Conference Presentations by Nalini Mohabir
An 'ecotone' is a transitional area between two or more distinct ecological communities, for inst... more An 'ecotone' is a transitional area between two or more distinct ecological communities, for instance the zone between field and forest, mountain and ocean, or between sea and land. The two ecosystems may be separated by a sharp boundary line or may merge gradually. An 'ecotone' may also indicate a place where two communities meet, at times creolizing or germinating into a new community. After the first three conferences held in Montpellier, Poitiers and Reunion island, 'Ecotones 4' will focus on one area that has served as an ecotone for centuries. This is the area of Bengal in East India, an ecotone area between Europe, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. With its unique position, the region has been criss-crossed for centuries, by travellers, traders, colonists, refugees, pirates and missionaries of diverse racial, religious, linguistic, regional and national affiliations from all over the globe. In this conference we will explore how a region functions through history as a transitional space between two ecologies. Do these ecotone spaces echo the distinct notes of its two borders, or do these spaces create a unique melody of their own and constitute a third space? How do these ecotone spaces reflect the dynamic flow of people into and out of its precincts? Do they have essential attributes that impact the people who call the ecotone their home? The studies on the culture and the geography of these areas will also enquire into the vulnerability of the ecosystems and of the populations in these areas, the former experiencing a persistent burden from the latter who source their livelihoods from their habitat, while the latter have to bear the brunt of myriad forms of assault. During its centuries-old history, the region of Bengal has been a space that, like the people who inhabit it, came to be dynamic in nature. This has been a space that has, through history, granted refuge to many — a history that was made possible because of its unique geographical terrain, making it, paradoxically, both easy to access and difficult to monitor. This aspect has been accentuated by the political position of this ecotone area, situated between two nations, and on the Bay that opens into SouthEast Asia. Bengal is a transitional zone where the urban and urbane space of North India dissolve into the marshy, rural world of the Gangetic delta; it is a transcultural zone where the racial and cultural 'purity' of Brahminical and Mughal India gave way to a syncretic mixture of languages, cultures and ethnicities; it is a transcolonial zone where French, British and other European interests intersected and creolized. This plurality can be seen reflected in the cultural and religious practices, in popular and classical art cultures, in public institutions and architecture, as well as in the folklores and customs of the place.
Talks by Nalini Mohabir
Indo-Guyanese women hold complicated positions within anti-colonial histories. Their fate as ‘fal... more Indo-Guyanese women hold complicated positions within anti-colonial histories. Their fate as ‘fallen women’ destined to labour in the fields of far-flung colonies was a narrative device particularly deployed by Indian nationalists. However, women labourers not only endured the circumstances of plantation, but were often at the forefront of resistance, risking (and losing) their lives in protests for justice and liberation. Though more research on the subjectivity, space, and resistance of (Indo) Guyanese women during the nationalist movement remains to be written, even less is known about the individual actions of (Indo-)women towards self-liberation. Decolonization in the academic literature is often privileged as a macro-political and masculine act. However, I argue that women who (re)claimed citizenship and belonging through return passage to India following that country’s independence, were also engaged in decolonizing actions.
George Lamming posed the question, “How and Where is the Caribbean?,” a question that occupies au... more George Lamming posed the question, “How and Where is the Caribbean?,” a question that occupies auto-ethnographic reflections or literary landscapes, but also geographical construction, spatial history, sociological, economic and political imaginations. Across disciplines, individuals have been concerned with how the Caribbean has been constituted, imagined, and bounded, the starting point being a timespace defined by European contact. However, this convention also serves as a reminder that the Caribbean is central to the phenomena of globalization, so prominent in all discussions of contemporary culture.
With a population drawn from all corners of the world-- the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia -- the Caribbean has always possessed a fluid sense of place extending beyond its borders. The legacy of which has created a highly mobile population who have remapped Caribbean space onto new locations, including London, Amsterdam, and New York. My work contextualises a re-mapping of the Caribbean as not only a uni-directional postcolonial phenomenon, but an ever-present part of Caribbean flows.
