Welcome to the workshop on postcolonial urban histories and ethnographies convened by Shekhar Krishnan and Michael M.J. Fischer at MIT since January 2006.

Until recently, the study of cities in the colonial world has had to contend with an anti­-urban bias. If, as nationalists in South Asia often asserted, the “real India” lived in its villages, the countryside was more deserving of scholarly inquiry than cities. When forced to confront rapid urbanization in recent decades, postcolonial planners viewed the city less as a social form than as a set of problems, an ahistorical object of state intervention and control. These biases have shaped modern scholarship on colonial cities, where urban change has been submerged within the narrative frameworks of imperial power, resistance and identity – concerns which have dominated nationalist historiography and postwar area studies.

Recent urban crises in South Asia – from communal violence and religious extremism to ecological crises and infrastructure collapse – have renewed the debate on the significance of urban form and governance in India and cities of the postcolonial world. New urban histories and etnnographies of South Asia have demonstrated that its cities were a key arena for the circulation of transnational ideas and technologies of sanitation, mass housing and town planning, as well as a site for the articulation of novel forms of modernity whose history is neither “colonial” nor “national”, but are part of global urban history.

Our workshop attempts to rethink urban change in the colonial and postcolonial world beyond the nationalist framework of “impact” and “response”, and the dualism which structures most studies of colonial urbanism. Meeting once or twice month, we focus on new historical and ethnographic research in modern cities in South Asia and the Middle East, situating recently published and work in-progress on colonial and postcolonial cities in relation to the fields of urban studies, area studies, and science and technology studies. We also host film screenings, group discussions, and have initiated conference panels and roundtables over the past two years. Click on the links on the sidebar for more information about our activities.

Our meetings are open to participants who sign up for our mailing list. While all of the information here is public, members of the group have password-protected access to a repository of materials and courseware for reading and teaching about postcolonial cities and the  urban experience. All texts cited here are archived online and passwords are distributed privately to members. To join the group, please sign up for our mailing list at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/urban-media