Reading Variegated Dispossession in an Asian Megacity

ABSTRACT

This paper reads multiple shades of dispossession in an Asian megacity. The multiple dispositions talk of dispossession as an instrument that limits the autonomy and the self-sufficiency in material and non-material dimensions. In that endeavor we emphasize taking a broader picture of dispossession while pursuing critical urban theory. Through unpacking four ethnographies in Kolkata, the essay looks into dispossession, and in that process displacement and accumulation, from multiple vantage points while stressing on urban as a process that lies at the cross-section of the global capitalist development. The essay intertwines it with postcolonial reading - assemblage and worlding as they enable nuanced and contextual reading of urban emergence, negotiations, and negations. The methodology through an extended ethnography arrives at a point that dispossession is a broader concept holding intense meanings that need to be read beyond abstraction and through quintessentially nuanced postcolonial urban studies. 

KEYWORDS:

• Dispossession
• displacement
• worlding
• assemblage
• global south
• critical theory
• kolkata

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the three reviewers who have helped us disentangle the theoretical nuances. The first author acknowledges the guidance he received from Prof. Prasanta Ray, Honorary Visiting Professor, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, in selecting the appropriate field for research. A thank is also due to Prof. Hannu Ruonavaara for understanding and being compassionate throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Postcolonial urban theory interrogates and critiques the geography of urban theory generation which for the longer period were concentrated in the cities of the global north. It reads individual city’s idiosyncratic urbanity in place of reading all the cities through a template of any grand theory (for example, The Chicago School, The Los Angeles School, The World Cities approach). Through the fertile trope of comparativism, subalternity and singularity, the postcolonial urban theory troubles the metanarratives emerging from the global north cities that wields explanatory power over all the cities irrespective of their histories, culture and social connotations.

2. In this article, state means the institution that governs the urban space through regulation. It also means all those actions and processes through which governance is animated. Even if it is not necessarily constituted as any specific scale of governance, in this essay it means the provincial government, if not mentioned otherwise.

3. The way commodification, accumulation and dispossession intertwines with and gets accelerated due to mega events and how that is challenged and resisted is nuancedly read in the special issues of Journal of Urban Affairs (Volume 39, Issue 7 – Ren 2017; Ribeiro, Cesar, and Santos 2017; Bin 2017; Becerril 2017; Freitas and Sampaio 2017; Ivester 2017; Donaghy 2017; Vicino and Fahlberg 2017).