Affordances of the Night: Work After Dark in the Ancient WorldApril Nowell and Nancy Gonlin 2. Shakespeare’s Darkness: A Stage and State of MindElisabeth Bronfen 3. In the Night Garden: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London 1800-1859Alice Barnaby 4. A Short History of Artificial Darkness and RaceNoam M. Elcott Part 2: Cultural Practices in the Dark 5. Purda: The Curtain of DarknessAnkit Kumar 6. Inuit’s Perception of Darkness: A Singular FeatureGuy Bordin 7. Darkness in Videogame Landscapes: Corporeal and Representational EntanglementsRob Shaw 8. Dancing in The Darkness To The DarknessNina J. Morris Part 3: Sensing Darkness 9. Creatures of The Night: Bodies, Rhythms And Aurora BorealisKatrin Lund 10. Contact Zones: The Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park as Creative MilieuNatalie Marr 11. How Does the Dark Sound?Damien Masson 12. Ghosts and EmptiesSimon Robinson Part 4: Designing with Darkness 13. Going Dark: The Theatrical Legacy of Battersea Art Centre’s Playing In The Dark SeasonMartin Welton 14. On Darkness, Duration and PossibilityShanti Sumartojo 15. Darkness as CanvasLeni Schwendinger 16. Designing with Light and DarknessChris Lowe and Philip Rafael AfterwordRevisiting the Dark: Diverse Encounters and ExperiencesNick Dunn and Tim Edensor

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).