This panel presents new work that demonstrates the overlapping ways European colonizers, indigenous residents, and urban migrants constructed and contested the relationship between space, race and power in colonial cities. As European powers sought to create racially divided cities that served their own economic and political interests, non-European urbanites influenced how people built, managed, and navigated urban space for their own purposes. This panel draws attention to these diverse urban populations and their goals to explain how European and indigenous spatial practices melded together within the fraught landscapes of colonial cities. Ranging across South Asia and North and West Africa through the 19th and 20th centuries, this panel explores histories of race, space, segregation, and urban life in colonial cities.

Each paper focuses on a different city and local forms of segregation. Professor Beaujon’s paper examines colonial Algiers to explain how segregation structured the city’s landscape through economic and political pressures rather than formal regulations. Segregation could, however, also allow Muslim residents to claim and build their own idea of “home” in the Casbah. Professor Valdespino’s paper similarly examines colonial efforts to segregate Dakar during an outbreak of the bubonic plague to reveal how indigenous Lebu residents used protests and petitions to make the government behind their displacement give them the means to remain in the city. Finally, Dr. Dhanpal’s paper examines segregation programs in late 19th century Bangalore to argue that caste, rather than race, became the operative dividing line in this city. Dr. Beverley will round out the panel by placing these local case studies in dialogue with his own work on Hyderabad as well as major debates in global urban history across the Indian Ocean and formerly colonized world. These papers together draw attention to the ways colonized populations tried to assert some level of control over the spaces they inhabited in the face of restrictive and racialized colonial projects. Moving between Senegal, Algeria and India this panel argues that while the compartmentalization Fanon described must be understood as an illusory horizon, it had great power nonetheless. By asking these questions, we show the weakness and power with which social constructions of race were imbued into colonial cityscapes.