Session Abstract

The history of urban imaginaries in late 19^th and 20^th century Asia bears testimony to the interconnected political economy of urban spaces in the region with cities across the world. The history also reflects the entanglements of ideas, symbols, and every day practices of its inhabitants: be it the visions of its ruling elite, the desires of its bourgeoisie, and the aspirations of its outcasts. Cities in Asia also represent the site where the colonial and postcolonial state’s vision of grandeur and governance engendered social practices of citizenship and paradoxically it was also the site where state power was rendered vulnerable.
The panel envisions the “City” as the metonym for entanglements. The panelists develop and deploy the analytic of entanglement to highlight the complex processes that produce and represent the city in the region. The first paper highlights how colonial Delhi was the space where Indo-British cultural practices reshaped categories like the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘indigenous’, the ‘colonizer’ and the ‘colonized’, and the ‘dominant’ and the ‘subservient.’ In the second paper, on the 1942 Japanese novella Waga Machi (Our Town), the protagonist embodies the vernacular cosmopolitanism made possible by the material and cultural entanglements of provincial cities in Japan and the Philippines within the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Zone.  The third paper, on postcolonial Indonesia, traces how the state’s vision of national development encoded projects of urban transportation in Palembang. The postcolonial projects also reflected the entanglements of Dutch colonial visions of modernization, but like colonial projects these postcolonial practices of national development also produced the alienation of certain groups. The fourth paper, on late-colonial and postcolonial Mumbai, sheds light on how the city was imagined by the ‘untouchables’ as a space where markers of untouchability would be rendered redundant. And yet, upon migration to the city, they realized that the dreams of emancipation from caste practices were stymied by the organization of labor and housing markets and the State practices that legitimated these markets.  Thus the panel, by developing the notion of entanglement, sheds light on the material and cultural practices, State agendas, and the politics of inhabitants that produce cities in Asia.