The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities PDF Author: Julia C. Obert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198881266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities is a comparative study of architectural space in four (post-)colonial capitals: Belfast, Northern Ireland; Windhoek, Namibia; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Each chapter takes up one of these cities, outlining its history of building and urban planning under colonial rule and linking that history to its contemporary shape and scope. This genealogical information is drawn from primary source documents and archival materials. The chapters then look to local literary texts to better understand the lingering impact of colonial building practices on individuals living in (post-)colonial cities today. These texts often foreground the difficulty of moving through a city that can never feel comfortably one's own; legacies of racial segregation, buildings that disregard indigenous resources, and street names that serve as constant reminders of a history of oppression, for example, can produce feelings of anxiety, even of unbelonging, for native subjects. However, the literature also highlights ways in which the subversive wanderings of particular pedestrians—taking shortcuts, trespassing in forbidden places, diverting spaces from their intended uses—can contest 'official' topography. Bodies can therefore move against the power of a repressive regime, at least to some degree, even when that power is literally set in stone. Obert argues for the significance of these small gestures of reclamation, suggesting that we must counterpose the potential flexibility of lived space to the prohibitions of the map in order to more fully understand (post-)colonial power relations.

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities PDF Author: Julia C. Obert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198881266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities is a comparative study of architectural space in four (post-)colonial capitals: Belfast, Northern Ireland; Windhoek, Namibia; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Each chapter takes up one of these cities, outlining its history of building and urban planning under colonial rule and linking that history to its contemporary shape and scope. This genealogical information is drawn from primary source documents and archival materials. The chapters then look to local literary texts to better understand the lingering impact of colonial building practices on individuals living in (post-)colonial cities today. These texts often foreground the difficulty of moving through a city that can never feel comfortably one's own; legacies of racial segregation, buildings that disregard indigenous resources, and street names that serve as constant reminders of a history of oppression, for example, can produce feelings of anxiety, even of unbelonging, for native subjects. However, the literature also highlights ways in which the subversive wanderings of particular pedestrians—taking shortcuts, trespassing in forbidden places, diverting spaces from their intended uses—can contest 'official' topography. Bodies can therefore move against the power of a repressive regime, at least to some degree, even when that power is literally set in stone. Obert argues for the significance of these small gestures of reclamation, suggesting that we must counterpose the potential flexibility of lived space to the prohibitions of the map in order to more fully understand (post-)colonial power relations.

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities PDF Author: Julia C. Obert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019888124X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities is a comparative study of architectural space in four (post-)colonial capitals: Belfast, Northern Ireland; Windhoek, Namibia; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Each chapter takes up one of these cities, outlining its history of building and urban planning under colonial rule and linking that history to its contemporary shape and scope. This genealogical information is drawn from primary source documents and archival materials. The chapters then look to local literary texts to better understand the lingering impact of colonial building practices on individuals living in (post-)colonial cities today. These texts often foreground the difficulty of moving through a city that can never feel comfortably one's own; legacies of racial segregation, buildings that disregard indigenous resources, and street names that serve as constant reminders of a history of oppression, for example, can produce feelings of anxiety, even of unbelonging, for native subjects. However, the literature also highlights ways in which the subversive wanderings of particular pedestrians--taking shortcuts, trespassing in forbidden places, diverting spaces from their intended uses--can contest 'official' topography. Bodies can therefore move against the power of a repressive regime, at least to some degree, even when that power is literally set in stone. Obert argues for the significance of these small gestures of reclamation, suggesting that we must counterpose the potential flexibility of lived space to the prohibitions of the map in order to more fully understand (post-)colonial power relations.

Of Planting and Planning

Of Planting and Planning PDF Author: Robert K. Home
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780415512145
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This examination of the history of town planning in the British Empire from 1600 considers the transfer of British planning legislation to the colonies and the influence of this transfer on world urbanisation.

Of Planting and Planning

Of Planting and Planning PDF Author: Robert Home
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135945896
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
‘At the centre of the world-economy, one always finds an exceptional state, strong, aggressive and privileged, dynamic, simultaneously feared and admired.’ - Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries This, surely, is an apt description of the British Empire at its zenith. Of Planting and Planning explores how Britain used the formation of towns and cities as an instrument of colonial expansion and control throughout the Empire. Beginning with the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster and ending with decolonization after the Second World War, Robert Home reveals how the British Empire gave rise to many of the biggest cities in the world and how colonial policy and planning had a profound impact on the form and functioning of those cities. This second edition retains the thematic, chronological and interdisciplinary approach of the first, each chapter identifying a key element of colonial town planning. New material and illustrations have been added, incorporating the author's further research since the first edition. Most importantly, Of Planting and Planning remains the only book to cover the whole sweep of British colonial urbanism.

A Hygienic City-Nation

A Hygienic City-Nation PDF Author: Nabaparna Ghosh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108883427
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Calcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Yet, historians have largely ignored how the city shaped these movements. A Hygienic City-Nation is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. Ghosh focuses on an emergent discourse on Hindu spatial hygiene that powered nationalist pedagogic efforts to train city dwellers in conduct fit for the city-nation. In such pedagogic efforts, upper-caste Bengalis were pitted against the lower-caste working poor and featured as ideal inhabitants of the city: the citizen.

Neither Settler nor Native

Neither Settler nor Native PDF Author: Mahmood Mamdani
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674987322
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities. In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Colonial Cities

Colonial Cities PDF Author: Robert Ross
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description


Powerful Frequencies

Powerful Frequencies PDF Author: Marissa J. Moorman
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Powerful Frequencies details the central role that radio technology and broadcasting played in the formation of colonial Portuguese Southern Africa and the postcolonial nation-state, Angola. In Intonations, Marissa J. Moorman examined the crucial relationship between music and Angolan independence during the 1960s and ’70s. Now, Moorman turns to the history of Angolan radio as an instrument for Portuguese settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state. They all used radio to project power, while the latter employed it to challenge empire. From the 1930s introduction of radio by settlers, to the clandestine broadcasts of guerrilla groups, to radio’s use in the Portuguese counterinsurgency strategy during the Cold War era and in developing the independent state’s national and regional voice, Powerful Frequencies narrates a history of canny listeners, committed professionals, and dissenting political movements. All of these employed radio’s peculiarities—invisibility, ephemerality, and its material effects—to transgress social, political, “physical,” and intellectual borders. Powerful Frequencies follows radio’s traces in film, literature, and music to illustrate how the technology’s sonic power—even when it made some listeners anxious and frightened—created and transformed the late colonial and independent Angolan soundscape.

Cities and Towns

Cities and Towns PDF Author: Rebecca Stefoff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780349855
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Describes the daily life in the cities and towns of colonial America.

Urbanizing Frontiers

Urbanizing Frontiers PDF Author: Penelope Edmonds
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774859199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Frontiers were not confined to the bush, backwoods, or borderlands. Towns and cities at the farthest reaches of empire were crucial to the settler colonial project. Yet the experiences of Indigenous peoples in these urban frontiers have been overshadowed by triumphant narratives of progress. This book explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and settlers in two Pacific Rim cities � Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia. Built on Indigenous lands and overtaken by gold rushes, these cities emerged between 1835 and 1871 in significantly different locations, yet both became cross-cultural and segregated sites of empire. This innovative study traces how these spaces, and the bodies in them, were transformed, sometimes in violent ways, creating new spaces and new polities.