Rendering the Imaginal City: Uneven Urbanization and the Temporality of Mediation

• In Event: Inter-city Cinema in Asia: Imaginative Cartographies and Critical Postcolonial Encounters

Abstract

In this paper I attempt to articulate a visual strategy for critiquing development and globality as dominant regimes of the imaginal city, that is, the city as composed not merely of images but of ideas, representations and rhetorics. Such a critique unfolds in what I call an urban depth of field, which shifts the analytical perspective of the city by shifting the focus from spatiality to temporality. I make use of Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic concept of the time-image in order to argue that development and globality as imaginal regimes project diachronic and synchronic images of time onto the urban landscape, respectively. Postcolonial cities in South Asia (particularly large unevenly urbanized agglomerations like New Delhi), I argue, are continually caught between images of development and globality, on the one hand, and the invisible cities that dominant imaginal regimes exclude in order to exude intelligibility.

Author

• Rohan Kalyan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University