Session Name: Crossing Time and Space: Historical Perspectives on States, Communities and Human Mobility
Time, spatial culture and the colonial city in South Asia
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: The colonial city in South Asia has been imagined as a political cartography, an urban social artefact, a material culture formation and a network of distribution of subaltern subjects across nations and borders. In this paper, I will ask if we can inoculate the colonial city in South Asia with a temporal valence. Analogous to the concepts of utopia and heterotopia, but without the spatial connotation of the terms, I will propose that we think of South Asia as a spatial entity of heterogenous and multiple times, which offers us resources in thinking aside from the hegemonic temporality of colonial history. Also, South Asia's colonial city can be reconvened after the Academy has passed through the moments of postcolonial and decolonial critique. We are now in a position to take on the more positive and affirmative task of developing new standpoints and ideas from diverse historical experiences in interaction with one another. This must necessarily augment the ongoing mission of collective criticism. In that sense, my approach to the colonial city in South Asia and to time will draw on theories of reception by Peter Burke that emphasized the active, rather than the passive, role of the "recipients" of cultural influence. Accordingly, one of the central questions to ask will be: to what extent were spatial cultures and temporalities from the cities built in widely separate parts of Europe and South Asia by the Europeans during the colonial era significantly different and to what extent were they essentially the same?
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