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Provincializing Dracula urbanism
Abstract
In this commentary, I respond to and extend Wilson and Wyly's ‘Dracula urbanism’ by drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and urban political ecology critiques of global urbanism. To do so, I firstly provincialize Dracula urbanism to reframe this notion as a situated form of knowledge. I then examine how vampires specific to Indonesian and Malay cultures might reveal different insights into the nature of capitalist urbanization. I close with a call for urban scholars to engage more closely with critical perspectives from urban studies that continue to occupy the margins of the field. I also invite careful consideration and reflexivity as to the work we achieve by coining new urbanisms.
Cities are physical, material concentrations of people and structures, but they are also ongoing conversations of intergenerational negotiation, communication, competition, conflict, and cooperation. Recently, Emma Colven, Renee Tapp, Delik Hudalah, Dallas Rogers, and Christopher Silver have offered valuable critical contributions to this dialogue in urban research, evaluating the utility and limitations of a new metaphor, Dracula Urbanism, for understanding the inequalities of today's transnational real-estate growth machines. In this essay, we pursue an extended meditation inspired by some of the most valuable insights offered by Colven, Tapp, Hudalah, Rogers, and Silver. Dracula Urbanism is a fascinating yet fearful story of technologically accelerated reproduction of inequality and urban competition. Uneven yet insistently transnationalizing real estate states rely on, and reproduce, recombinant legitimations of diaspora and nativism, capital and consciousness, property and personhood, ancestry and amortization.
This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposals, methodological tactics, and substantive arguments that underpin this emergent approach to the urban question. Following consideration of some of the most prevalent misrepresentations of this work within this special issue, I build upon Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) concept of “engaged pluralism” to suggest more productive possibilities for dialogue among critical urban researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected and, potentially, allied. The essay concludes by outlining nine research questions whose more sustained exploration could more productively connect studies of planetary urbanization to several fruitful lines of inquiry that have been explored within postcolonial, feminist and queer-theoretical strands of urban studies. While questions of positionality necessarily lie at the heart of any critical approach to urban theory and research, so too does the search for intellectual and political common ground that might help orient, animate and advance the shared, if constitutively heterodox, project(s) of critical urban studies.
This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta's landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another.
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula was enmeshed in the discourse of British Imperialism, both in its composition and its reception. Stoker drew on Imperial-era studies to lend his narrative verisimilitude, including material on history, folklore, and geography from all over the world. As the range of Orientalist studies grew going into the twentieth century, Dracula effectively became part of imperial discourse, both in its own portrayal of the exotic, dangerous East and for its association with the vampire motif that recurred in colonialist texts. This paper will examine the context of Dracula and vampiric tropes in imperialist rhetoric, focusing on the literature and ethnography of regions specifically cited in the novel. These include Britain’s tropical colonies in Malaysia and India, as well as the Empire’s sphere of influence in China. Special attention will be paid to the power relations inherent in the “imperial gaze,” as well as European fears of reverse colonialism and, more acutely, the problems of mimetic desire and “going native.”
"To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry" (Guha, 1997, xv) Mainstream urban scholarship envisions urbanization as a global process that is best achieved via the worldwide application of the development mechanisms pioneered in the advanced capitalist countries - currently, those of neoliberal globalization. Yet the repeated failure of this vision to deliver on its promise of wealth for all and ecological sustainability compels urban scholars to rethink mainstream presumptions. By means of a ten-point manifesto, we argue that provincializing global urbanism creates space from which to challenge urban theories that treat "northern" urbanization as the norm, to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative urban futures.
This article explores the process of making Bangalore, India into a 'world city' by focusing on specific world-city projects, the parastatal government agencies managing them, the explosive IT industry as the putative engine behind this world-city making, and the inter-urban dynamics across world cities such as Dubai and Singapore. Most of these activities are linked to the highly remunerative challenge of transforming rural economies into urban real estate. Land speculation and active dispossession of those working and living in the rural periphery, on land upon which the new world-city projects are being built, is the main business of government today in Bangalore. This article suggests that this temporary 'state of exception', with both its attendant suspensions of civil and human rights as well as their institutionalization into government practices, reflects a shift into new forms of 'speculative' government, economy, urbanism and citizenship. © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
In 2014, a consortium of Dutch firms revealed the master plan for Jakarta’s Great Garuda Sea Wall project, combining urban development and flood risk management. Though a ground-breaking ceremony was held, little progress has since been made, and the yet-to-be materialized project faces an uncertain future. Taking this project as its case study, this article examines the efforts of Dutch consultants to realize the proposed Great Garuda Sea Wall project in Jakarta, and the frictions encountered during this process. This article contributes to a growing scholarship in policy mobilities that interrogates instances of policy failure. I begin from the premise that there are valuable insights to be gleaned by examining projects and policies that occupy the space in between failure and success. By using the lens of friction, this article aims to think beyond these categories and their limitations. I demonstrate how friction can be simultaneously productive and disruptive to policymaking and mobilizing, therefore complicating binary representations of success and failure. Abandoning these limiting categories holds the possibility of enriching policy mobilities scholarship by opening up space for analyses of the messy and indeterminate processes that are central to policymaking, and which categories of success and failure are unable to capture. This is especially important for understanding policymaking in the context of the “global South” where projects often remain unrealized and such categories are less analytically useful.
In engagement with Natalie Oswin’s essay, ‘An Other Geography’, I argue that despite the Southern turn in urban studies, the epistemologies and methodologies of inquiry remain more or less untouched by forms of knowledge designated as the ‘other’ of dominant Theory. Indeed, these other traditions of thought, be it postcolonial critique or Black geographies, are often assimilated and integrated into the self-narration of disciplines, including geography, a process I describe as citationary alibi. Following Oswin, I am interested in not only how such assimilation can be rejected and ruptured, but also how solidarity can be built across different modes of difference. This requires, I argue, a radical break with respectability politics and its citationary practice. It also requires ontologies of subversion in the global universities of the North Atlantic.
In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in the kampungs and have led to violent evictions. Residents of North Jakarta’s kampungs must negotiate the surprise impacts of both flooding and the government’s attempts to manage flooding. In this article, we catalogue the social and material practices that support life and livelihoods in the contexts of these urban environmental transformations, drawing from fieldwork conducted in three North Jakarta kampungs and from recent critical geographical research about urban resilience and urban political ecologies. We describe these practices as everyday acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance. These everyday practices are social and material, drawing from and remaking social and material relations. Although everyday practices of resilience, reworking, and resistance require investments in social relations, we also demonstrate that the dividends filter through existing power structures in the kampungs.
The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically-informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation projects. Drawing on testimonies of women evictees in Jakarta, as well as interviews with public housing managers, this article details the gendered nature of the rationalisation of urban life in the context of a contemporary evictions regime. We argue that the rationalisation of urban space serves to sharpen the gender order by placing material constraints on women’s roles, limiting their economic activities, and defining them as hygiene-responsible housewives. Further, and in turn, the limited provision of ‘rusunawa’ public housing, which we show to be a gendered spatial and social transition informed by state doctrine on the family, provides the state with justification for dispossession itself. Finally, women’s everyday acts of refusal and resistance show not only that kampung forms of social life continue to be preserved in Jakarta, but also that rationalisation itself is a negotiated and contingent process.
Vampire science: folklore, feminism and fact
- M Howells
UNCW professor to deliver a talk on vampire folklore right in time for Halloween
- E Geiszler