Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture

Elleke Boehmer · Dominic Davies

Nob 2018 · Springer

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This book brings the insights of social geographers and cultural historians into a critical dialogue with literary narratives of urban culture and theories of literary cultural production. In so doing, it explores new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between urban planning, its often violent effects, and literature. Comparing the spatial pasts and presents of the post-imperial and post/colonial cities of London, Delhi and Johannesburg, but also including case studies of other cities, such as Chicago, Belfast, Jerusalem and Mumbai, Planned Violence investigates how that iconic site of modernity, the colonial city, was imagined by its planners — and how this urban imagination, and the cultural and social interventions that arose in response to it, made violence a part of the everyday social life of its subjects. Throughout, however, the collection also explores the extent to which literary and cultural productions might actively resist infrastructures of planned violence, and imagine alternative ways of inhabiting post/colonial city spaces.

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Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of five monographs and five novels, including, among the former, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Nelson Mandela (2008), and Indian Arrivals 1870-1915 (2015), and, among the latter, The Shouting in the Dark (long-listed Sunday Times Barry Ronge prize), Screens against the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize), and Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize). She has edited and co-edited numerous books, including Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004).
Dominic Davies is Lecturer in English at City, University of London, UK. He completed his DPhil and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford. During this time he was also the Network Facilitator for the Leverhulme-funded 'Planned Violence' Network and the British Council US and TORCH-funded 'Divided Cities' Network. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930 (2017) and Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (forthcoming 2019).