Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature

Workshop 1:‘Empire and Post-Empire in the Global City’

Thursday 30th and Friday 31st January 2014
The River Room, Strand Campus, King’s College London.

Further information about this event is available from the project website, including the full programme.

The Leverhulme Funded Research Network, ‘Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’, sets out to explore the shifting relationship between urban planning, violence and literary representation from colonial into postcolonial times. The project examines the complex role of literature in theorizing the city: how contemporary patterns of violence are embedded within urban stories of the past, and how narrative complicates official histories of post-imperial, multicultural London, and postcolonial Delhi and Johannesburg.

The network brings the insights of critical geographers and historians into dialogue with cultural and literary critics, identifying literary texts as key to interrogating current theoretical debates on space and social control.