Cities And Citizenship

[i]Interogating Urbanism In Contemporary South Asia[/i] CALL FOR PAPERS February 14, 2008 University of California, Berkeley (exact location to be announced) Sponsored by the Center for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley The history of cities has long favored the West as the center of urbanization, thus casting the cities of the Global South in the rhetoric of delayed development and borrowed modernities. Indeed, the postcolonial condition of South Asian cities has been continually rendered as the shadow of former colonial cities struggling to cope with inefficiencies of the postcolonial state in managing urbanization and more recently with pressures of globalization and transnational forces. In order to move beyond a dialogue which frames the cities of the developing world as derivative of a Euro-Ameri-centric core we propose an interrogation of South Asian cities through the theoretical lens of citizenship. The evolving definition of citizenship—originally a product of the urban enclave (as in the medieval bastide or the polis) to a right defined by a larger national political community—is being recalibrated once again as cities around the world become the salient units of economic and political change. The notion of republican citizenship, as premised on an idea of universal liberalism, has most strenuously been challenged in the urban sphere, be it through the ghettoization of minorities or the growing enclaves of the wealthy. At the same time, diverse initiatives and grassroots mobilizations have emerged to counter old and new urban inequalities and spatial exclusions. Although the re-scripting of urban space in cities across the world is thus producing new notions of citizenship, both restrictive and expansive, the modalities through which these are produced remain contingent upon historical and geographical specificities. South Asian cities have recently come center-stage through innovative explorations in fiction, photography, and documentary film. This one-day symposium will provide a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogue which brings these perspectives from the humanities in conversation with those in the social sciences in order to investigate the urban realm. We encourage submissions that deal with cities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as a means to expand the discussion of South Asian urbanism beyond the case-study of India. We invite papers that speak to the issues outlined in the following three themes: I. Propertied Citizenship and Landscapes of Consumption II. Recalibrating Urban Governmentality III. Re-scripting Identity through Urban Space [b]Paper abstracts will be accepted by e-mail [/b]at [url=mailto:southasiancities@gmail.com ]southasiancities@gmail.com [/url] [b]through September 15, 2007[/b]. Abstracts should be 400-500 words in length and authors should attach the abstract as a Word document as well as include the text of the abstract in the body of the message. Please be sure to include the following information in the e-mail as well: Full name, departmental affiliation, and the title of your abstract. Accepted authors will receive e-mail notification no later than October 15, 2007. Accepted authors will be expected to submit a draft working paper by January 10, 2008. For additional information, please contact the symposium coordinators: Romola Sanyal ( [url=mailto:romi_s@berkeley.edu]romi_s@berkeley.edu[/url] ) or Renu Desai ( [url=mailto:renu_d@berkeley.edu]renu_d@berkeley.edu[/url] ).