Pablo Mukherjee

Ivan Vladislavić: Traversing the uneven city

The specificities of the African metropolis, or “Afropolis”, have been recently debated by a number of influential theorists of globalization and urban growth. This article registers these debates, but suggests that instead of a model of flows, fractures and hybridization, African metropoles reveal globalization as a process of radically uneven accumulation, excess and dispossession. Taking Johannesburg as a paradigmatic “Afropolis”, it suggests that such a process of simultaneous and excessive accumulation and dispossession demands the invention of correspondingly radical representative strategies that are capable of exceeding accepted cultural norms and idioms. The work of Ivan Vladislavić seems to be just such a cultural articulation of the forms of uneven development.

“Yet Was It Human?” Bankim, Hunter and the Victorian Famine Ideology of Anandamath

This essay reads W. W. Hunter’s The Annals of Rural Bengal (1868) and Bankimchandra Chatterji’s Anandamath (1881–82) to consider the importance of famine in Victorian imaginings of empire. Along with disaster events such as floods and contagious diseases, endemic famine provided a spectacular instance of the historicity of nature and the naturalization of history over the lifetime of modern British imperialism. The essay investigates how crucial famine was in raising questions about the nature of imperialism—was it a force that produced or mitigated the effects of “natural” disasters? Were disaster events peculiar to tropical areas? Did famine define an essence of India? Did it reveal key elements of governance and governmentality? What demands did large disaster events make on the cultural resources of those who experienced them?