Abstract
The Nobel Prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo was held on December 10, 2010, at the Oslo City Hall. The flower bedecked room was filled with some 1,000 guests, including King Harald, Queen Sonja, representatives from 46 different embassies, Chinese dissidents who had participated in the 1989 occupation of Tiananmen Square, the US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and even the Hollywood stars Denzel Washington and Anne Hathaway. Notably missing, however, was the laureate, Liu Xiaobo, who had just finished the first of year of an 11 year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” The laureate’s absence generated unusual dynamics of presence and absence that highlight various facets of communication geography. This chapter provides a concrete demonstration of the non-Euclidean terrain of communication using the 2010 Nobel Prize ceremony to explore the experiential continuum between space and place as it intersects the ontological paradox that communication is a container that is also contained (Adams 2009, 2011).
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Notes
- 1.
Synecdoche is a literary trope in which a part of something stands for the whole, for example referring to food as “daily bread” or workers as “hired hands.”
- 2.
Verdens Gang is the Norwegian newspaper with the second largest circulation; its name means the Way of the World.
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Adams, P.C. (2015). The Case of the Missing Laureate: The Communication Geography of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. In: Mains, S., Cupples, J., Lukinbeal, C. (eds) Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_19
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