Search results
This book explores the influence of imperialism in the landscapes of modern European cities including London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Marseilles, Glasgow and Seville. The first part considers some ways in which the design of urban landscapes articulated competing visions of the imperial city, including large-scale planning and architectural schemes, urban design and public monuments. The final shape of the Queen Victoria Memorial in London suggests an oddly tenuous relationship between the creation of imperial space and the representation of the empire itself. The notions of empire and romanità are expressed through the location, styling and form of the Vittoriano in Rome. The second part of the book considers the role of various forms of visual display, including spectacular pageants, imperial exhibitions and suburban gardens, in the cultural life of metropolitan imperialism. The material transformation of Paris with rhetorical devices reveals a deep-seated ambiguity about just how 'imperial' Paris wanted to appear. Sydenham Crystal Palace housed the Ethnological and Natural History Department, and its displays brought together animals, plants and human figures from various areas of the globe. The largest part of imperial Vienna's tourist traffic came from within the Austrian lands of the empire. The last part of the book is primarily concerned with the associations between imperial identities and the history of urban space in a variety of European cities. The book considers the changing cultural and political identities in the imperial city, looking particularly at nationalism, masculinity and anti-imperialism.
imperial metropolitan perspective. Ultimately what animates and controls the Company and Kurtz are urban corporate power, public opinion and consumption. I am proposing this reading of Heart of Darkness as a path-clearing exercise for future critical and theoretical analyses of metropolitan imperialism. This modest activity I justify on the grounds that it is precisely, and only, through close reading that the full import of the interplay of the metropolis and imperialism can be traced. Part of this text’s subtlety lies in its depiction of colonialism’s casual
metropolitan citizen; a complaint amplified in Bernard Porter’s sustained broadside against the whole empire and metropolitan culture project. 97 While these critiques themselves were often reductive, casting their quarry ‘according to a definition and interpretation of metropolitan “imperialism” that few would lay claim to’, they have arguably brought more sober reflection on the subtleties of
capitalism which imposed its domination on the colonised ‘over there’ and the workers ‘over here’ (as Sartre would later write in Colonialism and Neocolonialism ): Those who suffer from colonial oppression must take each other by the hand and walk shoulder to shoulder with those who suffer from the misdeeds of metropolitan imperialism; they must bear the same weapons and destroy the universal evil of global imperialism. Comrades, we must replace it by the union of free peoples of the earth. No
’, considers some of the ways in which the design of urban landscapes articulated competing visions of the imperial city, including large-scale planning and architectural schemes, urban design and public monuments. Part II, ‘Imperial Display’, considers the role of various forms of visual display, including spectacular pageants, imperial exhibitions and suburban gardens, in the cultural life of metropolitan imperialism. Finally, Part III, ‘Imperial Identities’, is primarily concerned with the associations between imperial identities