Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that imperial building projects and urban planning schemes often attempt to strategically weaken colonized subjects’ feelings of belonging. If legislated apartheid or the spectacle of the plantopolis or the ubiquity of urban surveillance turns “home turf” into vexed terrain, then that terrain can become a bludgeon rather than a shield. Buildings, motorways, and memorials, in other words, are hardly window dressing to the colonial enterprise: they are quite literally structures of power. These structures of power, the structures of feeling they condition, and the structures of resistance they birth into being are the subjects of this chapter. Drawing on Situationist theory, the chapter also observes that “unhomely” terrain can sometimes be destabilized by the subversive navigational strategies of particular pedestrians. Guy Debord’s analysis of personal “psychogeographies”—“fragmented, subjective, temporal experience[s] of the city”—elaborates how individuals’ “insubordinate” wanderings might potentially work against colonial hegemony set in stone. The chapter then introduces each of the case studies to come within this theoretical context.