Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a post colonial city

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199245
Author(s):  
Kavithaa Rajamony ◽  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Change ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
New Name ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
The City

Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.

scholarly journals The Post-Colonial Identity of Durban

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Koopman
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Place Names ◽  
The South ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Name ◽  
Public Reaction ◽  
The City

Many scholars have pointed out that when changes in political regimes take place, these are frequently accompanied by politically-inspired changes of place names. In this article, I look at the naming of the South African east coast city Durban, starting with the name Durban itself, and the various suggestions that have been mooted for its replacement. In particular, I look at the Zulu name for Durban (eThekwini — 'the place of the bay') and its suitability as a new name for the city. The article then goes 'inside' the city and looks at the recent re- naming of a considerable number of Durban's streets, and the public reaction to this. Both the re-naming and the public reaction are placed within the context of re-naming globally.

City’s Cultural Memory: Modern Practices of Symbolizing the Past

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-364
Author(s):  
Natalia G. Fedotova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Symbolic Resource ◽  
The City

The article is devoted to the discourse of the city’s cultural memory. The relevance of studying this topic is determined not only by the fundamental aspect associated with the episodicity of existing studies of this phenomenon. From an applied point of view, the city’s cultural memory is a symbolic resource that can be used to create an appealing image, form a sustainable urban identity, and strengthen the citizen’s sense of belonging to the city. The accumulation and objectification of cultural memory take place in symbolic forms, which makes it important to study the practices of symbolizing the urban past, the essence of which is to generate the significance of the relevant or latent layers of cultural memory for the citizens.The article presents the results of the final stage of research related to the study of the process of constructing the cultural memory of the city. The purpose of the article is to analyze modern practices of symbolizing fragments of the urban past, which mean their significance for contemporaries. Basing on the culturological cross-section of the issue, the author integrates different research contexts. The methodological basis of the article is the communicative approach that focuses on the processes of meaning formation, and the constructivist method that considers memory as a multi-layered and dynamic construct. Analyzing the practices of symbolizing the urban past by the example of Russian cities, the author of the article demonstrates how the episodes of the city’s memory are updated in the modern world, how cultural meanings become memorable for citizens. The author uses the results of previous studies and identifies the following elements of the symbolization of the urban past: a) ways of encoding fragments of the past; b) communicative trajectories of memory symbolization; c) factors of producing meanings about the collective past of the city. The obtained results open up new frontiers in understanding the processes of formation of the collective ideas about the city, and prospects for empirical research, forecasting and constructing the cultural memory of Russian cities, giving them the opportunity to change their present and future.

Tianjin's Worldly Ambitions: From Hyper-Colonial Space to ‘Business Park’

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-38
Author(s):  
Maurizio Marinelli
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Port City ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
World Class ◽  
History Approach ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin was the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Rogaski defined it as a ‘hyper-colony’, a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This essay focuses on the transformation of the Tianjin cityscape during the last 150 years, and aims at connecting the hyper-colonial socio-spatial forms with the processes of post-colonial identity construction. Tianjin is currently undergoing a massive renovation program: its transmogrifying cityscape unveils multiple layers of ‘globalizing’ spatialities and temporalities, throwing into relief processes of power and capital accumulation, which operate via the urban regeneration's experiment. This study uses an ‘interconnected history’ approach and traces the interweaving ‘worlding’ nodes of today's Tianjin back to the global connections established in the city during the hyper-colonial period. What emerges is Tianjin's simultaneous tendency towards ‘world-class-ness’ and ‘China-class-ness’.

scholarly journals On an excursion through EC1: multimodality, ethnography and urban walking

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
James Lamb ◽  
Michael Sean Gallagher ◽  
Jeremy Knox
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The City ◽  
Critical Interest

In this article we describe and critique a methodological exercise that brings together multimodality, ethnography and walking in order to investigate the city. Drawing on the experience of enacting our methodology in central London, we describe how an openness to the full range of meaning-making phenomena encountered during an unscripted excursion through the city provided ways of thinking critically about our relationship with the city. This research is undertaken against a backdrop of a growing critical interest in the complex and shifting nature of the urban environment, reflected in the range of approaches that investigate how we understand and experience our surroundings. Central to this methodological approach is the intersection of ethnography and multimodality which, when brought together within the device of an unscripted walk, provides valuable opportunities for thinking critically about our surroundings.

scholarly journals Driving on the Left: Sorkin’s View of the Street, the City and architecture

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sorkin ◽  
Graham Cairns
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Graduate Program ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
City College ◽  
The Media ◽  
Village Voice ◽  
The City

