Planned Violence Network

Project Convener: Professor Elleke Boehmer

Project Facilitator: Dr Dominic Davies

This Leverhulme-funded network, Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature, explored the complex, constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, violence, and literary and cultural representations from colonial into postcolonial times. Using the case studies of London, the former imperial metropolis, now a noted multicultural city, and Delhi and Johannesburg, both significant urban centres during and after the colonial period, the network brought the insights of critical geographers into dialogue with narratives and theories of urban cultural production in order to understand and respond to the infrastructural violence within key urban formations in South Africa, South Asia, and Britain.

Comparing the spatial pasts and presents of these post-imperial/postcolonial cities, the Network considered whether urban formations such as the square, marketplace, boulevard, alley, yard, and grid, instead of fulfilling the emancipatory promise brought by colonial modernity, were actually the built expression of governmental strategies that exacerbated rather than contained social violence. The Network considered the continuities between colonial urban planning and newer patterns of violence in postcolonial urban spaces, especially as these are relayed in literary writing. It asked how writers, both colonial and postcolonial, viewed the city as a means of siphoning violence, canalising it away from the centres of authority. How are certain spaces of exclusion and containment built into the basic infrastructures of colonial and then postcolonial multi-ethnic cities? What imaginary vistas were deployed in the making and unmaking of these urban spaces? And what are the relationships between these spaces and expressions of urban disorder such as riots, disturbance, and protest?

The network also asked: how do literary and cultural narratives, by mapping inheritances and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial times, model this complex inter-relationship between urban planning, city infrastructures, and social turbulence? In what ways and through what literary means does writing – including graffiti and dub poetry – provide interpretative tools through which authority and resistance in city spaces may be comprehended and coped with?

Under the heading “Empire and Post-Empire in the Global City”, the first workshop was held at King’s College London and addressed questions of global urban infrastructure and the carry-over of colonial power dispensations into postcolonial times. It focused specifically on London, though papers also introduced some comparative links with the two partner cities, Delhi and Johannesburg, as well as other urban examples such as Belfast and Cairo. Delegates attended from Germany, Italy, India, South Africa, and Australia, and from various institutions across the UK including Oxford, Bristol, Northampton, Coventry, York and Edinburgh. Academic papers were presented alongside, and in dialogue with, the cultural presentations, writers’ readings and dramatic performances. These were complimented by an alternative city tour of East London, which focused on the graffiti art and street culture.

The second workshop, held in Delhi in October 2014, was entitled ‘Planning Modernity: Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Discontinuities’. This workshop again included a broad range of academic papers, writers’ readings, and cultural presentations and tour. In the light of the surge in awareness of Delhi’s horrifying rape culture that preceded the workshop, accompanied by vocal activism and protest against it, there was a strong focus on ‘The Gendered City’, as the workshop put feminist activists in dialogue with more academic studies of how urban space facilitates and enables violence against women. Sohail Hashmi, an activist and tour guide, shared his unique knowledge of the city and took delegates on a tour out into the city itself.

The third Planned Violence Workshop took place at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University in Johannesburg on 31 March and 1 April 2015. It took as its title, “Forensic Infrastructure: Building the Global South”, drawing from Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture pamphlet. In preparation for the workshop, and to sharpen its focus, the Planned Violence Working Group put together a comprehensive reading dossier that was circulated prior to the event. The workshop began with the premise that the physical infrastructures that shape the layouts of not only Johannesburg, but also Delhi, London, and other post/colonial cities, might contain within them forensic clues to the structural and day-to-day violence with which they are often complicit. The workshop assessed the way in which various cultural forms, from literary and non-fiction narratives to visual and performance art, might enable not only new understandings and diagnoses of this violence, but also imagine alternative ways of inhabiting these city spaces and thereby subvert the violence inscribed into their terrains.

The fourth and final Planned Violence workshop took place at the University of Oxford on 24 and 25 September 2015 with the title “Comparative Infrastructures, South and North”. The workshop brought together many of the main threads of enquiry that had run across the project: the capacity of urban infrastructures both to enhance and to limit human lives; the suggestive parallels between cities of the north and the south, and of late colonial and postcolonial domains; and the power of literary writing to interrogate and, on occasion, to resist these limitations. In order to look back to the previous three workshops and their respective post/colonial urban infrastructural interests, the fourth workshop also drew together Network contributors from each of those cities, creating a space for a cross-disciplinary and cross-continental conversation. This helped to enhance the project’s ongoing comparative interrogation of the relationship between literature and forms of “planned violence”.

The workshop title “Comparative Infrastructures, South and North” spoke to some of the other workshop titles (“Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Discontinuities”; “Building the Global South”) and emphasised the globally comparative aspect of the project. Academic papers were combined with a dramatic performance from a local youth theatre group, Mandala, and a walking tour of Cowley Road in East Oxford. The tour rounded off with a reading in one of Oxford’s oldest gig venues, The Bullingdon, from the British-Caribbean poet Kei Miller and a conceptual performance from Oxford resident James Attlee and his band, Non-Stop Tango. In these different ways, the final workshop completed the Network’s movement from the Global North (London) to cities in the Global South (Delhi and Johannesburg) and back again (Oxford), whilst further drawing out and re-examining these comparative, transnational links.

The wrap-up keynote event at the University of Warwick in January 2016 featured a lecture from Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, entitled “August Clouds: Forensic Architecture’s 2014 Gaza Investigation”, and a reading from rapper, dramatist and novelist, Courttia Newland, whose literary writings address crime and violence in urban London. In addition to these talks, we organised a photo exhibition to accompany the lecture. The exhibition comprised of some of the best images from the series of photo-essays produced by the network’s working group, combining these with photographs and artistic pieces from Bradley Garrett (the London-based urban explorer and author, and speaker at our Oxford workshop) and Vishwajyoti Ghosh (a graphic novelist and speaker at our Delhi workshop).