In the first and second chapters of Debjani Bhattacharya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta (2018), she analyzes in great detail the ecological and administrative forces that shaped Calcutta from the mid eighteenth century to the nineteenth. She begins by using the case of Benjamin’s Lacam’s proposal for a harbor in the east bank of the… Continue reading Anti-Colonial Ecologies
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Captions and Numbers: Governing the City
Saidiya Hartman and Sheetal Chhabria maneuver their respective archives in very different ways. Where Hartman chooses photographs of Black American life, and writes of their subjects like one would write of an old friend, Chhabria shows us a table, Bombay census data from around the same time Hartman’s photographs were taken, she asks what doesn’t… Continue reading Captions and Numbers: Governing the City
Warp the Timeline
In “We have always been queer” Diana Taylor writes “Where native languages and cultural beliefs and practices survive as living forces, the future is not fully distinguishable from the past. We move forward into the past; our present simply enacts the second of alignment between the past that is never over and the future that… Continue reading Warp the Timeline
Thoughts on Precarity and the City
Keisha-Khan Perry’s Black Women Against the Land Grab (2013), brought to mind Rita Segato’s “Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women” (2010). In this essay Segato masterfully articulates the socio-economic complexities of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, while simultaneously performing an in-depth cultural reading of the city’s pervasive feminicides.… Continue reading Thoughts on Precarity and the City
Going South
I recently read a chapter from Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019). The chapter, entitled “Arab Telephone,” covers the intimate relationship between colonization, the expansion of the telegraph in Algeria, and resistance. Asseraf analyzes the growth of a global pan-Islamist movement through these colonial technologies. As the telegraph spread with colonial expansion, so… Continue reading Going South
The Space Between
In February 2021 I attended a conversation between Felwine Sarr, a musician, economist and scholar, and Thierry Grillet. The talk was hosted by Columbia Global Centers Paris. Some of Grillet’s questions included: “Where are the places of healing? Where do we digest colonial histories?” These questions, in some sense rhetorical, ask us where—they ask us… Continue reading The Space Between
Points of Entry, Points of Exit
In the summer of 2020, The Funambulist Podcast recorded a series on France’s “quartiers populaires.” These episodes were often recorded in the neighborhoods being discussed, where the host, Léopold Lambert, interviewed current and former residents. Les Potagers, a housing project in Nanterre, is the subject of two such episodes. Built in the early 60’s, Les… Continue reading Points of Entry, Points of Exit
