Introduction: Tracing the urban imaginary in the postcolonial metropolis and the “new” metropolis

Detmers, Ines; Heidemann, Birte; Sandten, Cecile

doi:10.1080/17449855.2011.614769

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(1 reference statement)

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“…The metropolis or the metropolitan thinking symbolises the centre from which the coloniser would rule a colony 11 and is also used as the de facto site for urbanity. 12 However, the critique of the metropolitan stance of power has not been substantially brought to bear on the way postcolonial cities are designated and theorised: a lot of this scholarship reinstates the idea of 'new' 13 metropolis rather than contest it. The idea of 'postcolonial spatialities' 14 gets addressed in terms of 'the postcolonial city' that includes London, Nairobi and Bombay, 15 and through the new metropolises of the postcolonial nations: Sekondi, 16 Durban, 17 Mumbai 18 or Delhi 19 to name a few.…”

Section: On Cosmopolitan-metropolitan Equationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kochi: provincialising postcolonial metro-cosmopolitan spatialities

Alias

Wadhwa

2023

cultural geographies

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There is much to learn about how some locales come to be deemed as more cosmopolitan than others. Mumbai is hailed as a cosmopolitan city and even a model for India. With an increasing sense of disappointment about the decline of cosmopolitanism in such metropolitan cities, there is a need to look at what other locales can offer as alternative models of cosmopolitanism. This article addresses Kochi as a locale that is nuanced with precolonial practices of cosmopolitanism. This move towards provincialising cosmopolitanism – in the sense of moving away from metropolitan locales to highlight deeper, more historical and local ways of being cosmopolitan – is informed by the growing emphasis on the need to explore subaltern or vernacular cosmopolitanism.

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Section: On Cosmopolitan-metropolitan Equationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kochi: provincialising postcolonial metro-cosmopolitan spatialities

Alias

Wadhwa

2023

cultural geographies

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“…26 27 ) have depicted 'Dark India', the underbelly of Indian cities with its slums. Arguably, through the commodification of poverty and destitution, and of endemic Indian corruption and systemic exploitations, these texts present the 'neo-colonial visage of the third world city as a disorderly and dysfunctional entity', 28 an argument that could also be levelled against the representation of Delhi in Capital, for example when Dasgupta describes the endemic corruption in the city:…”

Section: Spaces and Places Of The Imaginedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…26 Many celebrated fictional and nonfictional works on India (such as Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning The White Tiger and his subsequent novels, Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Kavery Nambisan's The Story That Must Not Be Told, and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers 27 ) have depicted 'Dark India', the underbelly of Indian cities with its slums. Arguably, through the commodification of poverty and destitution, and of endemic Indian corruption and systemic exploitations, these texts present the 'neo-colonial visage of the third world city as a disorderly and dysfunctional entity', 28 an argument that could also be levelled against the representation of Delhi in Capital, for example when Dasgupta describes the endemic corruption in the city:…”

Section: Spaces and Places Of The Imaginedmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conjunctural spaces of ‘new India’: imagined geographies of 2010s India in representations by returnee migrants

Mendes

Lau

2018

cultural geographies

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Focusing on returnee Indian authors, this article contributes to analytical perspectives on imagined geographies. We map the imagined geographies of 2010s Delhi and India as experienced and created by Indian returnee migrant authors, drawing on the hybrid nonfiction works India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India by Akash Kapur and Capital: The Eruption of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta. Juxtaposed, these texts sited on the borderline between fiction and nonfiction construct and produce knowledge on an imagined 'new India', textualised in literary form. Kapur and Dasgupta, having returned from long sojourns in the West are now India-based, privileged observers of and participants in the very subject of their study-the ground realities of contemporary, 21st century India-both temporally and geographically. As diasporic narrators of a 'new India', they stand within their physical landscapes as well as the created landscapes of their narrations. This article draws on the construction of imagined geographies, with a focus on the issue of affect and, relatedly, identification, desire, and transgression, and their impact on the representation of an imaginary homeland, to unpack the tension and dissonance between their imagined geographies of India-as residents and as members of the diaspora-and their lived geographies. We conclude that Kapur and Dasgupta's imagined geographies offer an alternative account of the contemporary processes that geographers are seeking to describe and explain. Not only do their imagined geographies impact reality but also construct new worlds and realities of 'new India' in literary representation. Their hybrid nonfiction texts position India globally, carefully un-glamorising the binary representations of 'India Shining' and 'Dark India', and recovering the multiplicity of presences in the conjunctural spaces of 'new India'.

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Memory and Cities: Discovering Transitions Through Urban Maps

Cheshmehzangi

2021

Urban Memory in City Transitions

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Introduction: Tracing the urban imaginary in the postcolonial metropolis and the “new” metropolis

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

Kochi: provincialising postcolonial metro-cosmopolitan spatialities

Kochi: provincialising postcolonial metro-cosmopolitan spatialities

The conjunctural spaces of ‘new India’: imagined geographies of 2010s India in representations by returnee migrants

Memory and Cities: Discovering Transitions Through Urban Maps

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