Ananya Roy was invited to speak for a keynote as part of the The Urban Studies Institute’s Comparative Urbanism Conference in 2019. Although five years ago now, the contents are even more pertinent in our current politics.

Titled the ‘The city as postcolony,’ centres on a regime, reinforcing the power to kill and the lower to civilize people. There are three conceptions Roy articulates in the article:

(1) Knowledge production and methodology remain untouched, despite the theoretical efforts in considering queering, decolonisation and the local, it is considered with the framework of a small scale. This is exasperated by how citations keep intact structures of power and knowledge coinciding with the limits of pluralism.

(2) Thinking from the south should be considered in relationship with the north Atlantic – south as well as south-south relations. This is built on the current consensus of racial capitalism and colourblindness.

(3) to think of political life of urban studies and the position of multiple cities founded on freedom dreams rather than pursuing equality.

Roy begins to dismantle the ideas of pluralism, equality and planetary urbanism. Rather than a bounded, flattened and embedded, Roy specifies that there is always an outside. Cities do not exist in totalities, there are socio spatial formations, and multiple modernities exists.

Here, a few key concepts are foregrounded.

• Simulcrum – Mbembe and subaltern studies are often situated in staging the difference between non-west and west. There is an absolute otherness
• Plantation – The agrarian cultures of slavery and subaltern readings of productivity has led to consider how plantation is the constant need to re-read cities of erasure, overlay and erasure. Just like a plantation, spaces of imagined productivity and tenancy are constructure, dismantled and demolished before being reconstructed. The multiple readings of the city is a palimpsest built on the framework of tenancy rights. When property as possession and a British colonial apparatus of plantation futures. The urban is rendered as ‘non-indigenous land on unceded territories and the city as the first colony.

Here is a methodological implications of her discussion is rather than considering queer, indigenous and feminist readings of palimpsest of the city as provincial, rural and local, these are not rural. Roy suggests considering plantation and the postcolony of the city is not the rural - and the forms of historical difference are spatialised, racialised and gendered. Instead of a series of comparative urbanism analysis, Roy suggests that a layered reading of the city is imperative to tell these stories in relationship with the current canonical discourses.

The trans in transnationalism is important here to keep note of. Such studies of ‘othering’ is often tied with the local, a small scale. Instead, Roy discusses a nested reading instead of othering. A trans-local conversation must be had in relationship and flows of exchange. To understand a nested correlation of stakeholders.

This presentation is compelling, suggesting a plantation politics of land is obvious where indigenous unceded territories. There is so much more to be done, as indigenous may not read smoothly from one place to another, especially here where I sit transnationally between Hong Kong and Malaysia.