Gallatin Global Faculty Symposium 2019
NYU Accra
March 20-22, 2019
The Postcolonial City at the Crossroads
#ThePostColonialCity
The symposium will bring together faculty from NYU’s Global network and from Gallatin to explore the postcolonial experience of urbanism from the vantage point of West Africa, and especially Accra. Drawing on an interdisciplinary set of questions emerging from ethnographic and fictional texts, the symposium will explore new intersections, itineraries, and spaces of belonging which animate postcolonial cities and reconfigure complicated histories of global connection. It will look at a rich set of emerging literatures on postcolonial urbanism—especially work on African cities—that reconfigure how we understand city building and urban citizenship through considering new iterations of development and new flows of money, people, ideas, and aesthetics. Though the discussions will be wide ranging and comparative, the symposium will pay particular attention to Accra and will involve local field trips. Specific topics may include: Sino-African investment and encounters; trans-Atlantic cultural production; new infrastructures of built and social architectures and their politics; literature and its role in post-colonial change. The Symposium may wish to interrogate and explore processes of “worlding” (Roy and Ong 2011, Haraway). Together, these discussions will ask faculty to consider the nature of the urban and the variegated and contradictory legacies of global encounter.