Towards a Spatial Practice of the Postcolonial City: Introducing the Cultural Producer (original) (raw)
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Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, capitalism – in particular its latest evolution, which the French theorist Henri Lefebvre calls “neocapitalism” – imposed its dominance over the space of modern cities (Production 8). This article aims to elucidate the way in which two modes of opposition to the neocapitalist domination of space, namely Western European street art and Henri Lefebvre’s theory, affect citizens’ experience of space. Throughout this article, it will become clear that Lefebvre and Western European street art share similar strategies of spatial resistance, based on the reconfiguration of what Lefebvre describes as the individual’s experience of the “perceived” and “conceived space” (38). However, what I call the paradox of visibility faced by these two figures of contestation casts doubt upon their ability to allow for a re-appropriation of the city space by its citizens. This will precipitate a questioning of their efficiency as strategies of spatial resistance.
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Environment and Planning A, 2008
This theme issue on the``Ordinary spaces of modernity'' arose from a conference event that sought to bring together scholars interested in how the contingencies and ambivalences of urban space mattered for how different actors engaged in`improving' or developing others'. Our rationale for this event was motivated in part by a double notion of parochialism. On the one hand, we sought to emphasise the importance of the parochial, of the tensions and ambivalences of municipal officials, and of the role of everyday materialities of construction or infrastructure, for the nature and contestation of improvement and development. On the other hand, we sought to do this by disrupting what has come to be criticised as a certain parochialism in urban studies, and in particular the tendency to make generalisations of`non-Western' urban forms, or to conceptually separate the`Western city' from the`Third World city' (cf Bishop et al, 2003;. We sought papers that illustrated the importance of connections and comparisons temporally, between colonialism and development, and spatially, between`Western' and`Southern' urbanism. We hope that, in tracing a range of contextual tensions and translations, the collection charts a diversity of temporal and spatial continuities and discontinuities. Legg, Perera, and Harris focus on colonial contexts in India, Sri Lanka, and a variety of African contexts, and Gandy, McFarlane, and Robinson are concerned with contemporary urban spaces in India and South Africa.
Visual Resources, 2010
The photography and filmmaking of Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster (b. 1965) depict derelict zones and dedicated spaces of social interaction in the built environment as intervals of stasis, anticipation, and vacancy. Questioning the physical cohesiveness of the postcolonial, globalized city, Gonzalez‐Foerster employs techniques of surveillance, social research, travelogue, and destination marketing. This article considers her representations of social space and subjective experience by examining her collection of films, Parc Central (2006), and book of photographs, Alphavilles? (2004). While the films often highlight monuments and landmarks as estranged, overdetermined places of expectation and transition, her photographs emphasize peripheral spaces as interchangeable signs in the visual lexicon of urban development. Drawing on the theories of D. W. Winnicott, Henri Lefebvre, and others, this article frames these choices as a negotiation of the limits of constructing representations of the urban experience in the face of the city’s growing homogenization and fragmentation across physical and virtual terrains.
Losing Ground? A Note on Feminism, Cultural Activism and Urban Space [Third Text, 2017]
Third Text, 2017
This article offers a study of the Hackney Flashers' project Who's Holding the Baby? (1976–1978). The agitprop series documented the establishment of an independent nursery in North London, while providing analysis of the profoundly gendered and classed nature of such work. This historical example illustrates with striking accuracy transformations to the urban landscape of London over the past four decades, in particular pointing towards the critical entanglement between collective art practice, liberal voluntarism and processes of gentrification. The article therefore raises a set of problems: To what extent does feminised social reproduction labour and care voluntarism assuage or challenge the normative functioning of urban public space? What is the relationship of cultural to economic capital, and how is gender relevant to these forms of value? Has the potential of creative, urban protest tactics been exhausted? Drawing from writings across cultural geography and art history, the article proposes that a historical consideration of the Hackney Flashers opens up a pressing discussion around shifts in the organisation of social reproduction since the 1970s. THIRD TEXT 148, Vol. 31, No. 5 (September 2017). 50 Free e-prints available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/T8seTxnWAXeEHisguf2d/full
Writing a post-colonial city: Theory in Medias Res
ACCESS: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural & Policy Studies, VOL. 26, NO. 1: 11–20, 2007
Engaging with ideas of Singaporean literary theorist Rajeev Patke through his montage essay, Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Postcolonial City, this article explores how the techniques of montage text can inspire theoretical writing to go beyond its conventional representational function. Besides challenging the conventional nature of theoretical writing as reflection, I will suggest the montage form can inspire readers to engage with the city they inhabit in new ways, and in turn produce new kinds of subjectivities, spaces and meanings that can resist (neo)-colonial and conventional sociological modes of categorisation. What readers-including artists, designers and other writersmay 'learn' from encountering a montage text arises from their own process of 'producing'.
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Journal of Postcolonial …, 2011
This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, topology and typography underlying the wide range of the "urban imaginary". This is to say, the aesthetic investments characterizing the textures of literary representations of the postcolonial metropolis and/or what we call the "new" metropolis. Although the very concept of the metropolis "has been used in contexts of colonial and imperial and postcolonial criticism" (Farías and Stemmler 12), recent scholarship dealing with urban literature has mainly focused on London as the former colonial centre (
The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Fiction
Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature (Eds. Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al Wazedi)
(From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in significant ways the postcolonial state's imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within post-colonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of " irreal " activities. It takes the term "irreal" from the Marxist scholar, Michael Löwy, who separates it from the domain of "unreal" and "anti-real" and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term's use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological findings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that "irreality" is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. For the literary part, the chapter reads the fictional work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014), son of Mahasweta Devi and Bijon Bhattacharya, whose work centers around the margins of postcolonial society. It is argued here that he provides the urban poor with the "armory" of the spectral and the mysterious to fight the bourgeois weapon of instrumental rationality and class dominance. The deliberate narrative effort at blurring spaces, times, and processes of reason-making contributes to his empowering of the subaltern and the outcast, and push for a rethinking of the matrices of postcolonial urbanity and modernity.
Urban Spaces: Gender, Genre, Mediation
Feminist Review, 2010
Cities have long held the attention of artists, writers, designers and academics. Offering rich possibilities for imagining public life, identities, and the nature of social interaction, the urban has appeared in a startling variety of representational forms. But Henri Lefebvre's (1991) classic account of the city reminds us that urban space is not merely a neutral context for people and for urban structures. Instead, city space functions actively to influence socio-cultural processes, identities and, indeed, the ways in which the city itself is represented. This insight challenges accounts that posit representation or mediation as a form of simple mirroring, and it has led to productive conceptualisations of urban spaces as becomings, as possibilities, as shifting political formations. Furthermore, as feminist interventions such as those of Rosalyn Deutsche (1997) and Gillian Rose (1993) make clear, such accounts of spatiality are not as abstract and generalised as they may claim: they are freighted with their conditions of production and social positioning of the producers. How can we think, then, about the role of gender in mediating space and in mediating understandings of space? How can we imagine urban space otherwise?