Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of "White Town" in Colonial Calcutta

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swati Chattopadhyay

Scholars assume colonial Calcutta was a dual city split into "black" and "white" towns. The critical aspect of colonial Calcutta, however, did not lie in such divisions, but in the blurring of boundaries between the two. The rhetorical categories of "white" and "black" towns were used to sustain the British desire to maintain difference in a city in which everyday life compromised such distinctions. The central argument of this essay rests on an analysis of a clearly distinguishable "pattern" of nineteenth-century colonial buildings that borrowed from indigenous as well as foreign sources. It is only by juxtaposing the spatial analysis with written and pictorial documentation that we can understand how these spaces operated in everyday practice. The attempt is to bridge the gap between rhetoric and practice, and to suggest that the spatial structure of Calcutta, from the building scale to the city scale, spoke of the hybrid conditions of colonial culture-a hybridity that did not simply reside in the native body and the native city, but one that the colonizers themselves inhabited.

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Mera ◽  
Mariana Marcos ◽  
María Mercedes Di Virgilio

En el marco de la pregunta por las diferencias y desigualdades metropolitanas, este artículo se propone estudiar la distribución espacial de la población extranjera en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires a partir de una tipología de contextos urbanos o tipos de hábitat, definidos en función del periodo de urbanización y la forma de producción del espacio habitacional. Tomando como fuente investigaciones previas y datos del Censo Nacional de Población, Hogares y Viviendas 2010, se realiza un análisis cuantitativo que indaga cómo se articula la diferenciación por condición migratoria con estos entornos que conforman la estructura socioespacial de la ciudad.Abstract:Within the framework of the question of metropolitan differences and inequalities, this article seeks to study the spatial distribution of the foreign population in the City of Buenos Aires on the basis of a typology of urban contexts or types of habitat, defined in terms of the period of urbanization and the form of production of the living space. Based on previous research and data from the National Census of Population and Housing 2010, a quantitative analysis is undertaken to explore how differentiation by migratory condition is linked to these environments that comprise the socio-spatial structure of the city.


Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-105
Author(s):  
Pedro A. Novo ◽  
Karmele Zarraga

AbstractThe article analyses the characteristics of the public water service in the city of Bilbao between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It addresses both the study of potable water and the different uses of non-potable water. In addition, the article includes the relationship between the water supply and the population that receives it. We are interested in knowing who enjoyed it at home, linking demographic sources with records of the water service of the city.


2020 ◽  
pp. 7-9

Examination of (35) samples of spices obtained from local markets for the purposes of isolating and diagnosing fungi growing on them. Anine isolates belonging to 13 different types of fungi were diagnosed by the standard dilution method with three replications, and it has been observed that the most samples from which the fungi were isolated is ginger. It was found that the most isolated species of fungi are Penicillium, Aspergillus, and Rizupes spp. A rare colony of fungi was observed, which indicates contamination of the spices under study with the fungus. The present study aims to identify the potential risks of the presence of fungi in spices and what may result from mycotoxins that may be the cause of many chronic diseases as a result of using these spices in large quantities. The study recommends limiting the use of contaminated spices, especially ginger, in preparing food and its uses, in addition to other types such as cloves, black and white pepper, and other types of spices found in the local markets, especially the expired ones.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.


Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.


Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.


Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


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