Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in the Asian City

Description

The talk will engage with the literature on cosmopolitanism and the city. I ask the question of how one might read a city contrasting the security state’s attempt to read cities and the effort to understand them in terms of layers of geo-historic-cultural stratification and the inter-penetration of cultures. Imperial and nation-statist ways cartographies have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions of Asia including those of India and Palestine and have led to the recent near annihilation of several ancient/medieval cities. One might then reframe Lefebvre’s question who has the right to the city? Also ask the question as to whether cities have rights? Building on my recently released book The other global city, I challenge the “global cities” literature. Using the chapters put together by the contributors to the book I attempt to map the topography of an alternative cosmopolitanism in Asia including cities such as Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Bukhara, Singapore, Delhi, Lhasa, Singapore and Tokyo.
—
Shail Mayaram is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Publications include Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins; Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity; ; coauthored with Ashis Nandy et al, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of Self ; coedited, Subaltern Studies: Muslims, Dalits and the fabrications of history vol 12; edited, The Other Global City.