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
Tag: colonialism
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
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
