ASCA Book Award: Ben Moore, Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity. Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

Ben Moore’s monograph Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity argues elegantly and illuminatingly that inviable architecture holds the city together, yet always has some parts that are hidden. The book reads literature and architecture together, with architecture itself also employed broadly, so as to span the literary and the metaphorical. In its conceptual poetics, Moore employs the term invisible so as to to bring together the transparent as well as the hidden, and undoes the opposition between the two, reading,  very stimulatingly, Chernychevsky’s 1863 text and Dostoevsky’s response to it in Notes from Underground (1864), as an example of the undoing of the opposition. Notable chapters in the book  include one that read James Kay’s,  and Friedrich Engels’ and Elizabeth Gaskell’s depiction of spaces such as cellar-dwellings in Manchester.  The industrial capitalist system is disrupted by such spaces which are also however necessary in sustaining them. Another fine chapter reads Émile Zola’s depictions of  Paris, focusing on works such as Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), 1883, and shows how apparent total visibility in the Paris represented is exclusionary, and analysable  as a phantasmagorical blending of architecture and commodities. Gothic architecture and New York skyscrapers are more connected than one would at first think, if one follows the book’s analysis, while we learn much on arabesque in literature and ornamentation, and on whiteness and whitewashing in invisible architecture. A concluding section that does suggestive analysis of Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021) is refreshing.

ASCA Dissertation Award: Juan Montoya Alzate, Caribbean Palimpsests. Music and Heritage in Northern Colombia

Juan Montoya Alzate provides an impressive, critical and urgent analysis of the relation between what one could call the “heritage industry” and the musical styles, practices and performances of indigenous, African and other minoritized presences in Columbia. Alzate analyzes processes of “cultural transmission” as they discursively homogenize the conflictual histories and presences of indigenous cultures and music in Columbia. In doing so, he critically punctures the linear histories of colonial modernity which seek to manage the disturbing presences of cultures of struggle and contestation.

Alzate does not just expose the hegemonic scripting of colonialism in writing national heritage. By transforming “heritage” into cultural palimpsests, he also shows how Caribbean presences in music offer decolonial perspectives on thinking both the politics of music and the logics of the culture industry of heritage. Through fascinating analyses of counter urbanscapes, and the place of sound in creating them in Cartagena, as well as attention to embodied performances, interviews and the place of contemporary sound systems, he shows how “the colonized are made actors of their own transformation” as they contest their marginalization.

Congratulations on an impressive and much-needed contribution to decolonial studies, a field to which ASCA is deeply committed.

ASCA Article Award: Dieuwertje Luitse, Platform power in AI: The evolution of cloud infrastructures in the political economy of artificial intelligence. Internet Policy Review. 2024;13(2).

Dieuwertje Luitse’s article “Platform Power in AI: the Evolution of Cloud Infrastructure in the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence” is a remarkable contribution to the ongoing debates around AI, and the politics of infrastructure more broadly. The committee was impressed with Luitse’s capacity to put forward methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions in one single piece. The notion of “evolutionary platform technography”, which she introduces in this article, is a welcomed addition to the literature on technography as a method, and provides necessary tools to study technical systems characterised by vertical integration and heavy market concentration. The application of these methods in the empirical sections demonstrates remarkable scholarly rigor, and allows her to provide a typology of Big Tech strategies to condition technological innovation. It is hard to think of a more timely contribution to the field, considering the amount of market and political power amassed by the firms that she studied. Finally, this typology offers a valuable – dare I even say crucial – contribution to the theoretical debates around “platform power” in which many ASCA colleagues are involved. For all these reasons, the jury unanimously decided to award her this prize and wholeheartedly congratulates you for penning such an impactful piece of research.