Planned Violence Post Colonial Urban Infrastructure Literature and Culture 1St Ed Edition Elleke Boehmer All Chapter

Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban
Infrastructure, Literature and Culture

1st ed. Edition Elleke Boehmer
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EDITED BY ELLEKE BOEHMER
AND DOMINIC DAVIES
P L A N N E D
V I O L E N C E
POST/COLONIAL URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE,
LITERATURE & CULTURE

Planned Violence
Elleke Boehmer • Dominic Davies
Editors
Planned Violence
Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature
and Culture
Editors
Elleke Boehmer Dominic Davies
English Faculty City, University of London
University of Oxford London, UK
Oxford, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-91387-2 ISBN 978-3-319-91388-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952935
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: JULIE MEHRETU, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts): Part 3, 2012
Ink and acrylic on canvas, 180 x 144 in., 457.2 x 365.8 cm.
Courtesy of the Artist; Marian Goodman Gallery and White Cube.
Photo credit: Ben Westoby
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the International

Network grant IN-2013–003 that allowed us to set up ‘Planned Violence:
Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’ (2014–16). The
essays that appear in Planned Violence arose from the project workshops
and responses to them. Elleke Boehmer was the Principal Investigator on
the project, and Dominic Davies the Network Facilitator.
Warm thanks to our research collaborators on the project, and to the
institutions with which we were able to work due to their involvement:
Pablo Mukherjee at the University of Warwick; Sarah Nuttall at the Wits
Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg;
Ruvani Ranasinha at King’s College, London; GJV Prasad at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi; Alex Tickell at the Open University. Thanks
also to Pamila Gupta (WISER) and Lakshmi Menon (JNU) for attending
most of the workshops. We are particularly grateful to Pablo Mukherjee
for his insight and assistance in the early stages of mounting our applica-
tion to the Leverhulme Trust, and to the research support staff in the
English Faculty office for their kind help, especially Katie MacCurrach.
Our thanks also go to Josh Hambleton-Jewell for diligently indexing this
book.
Julie Mehretu’s evocative artwork appears on the cover of this book
and is discussed in its pages. We are grateful to her for allowing us to use
her work in this way, and to Nicholas Simcik Arese for forging the link
with her. Erica Lombard dedicated her time and stellar designer skills to
creating the project website, http://plannedviolence.org/, which func-
tioned—and continues to function—as an archive and online forum for
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the Network. Thanks also to Erica for the series of five beautiful posters
she created for the project workshops. We are very grateful to her for her
energies and vision. Elleke and Dom would also like to thank the friends
and colleagues who helped us create the photo-essays with which we
image-mapped social and economic divisions in the cities of Johannesburg,
Oxford, and Milton Keynes, especially Charne Lavery and Alex Tickell.
Further thanks to Alex also for his photos of Mumbai, to Nicholas Simcik
Arese for his of Cairo, and to Bradley Garrett for his of London. Bradley’s
photos are also featured in this book.
Across the two years of the project, we held four workshops on three
continents (at KCL, JNU, WISER, and Oxford), and a final closing key-
note lecture accompanied by a photo exhibition that took place at the
University of Warwick. With the support of The Oxford Research Centre
in the Humanities (TORCH) and the British Council (USA), we were
also able to hold two follow-up workshops under the network title
‘Divided Cities: Culture, Infrastructure and the Urban Future’. Our grati-
tude goes to both TORCH and the British Council (USA) and to Victoria
McGuinness, in particular. Further thanks also to TORCH for hosting the
‘Planned Violence’ exhibition after its launch at Warwick. The exhibition
included images from our photo-essays, 2015–2016, professionally pre-
pared as posters by Ruth Scobie.
A wide range of researchers as well as independent scholars, writers,
dramatists, performance poets, city anthropologists, and visual artists par-
ticipated in the project across its two years. We are privileged to include a
sample of their vigorous and wide-ranging work in between these covers.
We are also grateful to all our contributors for their patience through the
sometimes drawn-out process of putting this book together. We should
like to acknowledge our gratitude to everyone for their involvement by
naming all the ‘Planned Violence’ workshop participants here, in alpha-
betical order: Ackbar Abbas, Nicholas Simcik Arese, James Attlee and
Non-Stop Tango, Kanika Batra, Debaditya Bhattacharya, Lipi Biswas,
Mita Bose, Sid Bose, Keith Breckenridge, Terence Cave, Grégoire
Chamayou, Sharad Chari, Vibha Chauhan, Brian Chikwava, Imraan
Coovadia, Tom Cowan, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta, Bob Eaglestone,
Tunde Euba, Matt Feldman, Corinne Fowler, Bradley Garrett, Claudia
Gastrow, Mark Gevisser, Divya Ghelani, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, William
Ghosh, Paul Gilroy, David Theo Goldberg, Ananya Dutta Gupta, Narayani
Gupta, Sarah Harrison, Sohail Hashmi, Tonica Hunter, Jeremy James and
GLYPT, Manju Kapur, Michael Keith, Stuti Khanna, Kavita Krishnan,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
Loren Kruger, Ole Birk Laursen, Louisa Layne, Stephen Legg, Bettina
Malcomess, Zen Marie, Maurizio Marinelli, Achille Mbembe, Kei Miller,
Ankhi Mukherjee, Courttia Newland, Sarah Nuttall, Bodh Prakash, Rina
Ramdev, Mike Rubenstein, Someshwar Sati, Aman Sethi, Rachna Sethi,
Yasmin Sidhwa and the Pegasus Theatre Group including Louis Rogers,
Iain Sinclair, Preeti Singh, Florian Stadtler, SuAndi, Julie Taylor, Stephen
Tuck, Jo Tyabji, Eyal Weizman, James Whitfield, and of course, the core
project group. We would like especially to remember the late Jan-Georg
Deutsch, who contributed to the final Oxford workshop with his usual
mix of energy, critical vigour, and humour.
Finally, Elleke would like to thank Steven Matthews and Thomas and
Sam Matthews Boehmer for their support and interest throughout, and
Dom is as ever grateful to Emma Parker, Jane Barber, and Simon and Ruth
Davies. Thanks from us both to those always ready to rally round in
Brighton, London, the Hague, and Oxford.
Oxford, UK Elleke Boehmer

London, UK Dominic Davies
Contents
1 Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures,

Literature and Culture 1
Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies
Section I Planned/Unplanned Cities 27
2 White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native

Maps in Richard Wright’s Chicago and Modikwe Dikobe’s
Johannesburg 29
Loren Kruger
3 Grey Space, Tahrir Laser: Conspiracy, Critique and the

Urban in Julie Mehretu’s Depictions of Revolutionary
Cairo 49
Nicholas Simcik Arese
4 Thames Valley Royal (or, Maxwell in Oxford): The Story

of a Football Club and the History of a City 71
William Ghosh
ix
x Contents
5 Slums and the Postcolonial Uncanny 87

Ankhi Mukherjee
6 The Not-so-Quiet Violence of Bricks and Mortar105

Zen Marie
7 Intervention I. What You Find in the River: Isolarion

Ten Years On121
James Attlee
Section II Forensic Infrastructures 135
8 The Intimacy of Infrastructure: Vulnerability and

Abjection in Palestinian Jerusalem137
Hanna Baumann
9 Sound Systems and Other Systems: The Policing of

Urban Aesthetic Spaces in the Poetry of Linton Kwesi
Johnson159
Louisa Olufsen Layne
10 ‘Throwing Petrol on the Fire’: Writing in the Shadow

of the Belfast Urban Motorway177
Stephen O’Neill
11 Writing the City and Indian English Fiction: Planning,

Violence, and Aesthetics195
Alex Tickell
12 Blue Johannesburg213
Pamila Gupta
13 Intervention II. Take Me There231

Selma Dabbagh
Contents xi
Section III Structural Violence, Narrative Structure 235
14 ‘A Shadow Class Condemned to Movement’: Literary

Urban Imaginings of Illegal Migrant Lives in the Global
North237
Ruvani Ranasinha
15 ‘A Dagger, a Revolver, a Bottle of Chloroform’: Colonial

Spy Fiction, Revolutionary Reminiscences and Indian
Nationalist Terrorism in Europe255
Ole Birk Laursen
16 Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban Crimes in the

Nineteenth Century273
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
17 Weird Collocations: Language as Infrastructure in the

Storyworlds of China Miéville289
Terence Cave
18 Aquacity Versus Austerity: The Politics and Poetics of

Irish Water305
Michael Rubenstein
19 Intervention III. Control323

Courttia Newland
20 Afterword331
Sarah Nuttall
Index 341
Notes on Contributors
James Attlee is the author of Station to Station: Searching for Stories on

the Great Western Line (2015), shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel
Book of the Year Award 2017, Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight
(2012), and Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (2009), as well as
numerous essays, chapters, and articles, mainly concerning art and books.
His latest book, Guernica: Painting the End of the World, was published in
October 2017.
Hanna Baumann is a research associate at The Bartlett’s Institute for
Global Prosperity (University College London). She completed her PhD
at the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research, University of Cambridge, in
2017.
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the
University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre in Life Writing
(OCLW), based at Wolfson College, and a foundational figure in the field
of colonial and postcolonial literary studies. Her monographs include
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005), Empire, the National
and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (2002), Stories of Women
(2005), Nelson Mandela (2008), Indian Arrivals (winner of the ESSE
2015–16 prize), and Postcolonial Poetics (2018). Her novels include The
Shouting in the Dark (long- listed Sunday Times prize, 2015), Screens
again the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize 1990), and Bloodlines (short-
listed SANLAM prize 2000). She edited Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys
(2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998). She holds an Honorary
doctorate from Linnaeus University in Sweden.
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University

of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College. His publications
include The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French
Renaissance (1979), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988), How to
Read Montaigne (2007), and Mignon’s Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from
Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (2011). In 2009, he won the Balzan
Prize for literature since 1500, and during 2010–2013, he was
Director of the Balzan project ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’
at the St John’s College Research Centre, Oxford. His book Thinking
with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism was published in 2016.
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction who lives in
London. Her first novel, Out of It, was published in 2011 to positive
reviews in the UK, the USA, and the Middle East. It was nominated as a
Guardian Book of the Year in 2011 and 2012. She has also written and
published numerous short stories with Granta, Wasafiri, Saqi, Telegram,
International PEN, and others. Several of her short stories have been
nominated for awards and been viewed favourably by international panels
of judges. She has also produced numerous blogs and pieces of journalism
for newspapers and magazines—from The Guardian and the LRB in the
UK to GQ in India. Short pieces of her fiction and non-fiction have
appeared in numerous anthologies. She wrote an Imison Award-nominated
radio play produced by BBC Radio 4, The Brick, which was broadcast in
January 2014, and regularly reviews works of fiction, films, and plays
about or by Palestinians for The Electronic Intifada. Her work has been
translated into a number of languages including Arabic, Mandarin,
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French.
Dominic Davies is Lecturer in English at City, University of London. He
holds a DPhil and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the
University of Oxford. During this time, he was also the Network
Facilitator for the Leverhulme-funded ‘Planned Violence’ Network
and the British Council US and TORCH-funded ‘Divided Cities’
Network. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial
Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930 (2017) and Urban Comics:
Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives
(2019), as well as a number of related journal articles and book chapters.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
William Ghosh was an Amelia Jackson scholar at Exeter College while

writing his doctorate, and now lectures in English at St Hugh’s College,
Oxford, University of Oxford. His research interests centre on the litera-
ture and intellectual history of Britain and the Caribbean from 1945 to the
present day.
Pamila Gupta is Associate Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social
and Economic Research), at the University of Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from
Columbia University. Her work has been published in Interventions,
Critical Arts, African Studies, Ecologie & Politique, Island Studies Journal,
Journal of Asian and African Studies, Ler História, and Public Culture.
She is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean
with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (2010). Her monograph enti-
tled The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in
Portuguese India was published in 2014. She is working on a new book
manuscript entitled Ethnographies of Lusophone Decolonization in India
and Southern Africa (forthcoming).
Loren Kruger is the author of several books, most recently Imagining
the Edgy City (2013), and Post-Imperial Brecht (2004), which won the
Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study awarded by the Modern
Language Association. Her articles on Chicago and Johannesburg have
appeared in such journals as The Drama Review, Journal of Southern
African Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Telos, and in essay
collections such as Performance and the Politics of Place (2008). She is
Professor of Comparative and English Literatures, African Studies, and
Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, where she
is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
Ole Birk Laursen is a lecturer in Postcolonial Indian Literature at NYU
London and an honorary research associate at The Open University. His
research concerns the literature and history of Black and South Asian
people in Europe, with a particular focus on anti-imperialism and anar-
chism. He is co-editor of Reworking Postcolonialism (2015), Networking
the Globe (2016) and a special issue of SubStance (2017) on comics and
anarchism. He is currently editing a collection of essays by the Indian
anarchist M.P.T. Acharya (2019) and writing a monograph entitled The
Indian Revolutionary Movement in Europe, 1905–1918 (2020).
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Louisa Olufsen Layne holds a DPhil in English Literature from the

University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis focused on the poetry of Linton
Kwesi Johnson. Her research and participation as an organiser in the Race
and Resistance Network (TORCH) in Oxford centres on the exploration
of new approaches to conceptualising the close relationship between
aesthetics and politics in the music and poetry of the black Atlantic.
She is Lecturer in Comparative and General Literature at the
University of Oslo.
Zen Marie is an artist who works in a variety of media, including photog-
raphy and film making, performance, sculpture, graphic processes, and
writing. His areas of focus include international sport, identity,
nationalism, and public infrastructure. The binding link between
these diverse areas has always been the relationship between power
and its subversion. He lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa,
where he is Lecturer in Fine Art at the WITS School of Art. He is also
a PhD candidate at WITS, with a focus on areas of art and theory in
relation to what he calls situated aesthetic practice.
Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at
Oxford. She is the author of two books, Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great
Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007) and
What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon
(2014), which won the British Academy prize for English Literature in
2015. She has edited two volumes, A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis,
Literature, and Culture (2014) and After Lacan (2017). Her articles have
been published in peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, MLQ,
Contemporary Literature, and Paragraph and she has contributed essays
to collaborative volumes. Mukherjee is on the editorial board of Cambridge
Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Women: A Cultural Review,
Contemporary Literature, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Her current
book project, for which she has received research grants from the AHRC
(Arts and Humanities Council, UK) and the Wellcome Trust, examines
the relevance of psychoanalysis for the psychic maladies of the urban poor
in global and postcolonial cities.
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is Professor at the Department of English
and Comparative Studies, Warwick University, UK. He teaches and
researches in the areas of British imperial literatures and cultures, postcolo-
nial literary and cultural theories, environmental studies, urban studies and
world and comparative literary theories. He is the author of Crime and
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (2003),

Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian
Novel in English (2010), Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines,
Epidemics and Literature (2013), and with the Warwick Research Collective,
Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World
Literature (2015), as well as a number of essays, articles, and book chapters.
He edited Victorian World Literatures: A Special Issue of Yearbook of English
Studies, 41:2 (July 2011) and was a member of the working group of the
Leverhulme-funded International Network, ‘Planned Violence: Post/
Colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’ (2014–2016). Mukherjee is
writing a book on the relationship between science policy and science fic-
tion of postcolonial South Asia.
Courttia Newland is the author of seven works of fiction that include his
debut novel, The Scholar. His latest novel, The Gospel According to Cane,
was published in 2013 and has been optioned by Cowboy Films. He was
nominated for the Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Frank O’Connor
award, The CWA Dagger in the Library Award, The Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award, and The Theatre 503 Award for playwriting as well as
numerous others. His short stories have appeared in anthologies including
Best British Short Stories 2017 and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
In 2016, he was awarded the Tayner Barbers Award for science fiction
writing and the Roland Rees Busary for playwriting. He is Associate
Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster and is com-
pleting a PhD in creative writing.
Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literature and Culture and Director of
WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg,
South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural
Reflections on Postapartheid, editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and
Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books including
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis and Loadshedding: Writing On and
Over the Edge of South Africa. For four years she has directed WISER, the
largest and most established Humanities Institute in the Global South. In
2016 she was Oppenheimer Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard
University.
Stephen O’Neill is a final-year PhD student and teaching assistant at the
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. His research, under the super-
vision of Dr Tom Walker, investigates the country and the city in the Irish
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
novel from 1922 to 1965, and is generously funded by the Irish Research
Council. He was one of the organisers of the Institutions and Ireland
series in 2016, and in 2017 he was a visiting fellow at the University of São
Paulo under the auspices of the SPeCTReSS project.
Ruvani Ranasinha is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at
King’s College London. She was a member of the working group of the
Leverhulme-funded International Network, ‘Planned Violence: Post/
Colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’ (2014–2016). Her
research focuses on South Asian writing, postcolonial book history, and
transnational feminism. She is the author of Hanif Kureishi (2002), South
Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation
(2007), Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender,
Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave, 2016), and the lead editor of
South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870–1950 (2012). She is an
associate editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and on the edito-
rial board of the feminist digital humanities project Orlando.
Michael Rubenstein is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook
University. His book, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and
the Postcolonial, received the Modernist Studies Association Prize for Best
Book in 2011. He co-edited, and co-wrote the introduction to a 2015
special issue of MFS Modern Fiction Studies on ‘Infrastructuralism’. His
2017 essay, ‘Life Support: Energy, Environment, and Infrastructure in the
Novels of Mohsin Hamid’, appears in the online journal Post45.
Nicholas Simcik Arese is Postdoctoral Research Associate at ESRC
Urban Transformations (Anthropology, University of Oxford) and
Research Associate at the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities. A
legal geographer and architect, his current ethnography explores concep-
tions of rights, ownership, and law by homebuyers and squatters in a gated
community during Egypt’s 2011–13 revolutionary period. He trained at
the Architectural Association and in 2017 completed a DPhil at the
University of Oxford.
Alex Tickell is Senior Lecturer in English and Director of the Postcolonial
Literatures Research Group at the Open University, UK. His research
interests include the history of Anglophone literary cultures in South Asia
and contemporary Indian fiction in English. He is author of Terrorism,
Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947 (2012) and a guide
to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2007), and is, more recently,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
editor of South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations

(2016). Tickell is editing volume 10 of the forthcoming Oxford History of
the Novel in English: The Novel in English in South and South East Asia
since 1945. He has published in journals such as Postcolonial Studies,
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
Literature & History, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, and he was a
member of the working group of the Leverhulme-funded International
Network, ‘Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures and
Literature’ (2014–2016).
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts): Part 2,

2012, ink and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 144 in. (457.2 ×
365.8 cm.). (Courtesy of the Artist; Marian Goodman Gallery
and White Cube; Photo credit: Ben Westoby) 51
Fig. 3.2 Detail from Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four
Parts): Part 2, 2012, ink and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 144 in.
(457.2 × 365.8 cm.). (Courtesy of the Artist; Marian
Goodman Gallery and White Cube; Photo credit: Ben
Westoby)53
Fig. 3.3 (a) A tweet showing “It is not a Coup” projected onto the
Mogamma building in Tahrir Square; (b) A Twitter account
claiming to be Tahrir Laser 57
Fig. 3.4 Detail from Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four
Parts): Part 2, 2012, ink and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 144 in.
(457.2 × 365.8 cm.). (Courtesy of the Artist; Marian
Goodman Gallery and White Cube; Photo credit: Ben
Westoby)63
Fig. 4.1 Beech Road Stand at the Manor Ground. (Source: Steve
Daniels, Wikimedia Commons, https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)76
Fig. 4.2 The East Stand of the Kassam Stadium under construction.
(Source: Steve Daniels, Wikimedia Commons, https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)80
Fig. 8.1 Map of Jerusalem and environs, including multiple,
transecting borders and the ‘exclaves’ of the city cut off by the
Separation Wall 142
xxi
xxii List of Figures
Fig. 8.2 Film still from Whole in the Wall (2013). (Courtesy of Khaled
Jarrar and the Ayyam Gallery) 143
Fig. 8.3 Film still from Infiltrators (2012). (Courtesy of Khaled Jarrar
and the Ayyam Gallery) 144
Fig. 8.4 Film still from Journey 110 (2008). (Courtesy of Khaled Jarrar
Fig. 8.5 Film still from Infiltrators (2012). (Courtesy of Khaled Jarrar
Fig. 12.1 Photo taken by the author 215
CHAPTER 1
Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban

Infrastructures, Literature and Culture
Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies
Introduction: The City Always Wins

In the first pages of his debut novel, The City Always Wins (2017), Omar
Robert Hamilton describes Cairo, the city of the title, as an urban space
‘of infinite interminglings and unending metaphor’:
Cairo is jazz: all contrapuntal influence jostling for attention, occasionally

brilliant solos standing high above the steady rhythm of the street. […]
These streets laid out to echo the order and ratio and martial manage-
ment of the modern city now moulded by the tireless rhythms of salesmen
and hawkers and car horns and gas peddlers all out in ownership of their
city, mixing pasts with their present, birthing a new now of south and
north, young and old, country and city all combining and coming out
loud and brash and with a beauty incomprehensible. Yes, Cairo is jazz.
(2017: 10)
E. Boehmer (*)
English Faculty, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: elleke.boehmer@ell.ox.ac.uk
D. Davies
City, University of London, London, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Boehmer, D. Davies (eds.), Planned Violence,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9_1
2 E. BOEHMER AND D. DAVIES
In this introductory passage and throughout the novel, Hamilton’s liter-

ary writing invites critical questions about the relationships between p ost/
colonial urban infrastructures, literature and culture—questions that this
book’s central, organizing concept of ‘planned violence’ also sets out to
explore. By way of introduction, the novel offers an emblematic window
into our discussion of urban infrastructure and post/colonial resistance.
Beginning in Cairo ten months after the revolution of January 2011,
the first section of Hamilton’s novel captures the heady period of urban
resistance and democratic protest that centred on Tahrir Square, a huge
public space in the heart of the city. In its second and third sections, how-
ever, the narrative turns to chart the suppression of this resistance, socially
and spatially, by the Egyptian military’s use of planned infrastructures—
barricades, roadblocks and barbed wire—designed to ‘zone’ and ‘confine’
protesters, ‘segregating them in limited spaces of war’ (Abaza 2013: 127).
These planned infrastructures crush the revolutionary movement with
which the novel opens, as state and private actors turn their militarized
infrastructure and ‘weaponized architecture’ on their civilian populations
(Graham 2011: xiii-xv; see also Lambert 2012). It is in this sense that the
novel finds itself conceding that, in the end, ‘the city always wins’.
The City Always Wins raises some of the key questions that are taken up
in the sixteen chapters and three creative pieces that constitute this edited
collection, Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure,
Literature and Culture. The contributors explore along a number of dif-
ferent vectors—metaphorical, linguistic, spatial and historical—how urban
infrastructures make manifest social and cultural inequalities, and how art
forms including literature can speak back to these often violent coordi-
nates. In Hamilton’s opening description of Cairo, quoted above, the
multiple layers of planned and unplanned urban life resemble the ricochet-
ing notes of an improvised jazz score, suggesting something of the spon-
taneous effects and energies of everyday life as they play out over the
underlying urban infrastructures that ‘order and ratio and martial’ city
space. These are the ‘physical and spatial arrangements’ from which a soci-
ety’s overarching values and prejudices can be read, and which, as Anthony
King observes, are nowhere ‘more apparent than in the “colonial cities” of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether in Africa, Asia or middle
America’ (1976: xii). Cairo’s urban development and spatial arrange-
ments, forged during Britain’s occupation of Egypt from 1881, material-
ize this trajectory (see Mourad 2017: 22), as do the spaces of other cities
examined in this collection: Johannesburg, Belfast, London, Delhi,
PLANNED VIOLENCE 3
New York and Oxford. As Frantz Fanon evocatively described in his

account of the colonial city as ‘a world divided into compartments’, such
segregationist infrastructural planning relied on ‘lines of force’ that
brought ‘violence into the home and into the mind of the native’ (2001:
29). According to Fanon, urban planning in Algiers, as in Cairo and other
colonial cities, was a violent materialization of colonialism’s exploitative
project: it was a ‘planned violence’, as this book terms it.
In this passage, Hamilton also points to countervailing aspects, how-
ever, including the contingency of these rationalist, geometric planning
regimes. Reinterpreting and reclaiming this planned space are the inter-
ventions of ordinary people, ‘the tireless rhythms of salesmen and hawkers
and car horns and gas peddlers all out in ownership of their city’ (2017:
10). The array of informal social and economic activities that undercut
and override the once-colonial city captures a different and more enabling
notion of infrastructure, recalling Abdoumaliq Simone’s notion of ‘people
as infrastructure’, a concept that ‘emphasizes economic collaboration
among residents seemingly marginalized from and made miserable by
urban life’ (2008: 68). Through such processes, urban dwellers might fur-
ther enact a repossession of urban space, what Henri Lefebvre would
describe as ‘the right to the city’ (2000: 147–159). In the physical, kinetic,
aural and visual occupation of urban space, they lay claim to ‘some kind of
shaping power over the processes of urbanisation’, demanding a participa-
tory and democratic say ‘over the ways in which our cities are made and
remade’ (Harvey 2012: 5).
That Hamilton couches even the informal activities of ‘hawkers’ and
‘peddlers’ in such overtly politicized terms sets the context of urban pro-
test and counteractive planned violence, a contest that plays out in the
novel’s fictional account of the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath.
The images of the huge public protests that took place in Tahrir Square in
January 2011 have since become iconic symbols of urban resistance in the
twenty-first century, as movements mobilizing against planned and other
kinds of violence around the world concentrate very precisely on the rec-
lamation of central, public urban spaces (see Franck and Huang 2012:
3–6). We think here of the occupiers of Gezi Park in Turkey, Catalunya
Square in Barcelona and Zucotti Park in New York, all of which referenced
Tahrir as a ‘transposable’ coordinate with which to foreground the politi-
cal underpinnings of their causes (see Gregory 2013: 243; Castells 2012:
21). The ‘performance’ of the right to the city in Tahrir of course
‘depended on the prior existence of pavement, street, and square’, as
Judith Butler notes, but, reciprocally, ‘it is equally true that the collective
actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and
organize the architecture’ (2011: n.pag.). As this again suggests, resis-
tance to privately funded or state-sanctioned ‘planned violence’ is
grounded in its strategic reclamation of the physical urban infrastructures
of the city. It is through that embodied occupation of physical space, or
what Butler calls ‘bodies in alliance’, that the imaginative reconfiguration
of alternative urban spaces and modes of city living might be generated.
This is a process that Hamilton’s novel is itself concerned first to docu-
ment and then to enact through its form, reconfiguring literary infrastruc-
tures as a resistant counterpoint to the planned violence of urban
infrastructure, as we will see happen again and again across this book.
Though not concerned with such explicitly revolutionary urban move-
ments, Rana Dasgupta’s Capital (2014), a love-hate song to Delhi and its
singular brand of modernity—ribald, brutal, cacophonous, exhilarating—
similarly represents the city as a place of embedded inequalities through its
non-fictional yet literary form (a genre explored in more detail by Ankhi
Mukherjee in Chap. 5 of this collection). For Dasgupta, the city’s divisions
and layerings are cross-hatched with a globalized mass-culture born of
post/colonial conflict, in this case the 1947 Partition. Meanwhile, intersti-
tial subcultures also work to re-elaborate and reconstruct streets, markets
and other spaces in ways that involve the city dwellers themselves. Imitating
Dasgupta’s own movement through the city, the book’s mostly untitled
chapters rocket the reader through a series of formative post-1991 Delhi
experiences, from outsourcing and Americanization to corruption and the
accumulation of waste. Chapters that dwell on formative moments in the
city’s history are themselves threaded through with the author’s conversa-
tions with prototypical ‘Delhi-ites’, engaged varyingly along a spectrum of
violent, corrupt and activist projects. By thus interspersing his movement
through and stoppages in Delhi’s clogged motorway system with the indi-
vidual stories of his interviewees, Dasgupta’s own writing sets about map-
ping the city’s chaotic street infrastructure while at the same time plotting
intrepid individual routes through it, as indeed does Arundhati Roy’s
more recent (2017) novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, taken up by
Alex Tickell in Chap. 11 of this collection. In both cases, the infrastruc-
tures of literary form and genre speak to and move against the violent
restrictions of urban infrastructures.
Or to take yet another example, the characters in Aminatta Forna’s The
Memory of Love (2010), a novel about the 1990s Civil War in Sierra Leone
PLANNED VIOLENCE 5
and its aftermath, recall how the fearsome rebel army, or Revolutionary
United Front, swept through the capital Freetown, targeting and
destroying with overwhelming violence the infrastructures of city streets,
bridges and government buildings, which to them functioned as oppres-
sive symbols of colonial power. In the war’s aftermath the city becomes for
characters like Kai, Forna’s protagonist, punctuated by painful no-go
areas, the conflict lingering, embedded in his subjective psychogeography.
Yet, while Forna charts these personal maps of urban trauma, at the same
time her lucid, fast-moving prose explores life-affirming through-routes
that the characters have managed to carve out in spite of the prevailing
historical violence. These new urban pathways, built on preferred, often
more circuitous walks and drives once made for pleasure, allow the reader
to observe Kai and others repossessing imaginatively the city they inhabit.
Through its mappings of these reroutings and alternative urban geogra-
phies, Forna’s novel builds a resistant literary infrastructure, one able to
counter the city’s lingering planned and replanned violence.
In this collection, we take inspiration from creative works such as these
to focus on the ways in which literary and cultural production is able to
offer a critical purchase on planned violence, a concept we outline in more
detail below. How does culture excavate, expose and challenge such vio-
lence? As importantly, we are interested in how these cultural forms con-
tribute to more productive processes of social and infrastructural
re-imagination and reconfiguration, and therefore also include three
pieces of creative writing at the collection’s turning points. In these vari-
ous ways we repeat and expand with respect to a range of cities the ques-
tions that cultural critic Sarah Nuttall asks specifically of Johannesburg:
How does the post/colonial city ‘emerge as an idea and a form in contem-
porary literatures of the city?’ What are the ‘literary infrastructures’ that
help to give the city imaginary shape? What forms can build ‘alternative
city-spaces’ (2008: 195)? And finally, what are the ‘disruptive questions’
that literary texts ask of urban infrastructure, ‘including in actual practice,
on the ground’ (Boehmer and Davies 2015: 397)?
To begin to answer these questions, let us turn again to another power-
ful artistic response to revolutionary Cairo, one that operates alongside and
in dialogue with Omar Robert Hamilton’s. Julie Mehretu’s ‘Mogamma, A
Painting in Four Parts’ offers a visual reflection on the heterogeneous, lay-
ered explosion of planned and unplanned movement, and formal and
informal infrastructures in Cairo—‘Part One’ of the series is reproduced on
this book’s cover. As this shows, in Mehretu’s work the formally planned
lines of the urban architect are disrupted by alternative topographical

