"Rethinking Urbanism from
Postcolonial Studies
and the Global South
Presented by Dr. Garth Myers, Trinity College
Over the last few decades in urban studies, a considerable critique and a vast opening of comparative
urbanism arose out of postcolonial studies and southern theory, challenging universal
understandings emanating from European and North American cities. This literature called into
question the meaning of urbanism and the roles, functions and shapes of urban areas, when accepted
understandings for these derive from Euro-American contexts and all other cities are measured against
them. This talk builds on the opening toward re-centering global urban studies, through engagement
with postcolonial studies and global South thinking. With the literature around planetary urbanization
that sprang from French urbanist Henri Lefebvre’s (1970: 113) hypothesis of ‘the planetary nature
of the urban phenomenon’ as a backdrop, I aim toward an analysis of select urban regions that have
mostly remained off the map of urban studies and perceived as disconnected from one another. I use
Hartford, Zanzibar, Port of Spain, San Juan, Cape Coast, Dakar, Shenzhen, Dongguan and
Guangzhou as starting places for conceptualizations built from postcolonial and southern
thinking. My goal lies in providing practical, empirical illustrations and thick descriptions of the
applicability of postcolonial and southern urban thought for addressing this new era of
planetary urbanization. I examine transversal links between urbanization dynamics using the vision of
transversality from Edouard Glissant (1989: 67) as an ‘invisible presence’ at the ‘roots of a crosscultural
relationship. Submarine roots…. not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but
extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches.’
In the words of Achille Mbembe (2017: 179): ‘No region of the world is spared from the logics of
the distribution of violence on a planetary scale…. Thinking through what must come will of
necessity be a thinking… in circulation, a thinking of crossings, a world-thinking.’ This talk will
offer a tangible illustration of how smaller or lesser-studied southern urbanisms impact one another’s
cultures and spaces in the circulations and crossings of this world-thinking.
AUST 434
September 27, 2019 | 12:20 pm | Join us after for refreshments!
For more information, contact: Nat Trumbull at trumbull@uconn.edu