Bibliography of Books and Articles Published in English on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2011

The world was changing; an imperceptible hysteria was pulsing through the city. For as long as I can remember Delhi looked like a giant construction site [ … ] but the rubble has masked the incredi...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17449855.2018.1461977

Delhi: New writings on the megacity

This paper claims that Sarnath Banerjee destabilizes the narrative of national economic progress in his graphic narrative All Quiet in Vikaspuri by highlighting ecological crises and destruction of...

/pdf/slow-violence-and-water-racism-in-sarnath-banerjee-s-all-545undua3g.pdf

Slow Violence and Water Racism in Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric.

/pdf/urban-comix-subcultures-infrastructures-and-the-right-to-the-3jzo331yp5.pdf

Urban comix: Subcultures, infrastructures and “the right to the city” in Delhi

Sarnath Banerjee's second graphic novel The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, a delightfully complex and remarkably multilayered work, is a significant contribution to Indian Graphic Narratives. This pap...

Revealing Layers: Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers

The notion of “new” metropolises alludes to the multilayered ways of life inside and outside, or even “downside”, of postcolonial cityscapes. This holds true, for example, for Calcutta, Delhi or Cairo. Unlike the normative conception of the western metropolis, three graphic novels, Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2004) and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) and G. Willow Wilson’s and M.K. Perker’s Cairo (2007), produce “new” metropolises which disclose the postcolonial city’s own subversive nature of underworlds morphing into overworlds, where tradition, modernity (and postmodernity) collide in the most unrelenting and dynamic fashion. The texts under discussion exemplify the nature and scope of the “new” metropolis by virtue of their enabling synthesis between the literary and imaginary. By focusing on the strategies of palimpsest-like layering in the three novels, this essay aims to show that postcolonial cities are essentially “new” metropolises that do not lend themselves to an easy explanation or con...

Intermedial fictions of the “new” metropolis: Calcutta, Delhi and Cairo in the graphic novels of Sarnath Banerjee and G. Willow Wilson 1

This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, topology and typography underlying the wide range of the “urban imaginary”. This is to say, the aesthetic investments characterizing the textures of literary representations of the postcolonial metropolis and/or what we call the “new” metropolis. Although the very concept of the metropolis “has been used in contexts of colonial and imperial and postcolonial criticism” (Farías and Stemmler 12), recent scholarship dealing with urban literature has mainly focused on London as the former colonial centre (Baker 1996; Ball 2004; Cuevas 2008; Korte and Sternberg 2003; Onega 2002; Phillips 2004). Moreover, these critics see the “new” metropolis in opposition to the “old” – that is, European or imperial capitals of ex-colonial countries. In so doing they stress negative aspects such as overpopulation, unequal access to economic and material resources, or slumification. Following King, who cogently observed that the “new” metropolises, as discursive environments in their own right, have been “woefully neglected” (320) in the field of postcolonial studies, we attempt to both complement and complete these previous debates. As the topic has only just begun to receive nuanced critical attention (Nnodim 321–32; Sandten 125–44), this issue is dedicated to fresh approaches to cultural representations of what – since the 1960s with respect to the field of Urban Studies – has been variously termed “global city”, “world city”, “megacity”, “megalopolis”, “cosmopolis”, “galactic metropolis”, “boomburb” or “metroplex”. Our selection of articles thus aims to promote a dialogue between the politics and poetics of urban space – both real and imagined – and recent redirections of ideas and ideologies pertaining to postcolonial discourse in as well as through literature. This dialogue is shaped by what Rüdiger Kunow, among others, referred to as the “spatial turn” (186), and, more recently, Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler termed the “metropolitan turn” (2). As a concept, the “metropolis” dates back to antiquity and was rediscovered during the 18th and 19th centuries. However, based on the assumption that “the concept metropolis has become of central importance and notoriety within the urban discourses” (Farías and Stemmler 2; emphasis in original), we are less interested in applying this merely abstract “concept or category of practice” (2) to a wide range of textual representations.

Introduction: Tracing the urban imaginary in the postcolonial metropolis and the “new” metropolis

The volume Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis offers a wide-ranging collection of interdisciplinary essays by international scholars that address the postcolonial urban imaginary across five continents

Cecile Sandten

Papers

Intermedial fictions of the “new” metropolis: Calcutta, Delhi and Cairo in the graphic novels of Sarnath Banerjee and G. Willow Wilson 1

Introduction: Tracing the urban imaginary in the postcolonial metropolis and the “new” metropolis

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis

Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries

In Her Own Voice: Sujata Bhatt and the Aesthetic Articulation of the Diasporic Condition: