学会発表（発表要旨）：2011：
How many roads must be named after him ?
The politics of naming streets after Bob Dylan in Minnesota．
The 6th Korea-China-Japan joint conference on Geography:
Seoul, ROK, 6-9 November, 2011.
（ソウル国立大学校：韓国、ソウル特別市）
How many roads must be named after him ?
The politics of naming streets after Bob Dylan in Minnesota
Hrumichi YAMADA, Professor, Tokyo Keizai University
Tokyo Keizai University, 185-8502, Japan
yamada@tku.ac.jp
Bob Dylan is a world-famous American singer-songwriter and poet. Before he started his career on the New York City's Greenwich Village music scene, most of his life had been spent in Minnesota. He was born in Duluth, grew up in Hibbing, and lived for a year, as a would-be student of Minnesota University, in Dinkytown as Robert Zimmerman, before he reinvented himself Bob Dylan. Today, there are streets in both Duluth and Hibbing named after Dylan.
Dylan’s career spans several decades from the 1960s to the present day, but his heyday was undoubtedly in the 1960s. However, moves towards naming streets after him are a relatively recent phenomena. In 1986, the Duluth City Council decided by vote to rename Harbor Drive to Bob Dylan Drive - only to reverse the decision three days later. The decision was rescinded following an unpopular response from the local public. This unsuccessful attempt was the first of its kind.
In 2005, the City of Hibbing decided to designate several blocks on Seventh Avenue as the Bob Dylan Drive. This was realized following local enthusiasts’ effort to honor Dylan by holding an annual festival called Dylan Days for several years. In Hibbing, the key person who took the initiative in creating Bob Dylan Drive was NOT a locally born resident. In that sense, the value of the name of Dylan was propagated through a voice from “outside”. In fact, the few residents who opposed the proposal were long-time local residents who knew Robert Zimmerman in his teens
News of Bob Dylan Drive in Hibbing reached Duluth right away. Following the news from Hibbing, it was suggested that Michigan Street should be renamed after Dylan in Duluth’s local newspaper. After considering the matter for a year, in 2006, the Duluth City Council voted to give three connected streets including Michigan Street the honorary designation Bob Dylan Way. Specially designed signs were introduced in 2007.
Such renaming of street and/or other places honoring somebody who has had limited commitment to his hometown, like Dylan, seems to be more likely to happen after:
(1) the person’s fame has been fully established as opposed to at its zenith,
(2) those who knew him before he became famous become a minority in local public opinion, and the younger generation’s indirect, often romanticized, view of the person overrides the older generation’s negative and/or indifferent attitudes, and
(3) similar renaming (or honorary naming) has occurred in other places.
////社会経済地理学/地域研究/地誌////大衆文化論////
このページのはじめにもどる
テキスト公開にもどる
山田晴通・業績一覧にもどる
山田晴通研究室にもどる
CAMP Projectへゆく