The Other Global City

What is a Global City? Who authorizes the World Class City? This edited volume interrogates the "global cities" literature, which views the city as a shimmering, financial "global network." Through a historical-ethnographic exploration of inter-ethnic relations in the "other global" cities of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, the well-known contributors highlight cartographies of the Other Global City. The volume contends that thinking about the city in the longue duree and as part of a topography of interconnected regions contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities that have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions in Asia and the world.

Shail Mayaram is a Professor and Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India. She is the author of Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (Columbia University Press, 2003); Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Oxford University Press, 1997); and the co-author of Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanambhumi Movement and the Fear of Self (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Prologue and Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Re-Reading Global Cities: Topographies of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism in Asia Shail Mayaram Section I: Cosmopolitanism and the State 2. Beneficence and Difference: Ottoman Awqaf and “Other” Subjects Engin F. Isin 3. Living Together in Lhasa: Ethnic Relations, Coercive Amity, and Subaltern Cosmopolitanism Emily T. Yeh 4. Intelligent City: From Ethnic Governmentality to Ethnic Evolutionarism Aihwa Ong Section II: Cosmopolitanism Compromised/Denied 5. Impossible Cosmopolis: Dislocations and Relocations in Beirut and Delhi Yasmeen Arif 6. Limiting Cosmopolitanism: Streetlife “Little India,” Kuala Lumpur Yeoh Seng Guan 7. Invisibility and Cohabitation in Multiethnic Tokyo John Lie Section III: Cosmopolitan Microprocesses 8. Cairo Cosmopolitan: Living Together through Communal Divide, Almost Asef Bayat 9. Cosmopolitanism and the City: Interaction and Co-existence in Bukhara Caroline Humphrey, Magnus Marsden and Vera Skvirskaja