scales and shot through with erratic lines of flight. Through their brico-
lage-like assemblage, these lines capture a descriptive failure to interpret
the utopian moment of the Egyptian Revolution, as Nicholas Simcik Arese
also explores in Chap. 3. Indeed, this failure to decode Cairo’s revolution-
ary urban space returns us to Hamilton’s formal efforts to depict the city’s
infrastructural incomprehensibility, especially in a striking section of visu-
ally conceived dialogue in The City Always Wins. Here, his two protago-
nists, Mariam and Ashraf, are fleeing Tahrir Square after the military has
opened fire on their protest:
Ashraf is running, they’re both running. They don’t know which

streets are safe. […] She takes off her kufiyyeh and feels it is heavy
with blood.
“Which way’s the
palace?”
“I’m sure it’s this way.”
“Which way did we
come? I don’t recognize
this street.”
“When we chased
those boys did we
turn right or left?”
(2017: 122)
Crucial to Hamilton’s evocation of urban navigation and the avoidance of

the Egyptian military’s planned violence is this spatial layout of the text on
the page, which is accurately reprinted here. As Mariam and Ashraf begin
to flee, deciphering which streets are safe enough to escape down, the text
fragments the ‘planned’, formal infrastructures of the page margins, visu-
alizing Mehretu’s ricocheting lines in the literary form. Breaking away
from this spatial ordering, the text follows Mariam and Ashraf in a jagged
dodge-and-weave, capturing their dialogue in stereo and in this way subtly
but subversively rerouting urban space, even as the army attempts to deny
them their right to the city.
Such examples are just a few of the many case studies that were explored
during the two years of the Leverhulme-funded international network,
‘Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’,
from which this edited collection developed. Throughout the project, we read
a range of literary and cultural texts for their contrary, countervailing and at
times subversive reinterpretations of the post/colonial city’s urban planning,
PLANNED VIOLENCE 7
asking how they might build resistant visions of its otherwise violent infra-
structure space.1 To cite further examples, all of them literary, we might
think of how Nazneen in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2004) is liberated from
the oppressive gender hierarchies of her domestic confinement through her
exploration of London’s ‘public realm’, an urban movement that the writ-
ing traces (see Ziegler 2007: 160); or of Ivan Vladislavić’s attempts in his
memoir-collage, Portrait with Keys (2007), to ‘unlock’ the increasingly
securitized and segregated landscape of Johannesburg using formally seg-
mented narrative snapshots of urban mobility (see Mukherjee 2012;
Concilio 2016); or of the ways in which Brian Chikwava’s Harare North
(2009) renegotiates the post-imperial capital by following the pedestrian
wanderings of its asylum-seeking anti-flâneur (see Boehmer and Davies
2015: 403–404; Noxolo 2014).
These postcolonial novels represent the ‘act of walking’ as invested with
the capacity to reinterpret the infrastructural ordering of the city. They
constitute what Michel de Certeau describes as ‘multiform, resistant, tricky
and stubborn procedures that elide discipline without being outside the
field in which it is exercised’ (1988: 96), that is, in this context the infra-
structural field of the post/colonial city’s planned violence. As Caroline
Herbert observes of the ‘identifiable urban turn’ in recent postcolonial lit-
erary studies, these texts ‘frequently place a “rhetoric of walking” at the
centre of their narratives’, emphasising how ‘the postcolonial city is con-
tinually remade, reread, and recharted in ways that evade the surveilling
gaze of the authorities’ (2014: 203). In so doing, these works undermine
in both imaginative and textual terms those modes of urban planning that
seek to circumscribe the lives of the city’s inhabitants, in some cases even
recalibrating that infrastructure towards more egalitarian ends.
In the revolutionary context of The City Always Wins, Hamilton’s
Egyptian protagonists don’t walk—they run. The urgency of their move-
ment repositions de Certeau’s ‘everyday’ practices of urban subversion
in a more immediate and explicitly political project of participatory resis-
tance to planned violence. Their actions also reclaim infrastructural pro-
vision for the public good, as this book’s contributors explore in relation
1
A full description of the Leverhulme-funded ‘Planned Violence’ project, as well as an
archive of recordings and summaries of its various associated talks and workshops, can be
found on the network’s website at www.plannedviolence.org. Of this book’s co-editors,
Elleke Boehmer was the Principal Investigator on the project and Dominic Davies the
Network Facilitator.
to a variety of urban spaces. Art once again is central to this resistance.

Indeed, the phenomenon of the Egyptian Revolution in Tahrir underlines
very clearly the importance of cultural production and literary representa-
tion to effective urban protest, especially as it mobilizes around, and in
resistance to, mechanisms of planned violence. As the Egyptian novelist
Ahdaf Soueif observes in her memoir of this revolutionary period, ‘art
galleries opened, and tiny performance spaces’ were created: ‘Mosques
and cultural centres clutched at the derelict spaces under overpasses’
(2014: 36; see also Atlas 2012: 149). Meanwhile, though ‘graffiti existed
all over the city of Cairo well before January 2011, […] these gained a
mesmerising new dimension after the revolution’ (Abaza 2013: 125).
Intervening into (and onto) the infrastructural canvases of the city’s physi-
cal public spaces, graffiti and street art demonstrated ‘an irreverent disre-
gard for walling infrastructure and a strategic re-appropriation of it’
(Davies 2017: 15), a contravention also captured in Mehretu’s painting.
If Hamilton’s novel concludes with the disillusionment of its revolu-
tionary characters and the imprisonment of the movement’s organizing
members, it nevertheless retains elements of the utopian impulse that
underpinned Egypt’s January 2011 revolution, as well as the democrati-
cally networked social movements that drove it forward (see Castells 2012:
228). Dasgupta and Forna, for their part, also see an inventive and at times
subversive energy-shaping life on the street in Delhi and Freetown, no
matter how restricted these spaces may be by the forces of neoliberal
development or civil war. Postcolonial literary and cultural works such as
these—novels and memoirs, but also dramatic performance and street
art—thus contribute significantly to the utopian work of urban recon-
struction and the imagination of alternative futures that are, perhaps,
more democratic, socially inclusive and politically egalitarian. As the post-
colonial critic Bill Ashcroft usefully observes:
In literature, the utility of utopia lies in hope itself, in its defining capacity to
imagine a different world. Whether there is any political instrumentality in uto-
pian thinking is the same question as the one that arises in all arguments about
the book or the barricade—can literature change the world? (2015: 240)
It is in the evocative metaphorical shift between ‘book’ and ‘barricade’, as

infrastructure is reclaimed from colonial and neoliberal regimes and mobi-
lized as a site for more socially just city spaces, that our concept of ‘planned
violence’ is rooted and its utopian edge illuminated. Our hope is that, taken
together, the chapters below show that, indeed, literature and culture can,
PLANNED VIOLENCE 9
even if only sporadically and with occasional complicity, conjure urban

