Date: Thursday 13th June 2019

Time: 5.30pm - 6.30pm

Location: GM LT4, Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Met

Tickets: Free - Just turn up!

Rael is not real, but he is a popular culture representation of a real individual who is a stranger in a new city. As a recent immigrant to New York, Rael has to negotiate the alien space that has suddenly become his home. Part hero, part graffiti artist, part urban explorer, we witness our protagonist traversing the physical landscape of the city and that of his own psyche.

This paper explores the Lacanian concepts of castration anxiety, lack, the Other, and the real, in the context of the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Genesis, 1974). It examines the anxiety displayed in the character of the story and his attempts to work through this by using the landscape of the city as a vehicle for his own self-therapy.

By analysing Rael’s behaviour in the story, Richardson demonstrates that by taking a psychogeographic approach to the physical space of the city, and the abstract space of his own mind, Rael manages to work his way through the aesthetics of living in New York, as a foreigner, by facing his own troubled past.

Tina Richardson

Tina Richardson is a cultural theorist and psychogeographer based at Manchester Metropolitan University. Best known for editing Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (Rowman and Littlefield International 2015). Tina Richardson is currently developing and delivering the critical and contextual units in the Manchester Fashion Institute. From a cultural theory background, most of her research and publications are in the field of psychogeography and the postmodern city. Her cultural theory expertise lies in late 20th century (philosophical) cultural theory, specifically poststructural theories, but she also has an interest in the fields of Langian and Guattarian ‘anti-psychiatry’.