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).
