Light(s) and darkness(es): Shifting historical relations

In this special issue, we argue that light(s) and darkness(es) should be understood in their multiplicity, and that they constitute two aspects of the same phenomenon. They should, therefore, be studied in relation to each other. The complex dynamics of light and dark are more integral to the…

In recent decades, the development of virtual reality has allowed us to propose realistic reconstructions of lighting in Bronze Age buildings of the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean world. However, light and darkness have…

The gap between the early modern policing ideal of a homogeneous—“geometric”—perception of the urban fabric thanks to street lighting, and the persistent reality of dark areas, was particularly clear during periods of turmoil in the public order. In both Paris and Barcelona, the revolutionary…

In the British Raj, colonial lighting oscillated between “Tool of Empire” and everyday technology. While the British used modern lighting to visualize power and accentuate social differences, it was also a contested object of appropriation and protest. In fact, both colonial light and darkness…

During the 19th C., the Industrial Revolution and technical advances from the modern era led to the massive use of glass in architectural constructions, which contributed to the transparency of volumes as well as…

This essay takes expert assumptions about light preferences as a starting point for a historical inquiry into what I call imagined sociotechnical communities of light and energy. My argument is that historical energy supply systems produced these imaginaries and vice versa, shifting the scales…

This article examines how the perils conjured by blackouts in American cities after 1965 became interpreted as a key point of political and bargaining leverage for the nation’s coal miners. The anxieties provoked by these blackouts –sexual deviance, urban unrest, spoiled food, lost productivity…

The artificial but widely held binary conceptions of day versus night find themselves condensed in cities where strategies to recalibrate the nocturnal urban landscape are abundant. This transformation requires considerable energies and technologies to facilitate illumination. The night-time…

This personal essay describes light(s) and darkness(es) in Longyearbyen, Svalbard (Norway) during polar night in January 2019. Drawing on autoethnographic methods, I also seek to describe how I experienced the remarkable…