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This interdisciplinary, transnational module approaches the material and imaginative dynamics of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century post-imperial city as a paradoxical space of wealth and inequality, connectedness and segregation. We will explore literary and filmic representations of world cities that have been marked by the impacts of shifts in geopolitics, demographics, the built environment, economic systems, and cultural production, on lived spaces, neighbourhood cultures, and social fabrics. The selected works include memoirs, novels, and films (and other art forms) that focus on Istanbul, Cairo, Bombay/Mumbai, and London. By complicating current theoretical and critical debates on voluntary and forced displacement as well as ‘the right to the city’, these texts and films contribute engaged perspectives on significant issues like citizenship, interculturalism and ethno-religious isolationism, democracy and neo-nationalism, (more-than-)human rights and socially inclusive urban planning, slumification and gentrification, spatial and social justice, globalisation and neoliberalism, relationality and planetarity, gender equality and sexual rights.
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IMAGINING THE POST-IMPERIAL CITY