Papers by Nalini Mohabir
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
This is a reflection on the uses of university apologies, prompted by the recent apology offered ... more This is a reflection on the uses of university apologies, prompted by the recent apology offered by Concordia University for its mishandling of Black students’ complaints of institutional racism in 1969, which culminated in the Sir George Williams University student protest, the largest protest against racism on a Canadian university campus.
McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, May 15, 2022
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Following two weeks of a peaceful sit-in protest, on February 11, 1969, the Montreal riot police ... more Following two weeks of a peaceful sit-in protest, on February 11, 1969, the Montreal riot police stormed the Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) computer centre and assaulted and arrested nearly one hundred people. The students at Sir George had been protesting their experiences of discrimination and the university’s failure to take seriously their complaints about racism on campus. This discussion explores the significance of the 1969 protests as an intervention in Canadian higher education. It also situates that event in relation to narratives of the radical 1960s and explores the operations of the university as a site of knowledge and power. This discussion also raises questions about what we might learn from the protests in relation to current issues in the Canadian academy and offers reflections on Black studies in Canada today.
Land Use Policy, 2020
Abstract This article examines the urban regeneration process of Hubei old village in Shenzen, an... more Abstract This article examines the urban regeneration process of Hubei old village in Shenzen, and focuses on interest sharing among stakeholders. Urban regeneration processes are driven by the decreasing availability of construction land in Shenzhen’s city centre due to rapid urbanization and an unplanned, overcrowded urban core. The solution accepted by most stakeholders, i.e., local government, private developers, and urban villagers, is to generate land revenue through the demolition of urban villages like Hubei old village, thus clearing way for Shenzen’s urban development and transformation. However, tenants and small business operators do not benefit from the rising land and property value, and thus do not share the interests of other stakeholders. A further complication to Shenzen’s urban regeneration process is added by those who do not live in Hubei old village but have vocally fought to preserve its architectural heritage. By examining the urban regeneration process of Hubei old village in Shenzhen, this article provides a case study of the complex dynamics of the Hubei urban regeneration program and participatory planning process, taking as a starting point a question posed by an urban villager during an interview: “whose village?”, i.e., who has the right to make decisions on behalf of the urban village?
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019
This article focuses on the kala pani (dark waters) as a deathscape particular to indentured labo... more This article focuses on the kala pani (dark waters) as a deathscape particular to indentured labourers and their descendants. Following a historical discussion of representations of the kala pani, the author turns to contemporary artists Maya Mackrandilal and Andil Gosine to explore how their artistic engagements are rerouting the flows of the kala pani away from discourses of caste stigma or the finality of (social) death to a reckoning of past and future time for those living in the diasporic space of North America.
Land Use Policy, 2017
Since 1978, the Chinese central government has undertaken a series of market-oriented policy refo... more Since 1978, the Chinese central government has undertaken a series of market-oriented policy reforms which has led to responsibility for urban development shifting from central government to the local level, i.e., the provincial, prefectural city and district governments. As a result, local district governments in China's larger cities have become key players driving economic development through an intensive process of entrepreneurial urbanization (where markets drive urban policy). These urban projects are best characterized as property-led, encouraged by neoliberal policies such as government support for land-based urban growth coalitions and property speculation. Based on local government planning and infrastructure development, this process has led to several newly built districts or towns. However, they have become ghost cities due to their lack of inhabitants and empty apartment units (apartment units are often purchased as part of an investment portfolio rather than as primary residences). This paper will unpack economic mechanisms and government motivations behind three iterations of ghost cities, to explore how local governments interact with central government as well as with property developers to expand urbanization. We examine three cases, the distinct urban contexts of Shanghai Thames town, Ordos, and Kunming (reflecting suburban tourism; debt-financed urbanism; and pro-growth strategic urbanism respectively)to examine the variations across ghost cities in China (both in terms of neoliberal mechanisms and its outcomes).
