Peter Hitchcock, CUNY Graduate School

As cities of the global south expand, their metrics change beyond the norms of spatiality. In part this paper will argue that the globality of the postcolonial city often hinges not just on the time/space relations of compressed modernity, but also on how cultural forms figure/imagine these conditions. I have suggested elsewhere that the speed of place has specific postcolonial prerogatives: here I will link these to how culture creates a sense of the global, in this case in terms of the novel, documentary photography, and reportage. That each is associated with a velocity of the past is an intriguing way to understand the antinomies of globalization going forward, here read as the spaces of and between Mumbai and New Delhi. Perhaps we are only “after the city” to the extent we are asked to re-imagine the reality of its coordinates?