spaces resistant to the coercive measures of post/colonial planned violence.
With this in mind, we have settled, in this introduction, on the ‘slashed’
configuration ‘post/colonial.’ Throughout, the term draws out for us the
historical continuities of the colonial within the postcolonial, especially in
its infrastructural guises. ‘Post/colonial’ emphasizes the enduring infra-
structural shapes of colonial urban planning that reproduce spatial vio-
lence in the postcolonial present. This being said, the term simultaneously
refers to an emerging critical attention paid in all the essays collected here
to the ‘proliferation of utopian hope’ in postcolonial texts (Zabus 2015:
12–13).
Planned Violence
The ‘Planned Violence’ network, which gave shape to this essay collec-
tion, hammered out across the course of its two years the formulation of
‘planned violence’ that undergirds the book, as we will now outline. The
concept is rooted in the idea of ‘structural violence’ first defined by Johan
Galtung in his groundbreaking article, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace
Research’ (1969). For Galtung, ‘violence is built into the structure [of
society] and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life
chances’ (1969: 170–171). These structural forms of violence usually
remain invisible, deeply embedded within the spatial and infrastructural
configurations of contemporary city life. Nevertheless, such ‘invisible’
forms of violence can often produce ‘directly visible […] violence per-
formed by a clearly identifiable agent’ (Žižek 2008: 1)—a point taken up
by Zen Marie in Chap. 6, for example. This making visible also involves a
call to ‘step back’, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, so that we might better ‘perceive
the contours of the background which generates such outbursts’ (1). It is
in this process of stepping back that ‘the diagnostic effects of the literary’
are again highlighted:
the literary is here invested with a capacity to respond to and potentially

rewrite urban infrastructures and the planned violence inscribed within their
contours, generating alternative ways of viewing, understanding and inhab-
iting those cityscapes. (Boehmer and Davies 2015: 398–399)
For several urban theorists, focusing on infrastructure provides the

occasion for a more nuanced understanding of planned violence, especially
in interdisciplinary contexts.2 The anthropologist Brian Larkin argues per-

suasively that infrastructures ‘need to be analysed as concrete semiotic and
aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees’ (2013: 329). Meanwhile, in their
discussion of infrastructural violence, ethnographers Dennis Rodgers and
Bruce O’Neill argue that infrastructures provide an ‘ideal ethnographic
site for theorising how broad and abstract social orderings such as the
state, citizenship, criminality, ethnicity and class play out concretely at the
level of everyday practice’ (2012: 402). In an observation that is especially
pertinent for this book, they contend that a critical focus on violent infra-
structures might also open up ‘a concrete way of discussing society’s
responsibility for this harm’ (405).
Similarly, architect Eyal Weizman conceives of architecture as a ‘“politi-
cal plastic”—social forces slowing into form’ (2012: 7). He emphasizes the
diagnostic component of this architectural analysis through an emphasis
on forensics, which he interprets as ‘the art of the forum’: ‘Because objects
cannot actually speak, there is a need for a “translator” or an “interpreter”—
a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the thing and the
forum’ (8–9). Transposing these architectural observations into the physi-
cal world of urban infrastructure, as we did in our 2014–16 workshops on
‘forensic’ and other infrastructures, encourages the unpacking of the social
and political forces that have solidified in the urban planning of post/
colonial cities.
Yet infrastructure is not solely a tool of violence and control. As Ara
Wilson further recognizes, it is often also representative of, and functions
as, the commons: ‘much of what counts as infrastructure is associated with
utilities or public goods’ (268). Or, as one of our contributors, Michael
Rubenstein, notes, infrastructural development is often undertaken as
‘public works’, with ‘water, electricity and gas’ supplies being a case in
point (2010: 5–6). Infrastructure thus often ‘remains apart from com-
moditisation’, though its association with ‘the common good’ is a site of
‘constant struggle’ (Rubenstein et al. 2015: 577). The public underpin-
nings of infrastructural development also correspond directly to public
spaces, those urban arenas contained by and built from urban infrastruc-
ture that operate as civic platforms for democratic political engagement,
with Tahrir Square once again being a case in point. As a number of urban
theorists have shown, public space and the publicly owned infrastructure
2
As Bechir Kenzari has observed, ‘the phenomenon of violence is still understudied as an archi-
tectural subject’ in large part because of ‘the boundaries between disciplines’ (2011: 13).
PLANNED VIOLENCE 11
through which such spaces are constituted are a fundamental component

of the construction of the right to a more ‘socially and spatially just’ city
(see Mitchell 2003; Harvey 2009; Soja 2010).
Most of the chapters that make up this book illuminate the intercon-
nections of ‘planned violence’ with specific infrastructural developments
such as walls (Chap. 8), motorways (Chap. 10), and even football clubs
(Chap. 4). The essays also demonstrate how coercive forces like kettling
and canalizing delimit and condition urban social relations. Though a
number of critics have emphasized the extent to which infrastructure is
supposed to remain ‘invisible’, reducible to nothing more than a ‘taken-
for-granted background hum’ and noticeable only when it ‘fails’ (Wilson
2015: 270; see also Graham ed. 2010), in the post/colonial context this
is often not the case. Indeed, colonial planners often made explicit the
grandeur of their infrastructural projects, which offered ‘imperial adminis-
trators, financial speculators and colonial writers alike a symbolic reference
point of supposed “civilisation” and “modernity”’ (Davies 2017: 2).
Within specifically urban colonial contexts, infrastructural development
functioned as one of the ‘most spectacular showcases of imperial moder-
nity’, a process of which the Raj’s early-twentieth-century construction of
New Delhi is an exemplary case in point (see Nightingale 2012: 219–225).
As Stephen Legg writes with reference to Fanon’s conception of the
divided colonial city, against ‘the sterile, geometric spaces of New Delhi,
“Old Delhi” was depicted as an organic space’ bereft of ‘extensive modern
sanitation and infrastructure’ (2007: 1). While such uneven and segrega-
tionist infrastructural planning was continually subverted by everyday
practice, including social movements and the labour routes of colonized
populations, these spatial templates from colonial times continue to regu-
late and direct postcolonial urban life today (see Varma 2011: 11–12).
To bring this post/colonial trajectory of urban infrastructure full circle,
twenty-first-century neoliberal urban development appears once again to
be increasingly drawn to the construction of explicitly visible infrastructural
projects (see Easterling 2014: 1). Most obvious in this regard is the prolif-
eration of ‘corporate skyscraper headquarters’ as ‘symbols of the aggres-
sive, centripetal pull of capitalist urbanism’, as the urban theorist Stephen
Graham observes (2016: 152). As he writes, we now live in ‘a world where
competition between rival cities and states becomes indexed and fetishized
through the relative size and scale of vertical urban forms and spectacles’
(161–162). D. Asher Ghertner further explores the ‘aesthetic’ component
of this process of ‘world-class city making’, which combines ‘a mental
image’ of the neoliberal city with a dramatic rebranding of urban space as

part of ‘a speculative project of attracting capital investment’ (2015: 24).
The result is what Graham and Simon Marvin have called ‘splintering
urbanism’, an ‘unbundling’ of infrastructural networks that stratifies cities
through increasingly complex layers of privatization (2001: 33–34). Such
processes limit—if not entirely eradicate—urban public spaces, thereby
placing increased and increasing restrictions on those who are able to assert
their claims upon the city (see Harvey 2012: xv).
Faced with this privatized urbanism, it is politically imperative that our
discussions of ‘planned violence’ also emphasize the resistant and critical
flip side of infrastructural analysis, something that once again often finds
expression in literary and other cultural and linguistic forms. As Jane
M. Jacobs observes in Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (2002),
it is precisely ‘because cities are sites of “meetings” [that] they are also
places which are saturated with possibilities for the destabilisation of impe-
rial arrangements’ (4). In turn, ‘writing the city’ furthers our understand-
ing of these resistant components of urban life (Soja 2003: 272).
Concurring, Mike Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins and Sophia Beal, the edi-
tors of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies entitled ‘Infrastructuralism’,
‘begin with the assumption that […] new ways of thinking will find pow-
erful forms of expression in literary fictions, where speculation and experi-
mentation beyond the factual are made uniquely possible’ (2015: 575).
That they undertake this project by focusing ‘on literary fictions that try
to make infrastructure, as well as its absence, visible’ (576) is indicative of
the recent emergence of a wider attendance to urban infrastructure in
post/colonial literary and cultural studies (see Chambers and Huggan
2015). As Dominic Davies has argued in his book-length study of Britain’s
imperial infrastructural development, Imperial Infrastructure, representa-
tions of infrastructure in colonial literature not only ‘reveal imperialism’s
underlying dynamics’, but also how these ‘developments are intimately
linked to forms of resistance’ (2017: 6, 262). Graham meanwhile has
interrogated ‘the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang, Ballard and various cyber-
punk authors’ to stress ‘the impossibility of some clean and binary opposi-
tion between “factual” and “fictional” cities’ (2016: 389), an entanglement
further highlighted and unpicked by Terence Cave in his exploration of
China Miéville’s fictional cities in Chap. 17 of this book.
In related terms, the environmentalist critic Rob Nixon also draws
directly on Galtung’s work to call for narratives that ‘plot and give figura-
tive shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across
space and time’:
PLANNED VIOLENCE 13
The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of draw-

ing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but
high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally entails devising
iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms
that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency. (2011: 10)
Nixon’s qualificatory renaming of ‘structural violence’ as ‘slow violence’