Cultural Dynamics, 2019
In this primarily visual essay, I consider the ways in which Yee I-Lann’s art revisits the coloni... more In this primarily visual essay, I consider the ways in which Yee I-Lann’s art revisits the colonial archive in an attempt to affect our understanding of its geographic, social and historical implications. Stitching together concerns about time, space and feelings, Yee I-Lann’s work addresses Southeast Asia’s history of colonial practices through her method of ‘speculative photomontage’, creating speculative moments to suggest new meanings within past and present contexts. In so doing, her work opens up the single photographic moment in time by recontexualizing and recombining signifiers of memory, landscape, personal, and social histories, emotional and political affiliations through her photomontage process. The visuality of her approach facilitates alternative – and affective – ways of seeing the ripple effects of histories and geographies.
Small Axe, 2017
This essay engages with visual cues that point to an afterlife of indentureship across a culture,... more This essay engages with visual cues that point to an afterlife of indentureship across a culture, history, and economics of labor, evident as a felt presence or absence in photographic representations of Caribbean persons. The author re-views photographs (both archival and artistic) taken in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the aim of advancing a notion of indentureship, at once larger and more circumscribed than Indo-Caribbean identity. This goal is underscored by three premises: visualization connects documentary sources to their imaginative coordinates; dynamics of affect, memory, and history related to indentureship are mobilized in the photographic arts of the Caribbean diaspora; and the aesthetic is a conceptual space with cultural resonance for the descendants of indentured laborers. In essence, the author finds that visual evidence of an indentured past requires the arts of imagination to understand the invisible and visible currents still present.
Habitat International, 2017
Abstract The movement from rural areas and agricultural economies to urban spaces has been the mo... more Abstract The movement from rural areas and agricultural economies to urban spaces has been the most significant migration trend shaping Chinese society. Rural migrants moving to urbanized areas serve as a floating labour pool, providing flexible and cheap labour for urbanization and industrialization processes (increasingly over the past three decades). During periods of slow economic development, however, there is a pattern of return migration from the urban back to the rural. Over the last decade, older rural migrants, or first-generation migrants, tend to return to their home villages periodically, during times of economic downturn, but this does not imply that migration to cities has decreased. Younger people from rural villages continue to migrate to the city in search of urban economic opportunities and to escape rural poverty, regardless. The purpose of this paper, then, is to explore the intentions and context of floating migrants' decisions to return “home” or to remain in the city. This research examines how notions of gender, age and sense of belonging affect the choice of rural migrants to stay or return, including different calculations in the decision-making process across age and gender. The question of whether to stay or return is framed through the lens of belonging, which allows us to explore the changing priorities of a younger generation of floating migrants. Based on fieldwork in Shanghai and Anhui, we find that the floating workers interviewed prefer to remain in mega-cities as opposed to smaller cities or returning home to rural areas. The findings contextualize the residential dilemmas facing floating migrants, and points to different factors across age in deciding whether to stay in the city, or return to the village during economic slumps.
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2014
A newly installed plaque at the port of Kolkata stands as a memorial to the indentured Indian dia... more A newly installed plaque at the port of Kolkata stands as a memorial to the indentured Indian diaspora. It conveys a collective story relevant to present desires, not past hauntings. Yet it is the tension of absences and silences that makes the port city an interesting site of individual memories and collective diasporic history. This essay attempts to show the possibilities of an imaginative construction of indentured return experiences intersecting with intergenerational memories as well as the cultivation of facts on the ground, inspired by Wilson Harris’s argument that Caribbean scholarship needs to bridge the gap between historicity, space, and imagination.
One might wonder how this short reflection on outreach to East/Southeast Asian Gay Men who use Ba... more One might wonder how this short reflection on outreach to East/Southeast Asian Gay Men who use Bathhouses in Toronto fits within the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. Firstly, the Caribbean is a diverse space, with diasporic East Asian (Chinese) and Southeast Asian (Javanese) communities. Secondly, the Caribbean itself is not tied to geography, and may be found wherever its diasporas are located (e.g., Toronto). When we migrate our diasporas are made, un-made and re-made, coming together in ways that move across boundaries. For example, while Richard, Daniel, Peter, Ryan, and Brian are East/ Southeast Asian men, Nalini is not (her family is from the Caribbean). However, as 'Asians' or 'people of colour' (collectivities borne of migration histories), we work across the multicultural silos and gendered borderlines that seek to separate and contain us. Despite recent critiques of solidarity, we still need each other. In that spirit, this essay explores the practice of...
