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"Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial
Uncanny" is a spatial history of colonial Calcutta, addressing the
question of modernity that haunts our perception of Calcutta. The
book responds to two interrelated concerns about the city. The
first is the image of Calcutta as the worst case scenario of a
Third World city - the proverbial "city of dreadful nights." The
second is the changing nature of the city's public spaces - the
demise of certain forms of urban sociality that have been mourned
in recent literature as the passing of Bengali modernity.
This book explores the history of the city, focusing in particular
on its emergence from colonialism into postcolonial modernity.
Drawing on postcolonial and spatial theory, the author analyzes the
city under British colonial rule and in its later incarnations, and
also examines such issues as gender, identity, and nationalism. It
is an essential text for scholars with an interest in colonialism,
South Asia, and urban development.
The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary
Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from
architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media
and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering,
environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the
meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first
century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140
black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both
real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity,
technologies, cityscapes, and practice.
Small Spaces recasts the history of the British empire by focusing
on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its
subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and
landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the
marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns,
and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of
empire. In so doing it opens up an important new approach to
architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from
the large to the small scale. Taking the British empire in India as
its primary focus, this book presents eighteen short, readable
chapters to explore an array of overlooked places and spaces. From
cook rooms and slave quarters to outhouses, go-downs, and medicine
cupboards, each chapter reveals how and why these kinds of minor
spaces are so important to understanding colonialism. With the
focus of history so often on the large scale - global trade
networks, vast regions, and architectures of power and domination -
Small Spaces shows instead how we need to rethink this aura of
magnitude so that our reading is not beholden such imperialist
optics. With chapters which can be read separately as individual
accounts of objects, spaces, and buildings, and introductions
showing how this critical methodology can challenge the methods and
theories of urban and architectural history, Small Spaces is a
must-read for anyone wishing to decolonize disciplinary practices
in the field of architectural, urban, and colonial history.
Altogether, it provides a paradigm-breaking account of how to
‘unlearn empire’, whether in British India or elsewhere.
The town hall or city hall as a place of local governance is
historically related to the founding of cities in medieval Europe.
As the space of representative civic authority it aimed to set the
terms of public space and engagement with the citizenry. In
subsequent centuries, as the idea and built form travelled beyond
Europe to become an established institution across the globe, the
parameters of civic representation changed and the town hall was
forced to negotiate new notions of urbanism and public space. City
Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban
Public Space utilizes the town hall in its global historical
incarnations as bases to probe these changing ideas of urban public
space. The essays in this volume provide an analysis of the
architecture, iconography, and spatial relations that constitute
the town hall to explore its historical ability to accommodate the
"public" in different political and social contexts, in Europe,
Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, as the relation between
citizens and civic authority had to be revisited with the universal
franchise, under fascism, after the devastation of the world wars,
decolonization, and most recently, with the neo-liberal
restructuring of cities. As a global phenomenon, the town hall
challenges the idea that nationalism, imperialism, democracy, the
idea of citizenship - concepts that frame the relation between the
individual and the body politic -- travel the globe in modular
forms, or in predictable trajectories from the West to East, North
to South. Collectively the essays argue that if the town hall has
historically been connected with the articulation of bourgeois
civil society, then the town hall as a global spatial type --
architectural space, urban monument, and space of governance --
holds a mirror to the promise and limits of civil society.
This major new postcolonial study addresses the questions of
modernity and space that haunt our perceptions of Calcutta.
This book explores the politics of representation and the cultural
changes that occurred in the city as its residents negotiated the
idea of being 'modern'. Its dynamic range encompasses Asian Studies
and History, Architecture and Urbanism
The text responds to two inter-related concerns about the city.
First is the image of Calcutta as the worst-case scenario of a
Third World city -- the proverbial "city of dreadful nights. Second
is the changing nature of the city's public spaces - the demise of
certain forms of urban sociality that have been mourned in recent
literature as the passing of Bengali modernity. Drawing on its
postcolonial and spatial theory, it examines the city under British
colonial rule as well as its later incarnations and explores issues
such as gender, identity and nationalism.
We begin with an analysis of the British attitudes that produced a
dominant image of a problem-ridden city in the nineteenth century,
and then proceed to explore other ways of envisioning it,
emphasizing various modes of Bengali spatial imagination and
practice. The crafting of a nationalist identity was central to
modern Bengali spatial imagination and was animated by the
conflicting responses of Bengali residents to city life as they
attempted to work out the ethics of their public and private selves
in literature, art, residential design, and in the creation of new
urban spaces.
This new text problematizes the idea of representing the city -
both colonialist and nationalist. It argues for models of urbanism,
nationalism, and modernity that cannot befathomed by neat
renderings into black/white, spiritual/material, but must be
understood in terms of strategic "translations" between cultural
and political domains. An essential and challenging new work from
this leading author.
The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary
Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from
architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media
and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering,
environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the
meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first
century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140
black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both
real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity,
technologies, cityscapes, and practice.
Small Spaces recasts the history of the British empire by focusing
on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its
subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and
landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the
marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns,
and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of
empire. In so doing it opens up an important new approach to
architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from
the large to the small scale. Taking the British empire in India as
its primary focus, this book presents eighteen short, readable
chapters to explore an array of overlooked places and spaces. From
cook rooms and slave quarters to outhouses, go-downs, and medicine
cupboards, each chapter reveals how and why these kinds of minor
spaces are so important to understanding colonialism. With the
focus of history so often on the large scale - global trade
networks, vast regions, and architectures of power and domination -
Small Spaces shows instead how we need to rethink this aura of
magnitude so that our reading is not beholden such imperialist
optics. With chapters which can be read separately as individual
accounts of objects, spaces, and buildings, and introductions
showing how this critical methodology can challenge the methods and
theories of urban and architectural history, Small Spaces is a
must-read for anyone wishing to decolonize disciplinary practices
in the field of architectural, urban, and colonial history.
Altogether, it provides a paradigm-breaking account of how to
‘unlearn empire’, whether in British India or elsewhere.
Space and place have become central to analysis of culture and
history in the humanities and social sciences. Making Place
examines how people engage the material and social worlds of the
urban environment via the rhythms of everyday life and how bodily
responses are implicated in the making and experiencing of place.
The contributors introduce the concept of spatial ethnography, a
new methodological approach that incorporates both material and
abstract perspectives in the study of people and place, and
encourages consideration of the various levels from the personal to
the planetary at which spatial change occurs. The book s case
studies come from Costa Rica, Colombia, India, Austria, Italy, the
United Kingdom, and the United States."
Space and place have become central to analysis of culture and
history in the humanities and social sciences. Making Place
examines how people engage the material and social worlds of the
urban environment via the rhythms of everyday life and how bodily
responses are implicated in the making and experiencing of place.
The contributors introduce the concept of spatial ethnography, a
new methodological approach that incorporates both material and
abstract perspectives in the study of people and place, and
encourages consideration of the various levels from the personal to
the planetary at which spatial change occurs. The book s case
studies come from Costa Rica, Colombia, India, Austria, Italy, the
United Kingdom, and the United States."
Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern
urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the
vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of
cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced
argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City,
proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that
captures the ever-changing element of human experience. Urban life
is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid
views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay
looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that
incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to
apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban
history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art,
street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities
that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular
cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life.
She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the
configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political
potential of the people inhabiting cities. Unlearning the City uses
the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant
conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual
realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even
experienced.
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