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Lineages of the Global City

Name: Lineages of the Global City
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
SKU: 9781477331408
Price: 104.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESSISBN: 9781477331408

Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy

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$104.00

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By Shiben Banerji
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
Release Date: October 6, 2025
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions: 254 x 178 mm
Weight: 850 g
Pages: 336

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The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city. War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to 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 across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. 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, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

Shiben Banerji is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Prologue Chapter 1. Summoning Global Subjects: A Methodological Note Chapter 2. Unifying Science, 1905-1913: De Bazel's World Capital and Andersen's World-Centre Chapter 3. Financializing Debt, 1927-1933: Otlet and Le Corbusier's CitE Mondiale Chapter 4. Saving Empire, 1924-1933: Besant's World-Empire Chapter 5. Conserving Nature, 1920-1935: Griffin's Castlecrag Chapter 6. Globalizing Democracy, 1938-1949: Mahony's Magic of America Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

This is a beautifully researched and realized work of scholarship, which unveils a remarkable archive of urban images that connect occultism, modernism, globality, and architecture. It will be of great value to historians, architects, planners, and scholars of cultural modernity due to its powerful argument for the cosmological underpinnings of modern urban thought. - Arjun Appadurai, New York University, author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition In the contemporary era of climate crisis, growing concerns about the exploitation of nature, resurgent nationalism, and what is looking to be a new global political and economic order that will impact not just nations but also cities, this provocative book will spark considerable debate about what kinds of urban habitats we want to build and whether historical models relegated to the dustbin of twentieth-century architectural history can indeed offer new food for thought in these turbulent times. - Diane E. Davis, Harvard Graduate School of Design; CIFAR Fellow and Project Co-Director, Humanity's Urban Future

Lineages of the Global City

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