Talk on 17th September, Monday, 2012

Department of English Literature

The English and Foreign Languages University

Hyderabad 500007

Invites You to a Talk By

Anant Maringati

On

Is it time yet for postcolonial urban imagination?

Date: 17^th  September 2012 (Monday), 3:30 P.M.

Venue: Room No. 1, Ground Floor, New Academic Building, EFLU

Abstract: Postcolonial thought has found its way slowly and steadily into urban studies over the last decade. Critical urban scholars have borrowed extensively from postcolonial criticism to rethink power relationships in and between cities, so much so that ‘provincializing’ urban studies has become a project in its own right. Yet, this traffic appears to be largely in one direction. In this talk, I will trace the trajectories of some key ideas borrowed and reworked by urban scholars and speculate on their future potentials and limits. I suggest that postcolonial thought has successfully disrupted the methodologies, models and planning regimes of the cold war era. Yet, perhaps unwittingly, in doing so, postcolonialism appears to have become inextricably entangled in the unfolding of neoliberal urban  imaginations. Rebuilding a critical urban studies agenda therefore needs a critical engagement with and reworking of postcoloniality for a world in which the  ‘cities’ and ‘regions’ rather than the ‘nation state’ are emerging as sites of new identity construction projects. The talk will draw on examples from postcolonial fiction – particularly on the notion of home and the world in Amitav Ghosh’s acclaimed novel ‘The Shadow Lines’   as well as from recent scholarship in critical urban studies. 

Dr.Anant Maringanti is a geographer based in Hyderabad. He coordinates the Review of Urban Affairs, published biannually by the Economic and Political Weekly and serves as the Executive Director of Hyderabad Urban Lab, a research programme supported by the Right to the City Foundation.  After receiving his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2007, he was a post doctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore where he taught courses on global cities.