Pushpa Arabindoo

The objective of this fellowship is to draw some broader critical reflections from my ongoing monograph, "The unknown city: Excavating Chennai from Madras", especially in terms of how this ethnography of one specific Indian city provincialises in a pragmatic way the "southern turn" in the urban studies discourse and its associated project of retheorising the urban.

During this fellowship period, I will employ what Da Col and Graeber (2011) refer to as "ethnographic theorisation" to draw out from my monograph two major thematic constructs with implications for theorising the urban: (i) Theorisation of scale, and (ii) Theorisation of the state. In the case of the former, I suggest that the "scale question" is best addressed through a spatial reimagination of the hinterland, reconceptualising as a result, the established logic of peripheral urbanisation. In terms of the latter, my ethnography of urban transformations in Chennai reveal the inadequacy of the analytical lens of neoliberal urbanism, urging thus the need for a better theorisation of the state, especially as we are confronted with a bizarre socio-capitalist logic of an increasingly contradictory state-led developmental agenda. Secondly, as I develop the monograph on Chennai as a "biography of a conjuncture" (Davis 2006), I will explore the heuristic challenges embedded in "writing the city". Approaching it as a more than methodological gesture, I use this exercise to understand how one can bridge the emerging divide between particularist and planetary modes of theorising, allowing us to extract more sustained global urban analyses. Acknowledging the fact that how you write a city depends on where you write it from (including the language employed), I intend to work with French urban studies scholars to forestall not only the Anglophone dominance in this debate but also to foster a "transurban language of urbanisation" (Simone and Bourdreau 2009).