How can urban space create a global identity? Professor Shiben Banerji from UC Berkeley comes to King's to discuss his latest book, Lineages of the Global City, which explores an early-twentieth-century concept of the globe as an ethos—emerging through urban plans for cities, suburbs, and communes across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949.

The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonisers and the colonised to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity’s fundamental unity and common fate.

Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period’s most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

About the speakers

Shiben Banerji is an associate Professor in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of California, Berkeley.

His research explores the rhetorical and performative dimensions of architecture. An interdisciplinary scholar concerned with Art History, Architecture, and the politics of these aesthetic practices, his work currently focuses in how twentieth-century theorists of alternatives to liberal modernity in the ex-colonial world conceptualized the work of architectural media in altering perception and consciousness.

Pablo de Orellana is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London.

An inter-disciplinary scholar-working on diplomacy, nationalism and the relationship between art and conflict, his research on how diplomatic communication describes threads together his passion for political philosophy, literary analysis, history and aesthetics, while his work on ethnic nationalist thought focuses on the reactionary international movement represented by Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, Meloni, Putin, Bolsonaro and other contemporary ethnonationalists.