Towards a Spatial Practice of the Postcolonial City: Introducing the Cultural Producer

This article offers an introduction to the Interventions special issue, “Re-evaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation”. It institutes the cultural producer as its key reference point for re-examining the spatial imaginary of the postcolonial urban landscape. From internationally acclaimed artists, exhibition curators and marginalized performers to local audiences, tourist consumers, migrant workers, garbage collectors and transsexual pedestrians, the cultural producer is endowed with a diverse range of identity narratives by the cutting-edge contributions to the special issue. We posit the “production of space” as the principal conceptual axis for re-evaluating the postcolonial city as represented, interrogated and reconstructed by the cultural producer. With reference to Lefebvre’s spatial theory, Foucault’s postulation of heterotopia, and Soja’s understanding of the Thirdspace, this introduction explores the multiple spatial practices of the cultural producer as she/he engages with the everyday materiality of the postcolonial city along the discursive paradigms of colonial memory, national history, neoliberal hegemonies, racial struggles, gender politics, ethnic peripheries and radical sexualities. Demonstrated here is how the special issue foregrounds the spatial topography of the postcolonial city as an embodied site of the cultural producer’s canonical, subversive and alternative modernities. We finally provide a critical overview of the issue and its thematic concerns. This involves an analysis of the individual articles constituting the special issue, including the keynote contribution from renowned author and academic, Caryl Phillips.