introduces a temporal dimension that highlights the connections between
the structural policies of the neoliberal order and its catastrophic conse-
quences, which are often felt in distant geohistorical spaces. In so doing,
he avoids the ‘static determinism’ of which Galtung’s theory of structural
violence might be accused (10–11). But Nixon’s renaming also empha-
sizes the resistant agency of literary and cultural responses to infrastruc-
tural violence as it occurs in post/colonial contexts, an issue also addressed
by Zen Marie, Hanna Baumann and Louisa Layne in Chaps. 6, 8, and 9 of
this collection, respectively.
If ‘the city is a vast narrative structure that constantly re-presents itself’,
as Nuttall suggests (2008: 216), then the chapters brought together here
can be said to offer a forensic analysis of those precise, intimate relations
through which urban structural violence manifests and comes apart in a
range of narrative structures. Together, the chapters investigate the vio-
lence embedded in contemporary post/colonial urban infrastructures, but
they also participate in the utopian project to reimagine and even rebuild
more spatially and socially just cities. As Edward Soja writes:
Seeing justice spatially aims above all at enhancing our general understand-
ing of justice as a vital attribute and aspiration in all societies. It seeks to
promote more progressive and participatory forms of democratic politics
and social activism, and to provide new ideas about how to mobilize and
maintain cohesive coalitions and regional confederations of grassroots and
justice-oriented social movements. (2010: 6)
Collectively, the chapters brought together here demonstrate how literary

writing and other forms of cultural production intervene into the post/
colonial world’s unevenly developed, varyingly segregated and ever-violent
city spaces. Shifting between the excavation of violence through alterna-
tive literary mappings and the reimagining of both pasts and futures by all
kinds of creative cultural work, these chapters strive to challenge in at once
forceful and forensic ways the planned violence exerted by post/colonial
urban infrastructures.
Chapter Breakdown
Planned Violence is divided into three sections, each composed of five
chapters: Section I, ‘Planned/Unplanned Cities’; Section II, ‘Forensic
Infrastructures’; and Section III, ‘Structural Violence, Narrative Structure’.
To conclude each of these sections we include a creative response by a
contributing author: James Attlee, at the end of Section I; Selma Dabbagh,
at the end of Section II; and Courttia Newland, at the end of Section
III. All three participated as keynote speakers and performers during the
‘Planned Violence’ network between 2014 and 2016, and their interven-
tions in turn scrutinized the urban environments in which they or their
characters found themselves. The collection in this way remains attuned to
the centrality of creative literary writing, both fictional and non-fictional,
and to the critical forward-looking project of this collection as a whole.
Moreover, though the chapters are divided into the different themed sec-
tions, these core concerns are also threaded spatially throughout the book,
as they are taken up and analysed from different critical angles by the
contributors.
To highlight the visual component of creative efforts to interpret post/
colonial urban infrastructures, we have also prefaced the book’s three sec-
tions with photographs of London taken by the self-described ‘place-
hacker’ Bradley Garrett. Garrett’s research into urban exploration in the
British capital and elsewhere has revealed this subterranean practice as
motivated in part by a desire to ‘infiltrate’ the city, to lay ‘bare’ the sedi-
mented layers of its used and disused infrastructural arrangements—almost
literally to ‘hack’ imaginatively into the spatial and vertical history of a
place, as literary writers and artists do also. As Garrett’s photographs sug-
gest, there is more to place-hacking than simply the physical occupation of
abandoned, forgotten or forbidden spaces. Garrett’s images suggest that
in fact the urban explorer is something of an ‘explorer-documentarian’, or
‘guerrilla preservationist, conserving, through video footage and photo-
graphs, a record of a particular time and place—preserving what will
inevitably change and braiding themselves into those transitions’ (2013:
56). Whether peering over the precipice of multistorey buildings or tun-
nelling through bundles of infrastructure cabling, Garrett’s photographs
encourage readers to insinuate themselves into the urban environment, to
reflect on the geometry and the physics of the place-hack and to witness
urban form as both a material and a narrative structure.
The chapters in the first section, ‘Planned/Unplanned Cities’, begin by
focusing on the ways in which formal urban planning in post/colonial
PLANNED VIOLENCE 15
cities has been recorded, disrupted, transgressed and reinterpreted by

informal, unplanned modes of urban living. The chapters analyse how
these are recorded in literary fictional and non-fictional writing, as well as
exploring how such informality is initiated by other kinds of artistic and
community-led dramatic cultural production.
The opening chapter, ‘White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence
and Native Maps in Richard Wright’s Chicago and Modikwe Dikobe’s
Johannesburg’, by Loren Kruger, shows how art moderne architecture on
Chicago’s streets and its Century of Progress Fair in 1933 influenced the
Empire Exhibition and urban form in Johannesburg in 1936. By tracing
these connections, she shows how in the shadow of the two white cities,
black lives were threatened by planned and unplanned violence, and so
emphasizes the counter-intuitive fact that Chicago’s black South Side was
more segregated than Johannesburg’s inner districts in the 1930s. Her
chapter then compares critical responses to segregation by African
Americans and black South Africans, and the literary expression of these
tensions in fiction. In particular, she compares Richard Wright’s Native
Son and Modikwe Dikobe’s Marabi Dance, which combine sociological
and ethnographic research with melodrama and life-writing to depict
black women and men who claim more fully the right to their native
cities.
Building on these tensions between planned and unplanned urban forms,
Nicholas Simcik Arese’s Chap. 3, ‘Grey Space, Tahrir Laser: Conspiracy,
Critique and the Urban in Julie Mehretu’s Depictions of Revolutionary
Cairo’, explores the relationship between conspiracy and the city by draw-
ing together, in comparative analysis, Julie Mehretu’s already-mentioned
painting series ‘Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts’, the author’s own
ethnographic research in 2011–2013 revolutionary Cairo, and sustained
reflections on urban-based critical theory. By exploring Mehretu’s represen-
tation of the ‘grey space’ or ‘thirdspace’ of symbolic urban fora such as
Tahrir Square through a process of marking, layering and erasing, Simcik
Arese shows how the city becomes defined by the gap between that which
is spontaneous and that which is planned. The resulting effect of sociopo-
litical disorientation, he argues, can be connected both to Bruno Latour’s
landmark essay, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’, and to the logic
sustaining many of Egypt’s conspiratorial and often-violent tropes. Indeed,
the chapter grounds these characteristics of urban conspiracy and violence
in revolutionary Egypt itself, showing how, especially when times are uncer-
tain, they thrive in the gap between planned and spontaneous space.
Chapters 4 and 5 of the first section focus closely on two highly con-
trasting urban spaces, the relatively small but socially divided British city of
Oxford, and India’s vast city of Mumbai, which is marked by some of the
sharpest inequalities in the world. In Chap. 4, William Ghosh considers
sport as a lens through which to clarify Oxford’s histories of planning and
urban infrastructure, focusing on media baron Robert Maxwell’s life in
the city and his ownership of Oxford United Football Club. Ghosh situ-
ates the role of the football club in the changing urban landscape in order
to think about the way in which civic institutions—sporting or cultural—
reciprocally impact upon urban life and a sense of regional identity. In the
following chapter, Ankhi Mukherjee turns to the more obviously postco-
lonial city of Mumbai to read narrative non-fiction such as Katherine Boo’s
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the
Damned and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, examining the ways in which
these genres of aberrational fiction defy the naturalistic and neorealist doc-
umentary style generally associated with humanitarian narratives of the
urban poor. Drawing on the Freudian concept of the uncanny, she shows
how works such as these push against the limits of social justice discourse—
as well as creative literature on poverty—and cultivate physical proximity
with the objects of inquiry through the sustained and destabilizing
encounters they document.
Zen Marie’s chapter rounds out the section by returning to
Johannesburg and the Drill Hall, a historic site in the city’s central busi-
ness district that since 2004 has been reappropriated as a space for hosting
a range of cultural organizations, charities and collectives. This chapter
focuses in particular on the resident arts collective Keleketla! in order to
explore how planned violence and city-making impact one another in the
post-apartheid African metropolis. Central to this account is once again
the question of the ability of the creative arts and related imaginative pro-
cesses to work as diagnostic and critical emancipatory tools, not least in
making links between direct violence and more abstract forms of planned
violence. Marie explores the extent to which the performative force of arts
and cultural activism reimagine and make city space more humane in the
face of encroaching neoliberal machinations and divisions. Yet, while
Keleketla! offers an example of a city mobilizing the arts in an attempt to
achieve ‘world class’ status, the chapter concludes that such efforts ulti-
mately fail to implement long-term sustainable systems due to layers of
structural and bureaucratic violence, and the withdrawal of basic infra-
structural services such as water and electricity.
PLANNED VIOLENCE 17
In the collection’s first ‘intervention’, creative non-fiction writer James