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Conference Presentations by Nalini Mohabir
Talks by Nalini Mohabir
With a population drawn from all corners of the world-- the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia -- the Caribbean has always possessed a fluid sense of place extending beyond its borders. The legacy of which has created a highly mobile population who have remapped Caribbean space onto new locations, including London, Amsterdam, and New York. My work contextualises a re-mapping of the Caribbean as not only a uni-directional postcolonial phenomenon, but an ever-present part of Caribbean flows.
Papers by Nalini Mohabir
With a population drawn from all corners of the world-- the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia -- the Caribbean has always possessed a fluid sense of place extending beyond its borders. The legacy of which has created a highly mobile population who have remapped Caribbean space onto new locations, including London, Amsterdam, and New York. My work contextualises a re-mapping of the Caribbean as not only a uni-directional postcolonial phenomenon, but an ever-present part of Caribbean flows.
Commonly understood, a port is the site where ships’ passengers enter or exit, and cargo is loaded or unloaded. Thus, it represents the flow of people and exchange of goods, in the age of sail, as well as in the contemporary globalized world. The unbounded space of the port offers opportunities to explore “discontinuous histories” of port cities, and “its interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993), as a site that decentres the nation through its slippery flows. In addition, port cities anchor urban development around shipping routes and international trade. Ports of call offer the hope of safe harbours for migrants, a refuge in a storm, or alternatively a vulnerable site for colonial concessions or gateways that must be regulated or controlled. Ports are also passages of communications. In computer networking, a port is a nodal point of communication through which data flows, a portal to information. Lastly port cities occupy that liminal space between land and water, an in-between ecotonic zone of transition.
Ports are often referred to as nonplaces – gateways subject to global forces that historically shaped trans-oceanic connections, expansion into hinterlands, and crossroads of historical and contemporary encounters. Nonplaces within cities are commonly perceived as liminal locations reduced to their function of transportation or commercial nodes, or as locations that crush the sense of individual empowerment. But artists, writers, critics and researchers have depicted them as multiple, paradoxical spaces, where new possibilities arise and new cultures emerge. Nonplaces may produce social flows and networks that are not only a defining feature of our “super-modernity”, but also, in the longue durée of urban and semi-urban dynamics, a matrix for identity formation, cultural transitions and environmental adaptation.
Port cities, however, are also placed. Cities such as Georgetown in Guyana, Shanghai, Liverpool, Calcutta, Dar es Salaam, Nantes, or Montreal among many others, may be viewed through longstanding geographic imaginaries, linguistic collectivities and/or colonial and postcolonial histories, suggesting an ongoing struggle over who ‘claims’ the city (in Montreal’s case, unceded territory), and gestures towards political, social, or economic insecurities apparent in the spatial configurations of urban life, with implications that potentially destabilize national narratives. For example, as an island in the Saint Lawrence River, the city of Montreal is not only connected to multiple elsewheres through migration, but also through trade. The Saint Lawrence opens on to the Atlantic ocean through which flowed a long-standing trade in bauxite from towns in the Caribbean to Quebec (following circuits laid by imperialism). Thus, ports shape material channels of profit and power, as well as modes of resistance that occur around these networks of control.
Possible topics:
• Circulations and hubs of ideas, migration, or commerce that linked cities across empire(s)
• Interactions and networks of mobile labour in port cities, the spatiality of encounters
• Cultural transitions or environmental adaptions in (post)colonial port cities at different historical junctures or across geographic locations
• Urban colonial heritage, and attendant linkages to global urbanism
• Memorializing of port city histories and the shaping of identities (including sexuality, race, gender, language, religious, migrant)
• Literary representations and/or Visualities of colonial or postcolonial urban flows
• Port cities as globalized past and/or migrancy of the present
• Regulation, control, and spatial division within (post)colonial port cities