Sardonic, cutting, insightful, provocative: Michael Sorkin is one of today’s most radical architectural commentators with a staunch leaning to the political left and a literary bent for framing painful truths in ironic, and sometimes hilarious, verse. However, he should not be dismissed as a radical, isolated, or lone and unhindered voice however. He is a Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, and he has been Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In addition, he has taught at architecture schools across the world, including the Architectural Association, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Cornell. Sorkin runs his own design studio and research institute and has been a contributing editor of the Architectural Record . He was the architecture critic of the Village Voice for ten years and has published innumerable articles and essays. A list of some of his books includes: Twenty Minutes in Manhattan , Variations on a Theme Park , Exquisite Corpse , The Next Jerusalem , Indefensible Space , and a long list of other etcs . and alsos ….In this interview-article, he offers his opinion on a range of issues, including the environmental threats to contemporary America, architectural symbolism and paranoia, the importance of political action on the streets of the modern city, and the role of the architecture critic in the complex tapestry of contemporary culture. With regard the position of the modern critic, he begins by responding to a question regarding the relevance of Noam Chomsky’s description of the media as a form of propaganda and the contemporary journalist as functioning through the structure of what Chomsky defines as “filters,” or constraints and biases that dictate what gets written and published in the press.

Memorializing Pulse

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-23
Author(s):  
Rachel E. Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
The State ◽  
Living Form ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Culture Model ◽  
The City ◽  
Economics And Politics ◽  
Circuit Of Culture

Since 2016, the city of Orlando, FL, has remembered the Pulse nightclub massacre through memorial projects honoring the victims and survivors. The process of remembering and memorializing trauma is contentious; debates over how, where, who, and what to remember are about emotions, economics, and politics. Knowing that meaning making and memory are ongoing processes, I use the circuit of culture model to navigate my city’s processes and places of memorializing by visiting and interpreting different sites of memory. I argue for the power of the vernacular memorial, rather than the state-sanctioned, as a more inclusive, living form of memory.

Fragments Towards an Impossible (Domestic) Genre of the Human in Kenyan Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Wairimũ Mũrĩithi
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
International Media ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Extrajudicial executions and other forms of police violence in Kenya have always been an issue of significant concern in local and international media and human rights organisations. Reflective of this, scholarly interest in crime fiction in Kenya has grown significantly in recent years. However, the gendered implications of criminality – from sex work to errant motherhood to alternative modes of investigation – are still largely overlooked in postcolonial literary fiction and criticism. As part of a larger study on how women writers and characters shape crime fiction in Kenya, this paper critically engages with stories that the criminalised woman knows, tells, forgets,  incarnates, discards or hides about the city. It does so by examining the history of urban sex workers in Kenya, the representation of ‘urban women’ in postcolonial Kenyan novels and contemporary mainstream media, and the various (post) colonial laws that criminalise sex work. Through Justina, an elusive character in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, I consider how (post)colonial legislative frameworks and social life attempt to manage “impossible domesticity” (Saidiya Hartman) inside and against the geo-history of gendered and classed criminality in urban Kenyan spaces. My purpose is to interrogate hegemonic constructions of the citizen – and by extension, of the human  – in Kenyan law and public morality Keywords: crime fiction, feminism, sex work, human, homo narrans

scholarly journals ‘Welcome to London’: Spectral Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s Metropolis

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Lee
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Spectral Spaces ◽  
The City

This article examines the burgeoning tourist trade for locations featured in fictional narratives in popular culture. Symptomatic of a postmodern, hyperlinked culture referencing a vast reservoir of texts, such tourism produces a convergence of effects which render places ambivalent. Through a case study of Sherlock Holmes tourism in London, I argue that the city is constructed as seething with the spectral in which there is tension and slippage between paratexts, past and present, history and fiction, the observable and imperceptible. The tourist seeks out embodied experiences of their own secret London(s) which reside somewhere in-between the multiplicitous topographies.

Geography Matters: Regionalism and Identities in Contemporary Ukrainian Prose

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 82-101
Author(s):  
Maria G. Rewakowicz
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The City

AbstractThis paper examines the representations of four Ukrainian cities (Kyiv, Rivne, Chernivtsi, and Lviv) in a few selected fictional narratives by four contemporary Ukrainian authors. Each of these cities represents not just concrete urban settings, but also provides a certain set of beliefs, myths, and historical accounts. The sense of belonging to the local territory is underscored, yet the sense of belonging to the nation and the world is not dismissed. Kurkov, Irvanets, Kozhelianko, and Vynnychuk celebrate the city as a generator and site of identity, simultaneously regional and national.

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