As the 2017 UN Quito summit emphasized, the current era has seen rates of urban growth that are unprecedented in human history, and the vast majority of that growth (over 90%) is taking place in the Global South. These changes have been well documented by scholars in urban studies, who have also emphasized the disruptions caused by this demographic upheaval. Postcolonial literature has not only reflected these developments but also played a role in shaping them, notably by generating novel representational strategies able to bring the emergent realities of rapid urbanization, so often perceived as chaotic or incomprehensible, into the realm of the cognizable and the actionable.
It is not surprising, then, that the topic of urbanization has moved to the forefront of contemporary debates in the academic field of postcolonial studies, entering into discussions of issues ranging from economic globalization, development, and migration to human rights, good governance, cultural identity, and climate change. We might even speak of a new subfield: postcolonial urban studies, which would include such works as Ashley Dawson's Extreme Cities (Verso 2017), Rashmi Varma's The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (Routledge 2011), Sarah K. Harrison's Waste Matters: Urban Margins in Contemporary Literature (Routledge 2016), Dustin Crowley's Africa's Narrative Geographies (Palgrave 2015), and Maïk Nwosu's Markets of Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational (Africa World Press 2011).
The urgency of the urban question in the Global South speaks to the timeliness of this panel, but it is also important to recognize its relation to a larger debate within the field of postcolonial studies. As its name suggests, postcolonial studies has historically emphasized the legacies of colonial domination and oppression--first in its anti-colonial phase in the 1960-70s (as in Fanon) and then in its deconstructionist phase in the 1970s-80s (as in Said). But as the field struggles to adapt to the era of globalization, via such developments as transnational studies, the Empire/Multitude nexus, and "post-post-colonial" studies, the search for new critical idioms has gained new urgency. Postcolonial urban studies suggests one important way forward in this search.
This panel features, therefore, three papers that help to define the parameters of postcolonial urban studies. The papers chosen for inclusion are by young scholars--two graduate students and an assistant professor--who discuss three very different sites: Hong Kong, Srinigar (Kashmir), and Johannesburg. They were chosen not only for their common interest in the search for innovative solutions to the various representational challenges presented by life in the cities of the Global South, but also for their potential to catalyze a healthy discussion of the roles that postcolonial urban literature can play in shaping our understanding of the current world system and postcolonial studies' response to it.
In "Writing the City: Creating cultural identity through literary ethnography in Hong Kong literature," Wayne Yeung highlights the in-between status of Hong Kong, which is famously situated “between colonizers” (Rey Chow). A central challenge for writers in this space is the need to avoid conforming to both British colonialist and Chinese nationalist influences in order to do justice to Hong Kong’s uniquely cosmopolitan culture. Yeung argues that the ethnographic function of literature has played an important part in this task. Yeung traces the ethnographic paradigm in two works of Hong Kong literature: Saisai's My City (1975), which combined magical-realist aesthetics with ethnographic observation to produce a counter-discourse against British-colonial and Chinese-national identifications; and Wong Bik-wan's Lielaozhuan (2012) which ethnographically reconstructs the voice of a subaltern, life-long recidivist. Hong Kong’s example thus offers useful insights into the challenge of representing regional autonomy in an age of global populism rekindling local-national contradictions.
Like Yeung's paper, Rituparna Mitra's "Elastic Cities: Refiguring Urban Borderlands through Death," casts an ethnographic eye on its subject--in this case the city of Srinagar, Kashmir--and emphasizes its in-between status. Srinigar is a heavily militarized urban space at the "frontier" between Kashmir's independence movement and the postcolonial Indian security state. Leveraging Eyal Weizman's observation that the frontier is "elastic and dynamic," Mitra argues that the city's frontier status requires the relationship between bodies, space and power to be reformulated in novel ways. Specifically, the ongoing conflict renders the cityscape of Srinagar elastic so that checkpoints, camps, interrogation centers, sewers, graves all become sites of constant transformation and contestation. Mitra examines Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “Muharram in Srinagar, 1992” and Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, arguing that both refigure the material and affective flows between subject, space and power through the transformation of death into public ritual, thereby refiguring the urban community.
Like the previous papers, Liam Kruger's "Postcolonial Metropoles: Urban Setting, the Public Sphere, and Postcolonial Literature" focuses on postcolonial urban space as an object of representation that poses significant challenges to traditional conceptions of the urban, conceived in terms of the public sphere. He begins by drawing a contrast between two classic city novels (Joyce's Dublin in Ulysses and Achebe's Lagos in No Longer at Ease) and a certain tendency of South African novels to highlight the resistance of urban space to coherent presentation--a trend that he traces from the apartheid-era work of Nadine Gordimer, to the transitional novels of Afrikaans writer Marlene van Niekerk, to the post-apartheid Johannesburg writings of Ivan Vladislavić. Kruger then undertakes a comparative reading of Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket to show 1) why the urban setting takes precedence in South African fiction and 2) how a networked dialogue among public intellectuals and writers might contribute to the development of new conceptions of urban coherence relevant to the challenges of the current phase of late capitalism.