Attlee reflects on his book-length project, Isolarion (2007), which
mapped the multicultural interactions and encounters of Oxford’s Cowley
Road, ten years after its original publication. Zooming in on the wider
map traced earlier by Will Ghosh, Attlee offers both an anecdotal and a
psycho-geographical account of a local street that in turn is embedded in
much wider, global dynamics, from travel and terrorism to imperialism
and gentrification. Through his visits to Cowley Road’s numerous hair-
dressing salons and his conversations with homeless buskers, he unpacks
the everyday narratives that give shape to this microcosmic cross-section
of urban life.
Attlee’s close attention to the details of urban life is extended into the
critical perspective of the book’s second section, ‘Forensic Infrastructures’.
Here, the five constituent chapters attempt to ‘read’ infrastructural devel-
opment for the social and political forces that have solidified in their con-
tours. They also make use of a range of literary and artistic projects as
interpreters of post/colonial urban forms.
In the first chapter, Hanna Baumann explores the ‘intimacy’ of infra-
structure, focusing in particular on vulnerability and abjection in Palestinian
Jerusalem. Baumann argues that colonial infrastructures not only appro-
priate territory, they also often exclude populations from access to the
most basic of resources they need to survive, including food and water.
Combining the work of Palestinian visual artist Khaled Jarrar with findings
from her on-site research, Baumann highlights the embodied and affective
impact of violent infrastructures, focusing in particular on the Israeli
Separation Wall. Where most accounts view the role of infrastructure in
Israel/Palestine in terms of geopolitics or military strategy, her chapter
shows how cultural engagements with its personal, embodied and sym-
bolic affects can further our understanding of how this planned violence
operates.
Building on Baumann’s analysis of infrastructure as both coercive and
intimately embodied, Louisa Layne in Chap. 9 discusses how the work of
British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson explores the often-confronta-
tional relationship in the 1970s and 1980s between sound systems in
London and the Metropolitan police. Johnson’s poems often document
the shutting down by the police of a sound system event—the subcultural
space of the Caribbean party—and how this has been resisted through the
medium of music. As this shows, though the sound system is a relatively
closed-off or autonomous aesthetic space within the city, it is nevertheless
constantly impacted by London’s wider political context and in turn

pushes back against it. Johnson’s portrayal of the sound system therefore
functions as a metaphor for what Kobena Mercer describes as the black
artist’s ‘burden of representation’ (1990). This ‘burden’ plays out in
Johnson’s poetry, particularly his sound system poems, to illustrate how
the at-once politicized and polemical mode of black art is often not pri-
marily a result of the artist’s own formal choices. Rather, it is determined
by the invasive state infrastructure that forces it into a defensive position,
but from which it then mobilizes the various aesthetic and structural
components at its disposal in order to fight back.
In Chap. 10, ‘Throwing Petrol on the Fire’, Stephen O’Neill continues
the focus on invasive urban infrastructures in a historical account of the
planning, protest and violence that shadowed the building of the Belfast
Urban Motorway. The chapter explores the relationship between this
development and the marginalization of the working-class areas of the city,
such as the Lower Falls and Shankill, but it also highlights the wide-
ranging opposition to the scheme, which came from local community
activist groups as well as paramilitaries. The collaboration of the Motorway
planners with the security forces offers a clear instance of deliberately
planned violence used as a method of social segregation, while the literary
representations of the scheme, including Gerry Adams’ memoir Falls
Memories (1982) and novels such as Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka
Street (1996) and Glenn Patterson’s The International (1999), document
a range of cultural-political responses to the marginalizing logic of the
motorway’s planning.
Alex Tickell in Chap. 11, ‘Writing the City and Indian English Fiction:
Planning, Violence and Aesthetics’, also considers how an urban imagi-
nary might be reflected in fiction, in this case Indian fiction in English.
Specifically, he asks how rapid changes in Indian cities after economic lib-
eralization in 1991 modified and challenged the ‘civic aesthetics’ of the
Indian Anglophone novel. To pursue this question, he focuses on work by
Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga, both writers who have critically
responded to the Indian ideal of the ‘World-Class City’. Tickell deftly bal-
ances the developing urban aesthetics of their fiction with the rise of a
form of governance by aesthetics as theorized by Ghertner, concluding
that the ‘planned’ violence of the city is expressed as much in the struggle
over its aesthetic meaning as in its material transformation.
In Chap. 12, ‘Blue Johannesburg’, Pamila Gupta takes a different aes-
thetic gauge for material transformation than the novel, looking at how
PLANNED VIOLENCE 19
certain colonial Portuguese urban traces were enlisted in the making of

post-apartheid Johannesburg. The chapter experiments with the alterna-
tive format for writing (and visualizing) the city that is offered by the
perspective of the automobile and entwines various Portuguese materiali-
ties including blue azulejo tilework and overlooked monuments to charac-
terize this thriving diasporic community’s infused urban presence. It
suggests that these material adaptations provide an important aesthetic
undertow to contemporary life in Johannesburg, a city often still depicted
as violent and segregated.
In the book’s second ‘intervention’, a fictional vignette ‘Take Me
There’, British-Palestinian novelist Selma Dabbagh considers how invasive
infrastructures—in this case the Israeli Separation Wall—impinge on per-
sonal lives and domestic intimacies, so giving further life to the divisions
that Baumann also discusses. The anonymous couple featured in this short
piece of fiction relate to each other by both sharing accounts of their
everyday lives and re-narrating historical moments of successful resistance
to other instances of planned violence. For Dabbagh’s female character in
particular, planned violence is both visible and invisible, physical and psy-
chological, as the landscapes she longs for mostly lie beyond the wall that
by day obstructs the view from her window and by night invades her
dreams. In the story’s final geographical layering, Dabbagh conflates this
violent infrastructure and its hauntings with another historically notorious
instance of planned violence, the Berlin Wall.
The first three chapters of Section III, ‘Structural Violence, Narrative
Structure’, return to Indian writing, though this time to explore in turn
the diasporic northern city, histories of past dissidence and the uneven
development of literary forms. Ruvani Ranasinha in Chap. 14, ‘‘A Shadow
Class Condemned to Movement’: Literary Urban Imaginings of Illegal
Migrant Lives in the Global North’, examines how urban infrastructure
and de facto segregation shape the physical and psychological experiences
of Third World illegal migrants in Kiran Desai’s Man Booker prize-win-
ning novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006). While the lack of rights of
Third World labour often remains officially undocumented, Ranasinha
shows that the novel can give us insight into the exclusion, containment
and marginalization experienced by the global underclass in metropolitan
New York. Meanwhile, Ole Birk Laursen in his chapter returns us to ques-
tions of terrorism and planned violence in the early twentieth century,
reading W. Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘Giulia Lazzari’ (1928)
alongside the revolutionary reminiscences of the Indian nationalists
Virendranath ‘Chatto’ Chattopadhyaya and M. P. T. Acharya. In contrast

with the policed borders of Desai’s novel, discussed by Ranasinha, Laursen
shows that revolutionary infrastructures in place in Europe in the early
twentieth century allowed dissidents to travel frequently across borders in
pursuit of Indian freedom.
Underlining several of the collection’s overarching concerns, Pablo
Mukherjee’s Chap. 16, ‘Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban
Crimes in the Nineteenth Century’, explores the relationship between
different types of power and violence, organizations of planned space,
and literary form as registered in the popular world-literary genre of
crime fiction. Drawing on Galtung, Mukherjee argues that the uneven
distribution of power underpinning structural violence has taken its most
intense form over the past half-millennium, a time when capitalism
became globally dominant as a single but internally differentiated way of
organizing human society. Among the three outstanding features of this
‘capitalocene’ epoch are colonialism as political practice, urbanization as
spatial practice and textual literacy as cultural practice. This chapter joins
with other contributions in this collection by unspooling the common
threads that tie together structural violence in general with infrastructural
violence in particular.
In Chap. 17, Terence Cave offers an in-depth overview of the prolifi-
cally experimental novelist China Miéville, who constantly challenges the
linguistic and generic expectations of his readers. Cave shows how the
‘weird’ creatures, landscapes and urban configurations Miéville relishes
appear from a cognitive perspective as a series of impacted collocations
that violate this-worldly norms. Beginning with an account of collocation
as a linguistic phenomenon, Cave’s chapter explores violent or counter-
intuitive conjunctions of bodies and spaces (especially urban spaces) across
a wide range of Miéville’s fictions, from the political world of the Bas-Lag
series, via the impacted cityscape of the procedural noir novel The City &
the City, to the weird linguistics of Embassytown. It demonstrates the
robustness of Miéville’s collocations and inventive story worlds, but also
shows how these strategies warp and break down when placed under
intense fictional pressure. Underscoring the book’s interest in literary sub-
version, the chapter argues that the power of Miéville’s writing comes not
so much from his ideological critiques or his self-referential games with
generic tropes, as it does from his ability to exploit the explosive power of
barely possible linguistic collocation.
PLANNED VIOLENCE 21
In Chap. 18, ‘Aquacity Versus Austerity’, Michael Rubenstein

returns us to the debate concerning the infrastructural commons,
which he roots in the global financial crisis of 2008. His chapter shows
how the policies of austerity and privatization enacted by European
governments in response to the financial crisis have brought the even
deeper crisis of the commons into sharper relief. When the Irish gov-
ernment resolved to privatize its water infrastructure in 2013, an unex-
pectedly strong popular resistance movement took to the streets in
protest. Water supply is often symbolic of the commons, and in Irish
literature in particular there is a strong tradition of thematizing and
formalizing waterworks as an exemplary instance of what Bonnie
Honig calls a ‘public thing’ (2017). Rubenstein thus recounts the
recent political history of Irish Water alongside the century-long liter-
ary history of Irish water in Irish fiction, from James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922) to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967) and, most
recently, to Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016). In the figure of
Irish water and its infrastructures, Rubenstein contends, the Irish liter-
ary tradition speaks with urgency to the neoliberal condition in glob-
ally networked Ireland.
In the collection’s final creative response, Courttia Newland explores
through the use of dystopian techniques the increased militarization of
post/colonial city spaces and its uneven effects on different racial demo-
graphics. As his protagonist Danny walks through a dystopian city, his
movements open up and transgress its regimes of planned violence, even
as these encroach with increasing severity and violence on his right to the
city and his ability to move through urban space. By speculatively creating
a world in which latent regimes of planned violence are brought to the
fore, Newland’s story offers creative fiction both as a tool for interrogating
the dangerous effects of increased urban militarization and as an early
warning device of such oppressions.
Planned Violence reads a range of literary and cultural responses to a
diverse set of post/colonial urban infrastructural conditions, building a
literary infrastructure from which new modes of resistance might be
mobilized. As the chapters and fictions together demonstrate, it is
through the linguistic and symbolic torsions of writing across a range of
genres and forms that new ways of responding to planned violence may
emerge. As Sarah Nuttall concludes in her Afterword to the collection,
‘the infrastructures of our places and our times are sites of violence,
planned and unplanned, as well as modes of re-opening, repair and occu-

pation. In all of these ways they demand our urgent occasion for thinking’.
It is this arc of infrastructural repair and postcolonial resistance that
Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and
Culture traces throughout.
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SECTION I
Planned/Unplanned Cities
Bradley L Garrett, ‘Place-Hacking the City’

