The metropolis has remained a contested site for both imperial and decolonial projects. While it signified the center of colonial rule, it also became a space of radical possibilities. Elleke Boehmer writes that the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century metropolitan London was “pullulating with secularist, anarchist, socialist, avant-garde, and freethinking circles” who were envisioning decolonial movements in India, Ireland, Africa, and the Caribbean. As postcolonial writers look for ways to “provincialize Europe” in tune with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s frame, the metropolis has provided them with a broad canvas to reflect on new possibilities as well as crises that mark the afterlife of decolonization in political, ethnic, and economic spheres. As Rashmi Varma sees it, the postcolonial urban space births “new constellations of dominance and resistance, centers and peripheries, and formations of new political subjects.” It is thus a paradoxical site thatembodies hopes of secular modernity which, at the same time, breeds seeds of communal violence—a space where order intersects with chaos, impelling new understandings of the human condition.

Set against this backdrop, this panel investigates how postcolonial writers assemble memories of the colonial and postcolonial metropolitan spaces in South Asia, South Africa, and Europe. It probes the optics envisioned by writers to document necropolitical devaluation of life under the boot print of empire and the postcolonial native leadership which took the rein of governance from the departing colonizer in a Fanonian sense.

The panel opens with Fadila Habchi’s paper “Insurgent Countermemories: Leila Sebbar’s The Seine Was Red and the Limits of Historical Recovery” that examines the intersections of historical memory, political thought, and the quotidian in the shaping of literary visions of urban space. While investigating Leila Sebbar’s exploration of collective amnesia over the deadly repression of the 1961 Algerian anticolonial protest in Paris, the panelist illustrates how collective memory and struggles against official amnesia shape the spatial and political imaginaries of postcolonial subjects. Building on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work on the production of history and the scholarship on urban memory, Habchi departs from conventional readings of Sebbar’snovel which call it a successful attempt to recover a historical truth and to rehabilitate historical agents into the national narrative. She probes Sebbar’s use of spatial practices of fugue and vandalism to articulate “insurgent countermemories,” theorizing urban memory as a site of contestation and postcolonial urban space as a vehicle of undesirability. Thus, Habchi argues that postcolonial subjects lay claim to the city by rejecting historical erasure, and re-signifying urban belonging and citizenship as the constant struggle against invisibility and exclusion.

Continuing on this thread, Liam Kruger’s paper “Postcolonial Metropoles: Urban Setting, the Public Sphere, and Postcolonial Literature” comparatively investigates Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket which position the three metropolitan sites, Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg within a global network in their constitution of the public sphere. He charts various forms of anxieties over the urban setting and probes how they bleed into a critical interrogation of new postcolonial networks in an age of late capitalism. The panelist situates his argument in relation to James Joyce’s representation of Dublin in Ulysses against the backdrop of the 1922 formation of the Irish Free State and Chinua Achebe’s treatment of Lagos in No Longer at Ease during the 1960 Nigerian independence. Kruger thus establishes a causal relationship between national anxieties and urban memories within incomplete projects of reconciliation and legacies of postcolonial violence.

The panel concludes with Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s paper “Disciplining the Nasty: Bans, Bounties, and Banishment” that considers the work of exiled Bangladeshi author, feminist, and medical professional Taslima Nasreen. Through a close analysis of Nirbachita Column (Selected Columns) and Nashto Meyer Nashto Godyo (A Rotten Woman’s Rotten Prose), Mookerjea-Leonard investigates Nasreen’s critique of religious and heteropatriarchal dehumanization of women and female sexuality, and protests against the upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism in South Asia. The panelist critically observes how Nasreen’s work has been received by different readerships in South Asia and globally. Key to her analysis is the conservative censorship of the author in the urban public space as exemplified by such events as the destruction of her books at Dhaka’s annual Book Fair.

In this fashion, the panelists deliberate on alternative pasts, presents, and futures imaginatively forged by postcolonial writers using the urban space as a focal premise. Posing such questions as, How does European decolonization and US neoliberalism intersect in the urban space? How do oppression and resistance co-exist? and How does the metropolis lend a critical and creative scope to contours of the postcolonial human condition, this panel responds to the 2020 presidential theme “Being Human.” Each panelist will present for 20 minutes after which they will critically engage with the respondent and the audience for 15 minutes.