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
having conquered the valley of the Nile, his lieutenant Amrou
suggested to him the formation of a canal direct from Suez to
Pelusium; but,” continues Monsieur Dupin, “was it likely that the
man (Amrou) who was guilty of burning the Alexandrian library,
should possess sufficient capacity to carry out so grand an idea.”
Now there are here almost as many errors as words. First, the
Emir Omar never did conquer the valley of the Nile. Secondly, he
could not have rejected the idea of the construction of a canal
from Suez to Pelusium, for the very good reason that the canal
already existed; and lastly, he did not burn the Ptolomean library
of Alexandria, as it had been destroyed two centuries and a half
previously.
[16] This literal translation from the passage in Arabic is due to
Silvestre de Sacy. G. Heyne, in his Opuscula Academica,
explains concisely all the vicissitudes the Alexandrian Library
underwent.
[17] Mémoire de C. Langlès, Magasin Encyclopédique, 1799, Vol.
III.
[18] Martinus Polonus died about the year 1270, that is to say 184
years after Marianus. His remarks on Pope Joan are not fit for
transcription.
[19] Familier éclaircissement de la question si une femme a été
assise au siège Papal de Rome: Amsterdam 1747, in 8ᵛᵒ.
[20] In his dissertation De nummo argenteo, Benedicti III.: Rome
1749, in 4ᵗᵒ.
[21] Inserted in vol. II. part 1. of the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores.
[22] Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne: Février 1863.
[23] This decree of the council is delivered in terms sufficiently
damaging to the reputation of the convent of which Eloisa was
prioress: “In communi audientiâ conclamatum est super
enormitate et infamiâ cujusdam monasterii sanctimonialium quod
dicitur Argentolium in quo paucæ moniales multiplici infamiâ ad
ignominiam sui ordinis degentes, multo tempore spurcâ et infami
conversatione omnem ejusdem loci affinitatem fœdaverant.”
(Gallia Christiana, Vol. VII. p. 52.)
[24] Dulcius mihi semper exstitit amicæ vocabulum aut si non
indigneris, concubinæ vel scorti. Charius mihi et dignius videretur
tua dici meretrix quam Augusti imperatrix.
[25] The rest is better left in Latin: “Concupiscentia te mihi potius
quam amicitia sociavit, libidinis ardor potius quam amor. Ubi igitur
quod desiderabas cessavit, quicquid propter hoc exhibebas
pariter evanuit.”
[26] Frustra utrumque geritur quod amore Dei non agitur. In omni
autem Deus scit, vitæ meæ statu, te magis adhuc offendere
quam Deum vereor. Tibi placere amplius quam ipsi appeto. Tua
me ad religionis habitum jussio, non divina traxit dilectio. Vide
quam infelicem et omnibus miserabiliorem ducam vitam, si tanta
hic frustra substineo: nihil habitura remunerations in futuro!!
[27] M. Lenoir, at the time of the publication of his work, was the
keeper of the Musée des petits Augustins, in Paris.
[28] Annales archéologiques de Didron, 1846. p. 12.
[29] Lettres d’Abailard et d’Héloïse traduite sur les manuscrits de
la Bibliothèque Royale par E. Oddoul, avec une préface par
Monsieur Guizot Paris 1839, gr. in 8ᵒ, gravures.
[30] It was taken down 1861 and a plaister statue of Tell erected
in its place.
[31] L’illustre Châtelaine des environs de Vaucluse; dissertation et
examen critique de la Laure de Pétrarque. Paris 1842, in 8ᵛᵒ.
[32] As already stated, a large tablet was carried before her on
which her alleged crimes were inscribed.
[33] Namely: Mémoire tiré des archives de Chateaubriand par feu
le Président Ferrand.
[34] Mignet, Amédée Pichot, and W. Stirling.
M. Gachard has rather given the rein, we believe, to his
imagination, and adopts the legend of the funeral obsequies. We
shall see how triumphantly M. Mignet rebuts it.
[35] It was the Venetian, Frederic Badouaro, who conceived the
comical idea of representing Giovanni Torriano as a simple
clockmaker. Cardanus, in book XVII. of his work De Artibus,
mentions a wonderful piece of mechanism constructed by
Torriano.
[36] Henry Coiffier de Ruzé d’Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars,
beheaded at Lyons in 1642 by order of Richelieu. He was secretly
married to Marion Delorme.
[37] The author of this letter adds in a note: “The Marquis of
Worcester, who is considered by the English to be the inventor of
the steam-engine, appropriated to himself the discovery of
Salomon de Caus and inserted it in a book entitled Century of
Inventions, published in 1663.”
[38] Some very interesting details on Salomon de Caus and on
the honourable appointments he held until his death may be
found in a work of M. L. Dussieux: Les Artistes Français à
l’Étranger, Paris 1856.
[39] Only a very few of the innumerable Histories and Biographies
of Charles V. will be mentioned here.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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Planned Violence Post Colonial Urban Infrastructure Literature and Culture 1St Ed Edition Elleke Boehmer All Chapter

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Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban

Infrastructure, Literature and Culture

AND DOMINIC DAVIES

LITERATURE & CULTURE

ISBN 978-3-319-91387-2 ISBN 978-3-319-91388-9 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952935

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

We are very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the International

Oxford, UK Elleke Boehmer

1 Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures,

Section I Planned/Unplanned Cities 27

2 White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native

3 Grey Space, Tahrir Laser: Conspiracy, Critique and the

4 Thames Valley Royal (or, Maxwell in Oxford): The Story

5 Slums and the Postcolonial Uncanny 87

6 The Not-so-Quiet Violence of Bricks and Mortar105

7 Intervention I. What You Find in the River: Isolarion

Section II Forensic Infrastructures 135

8 The Intimacy of Infrastructure: Vulnerability and

9 Sound Systems and Other Systems: The Policing of

10 ‘Throwing Petrol on the Fire’: Writing in the Shadow

11 Writing the City and Indian English Fiction: Planning,

13 Intervention II. Take Me There231

Section III Structural Violence, Narrative Structure 235

14 ‘A Shadow Class Condemned to Movement’: Literary

15 ‘A Dagger, a Revolver, a Bottle of Chloroform’: Colonial

16 Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban Crimes in the

17 Weird Collocations: Language as Infrastructure in the

18 Aquacity Versus Austerity: The Politics and Poetics of

19 Intervention III. Control323

James Attlee is the author of Station to Station: Searching for Stories on

Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University

William Ghosh was an Amelia Jackson scholar at Exeter College while

Louisa Olufsen Layne holds a DPhil in English Literature from the

Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (2003),

editor of South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations

Fig. 3.1 Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts): Part 2,

Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban

Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies

Introduction: The City Always Wins

Cairo is jazz: all contrapuntal influence jostling for attention, occasionally

© The Author(s) 2018 1

In this introductory passage and throughout the novel, Hamilton’s liter-

New York and Oxford. As Frantz Fanon evocatively described in his

lines of the urban architect are disrupted by alternative topographical

Ashraf is running, they’re both running. They don’t know which

Crucial to Hamilton’s evocation of urban navigation and the avoidance of

to a variety of urban spaces. Art once again is central to this resistance.

It is in the evocative metaphorical shift between ‘book’ and ‘barricade’, as

even if only sporadically and with occasional complicity, conjure urban

the literary is here invested with a capacity to respond to and potentially

For several urban theorists, focusing on infrastructure provides the

in interdisciplinary contexts.2 The anthropologist Brian Larkin argues per-

through which such spaces are constituted are a fundamental component

image’ of the neoliberal city with a dramatic rebranding of urban space as

The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of draw-

Nixon’s qualificatory renaming of ‘structural violence’ as ‘slow violence’

Collectively, the chapters brought together here demonstrate how literary

cities has been recorded, disrupted, transgressed and reinterpreted by

In the collection’s first ‘intervention’, creative non-fiction writer James

constantly impacted by London’s wider political context and in turn

certain colonial Portuguese urban traces were enlisted in the making of

Virendranath ‘Chatto’ Chattopadhyaya and M. P. T. Acharya. In contrast

1 Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures,

Section I Planned/Unplanned Cities 27

2 White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native

3 Grey Space, Tahrir Laser: Conspiracy, Critique and the

4 Thames Valley Royal (or, Maxwell in Oxford): The Story

5 Slums and the Postcolonial Uncanny 87

6 The Not-so-Quiet Violence of Bricks and Mortar105

7 Intervention I. What You Find in the River: Isolarion

Section II Forensic Infrastructures 135

8 The Intimacy of Infrastructure: Vulnerability and

9 Sound Systems and Other Systems: The Policing of

10 ‘Throwing Petrol on the Fire’: Writing in the Shadow

11 Writing the City and Indian English Fiction: Planning,

13 Intervention II. Take Me There231

Section III Structural Violence, Narrative Structure 235

14 ‘A Shadow Class Condemned to Movement’: Literary

15 ‘A Dagger, a Revolver, a Bottle of Chloroform’: Colonial

16 Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban Crimes in the

17 Weird Collocations: Language as Infrastructure in the

18 Aquacity Versus Austerity: The Politics and Poetics of

19 Intervention III. Control323