Organized by the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore, with support from the Max Weber Foundation and its DIJ-ARI Research Partnership on Asian Infrastructures and MWS Research node on the Global Indo-Pacific: Connecting Histories and Futures.
ABSTRACT
In this presentation Prof Stephen Legg will reflect on his past, recent, and future work exploring the geographies of colonialism and anticolonialism. It opens with a summary of his 2007 book, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, which explores three landscapes of ordering which united New and Old Delhi as the capital of British rule in colonial India. Prof Legg will also reflect on the intellectual moment that this work emerged (geographer’s engagement with the latter-Foucault, postcolonial theory, and urban studies). He will also summarise his 2025 book, Spaces of Anticolonialism, which compliments and supplements the first work, by exploring spaces of anticolonial struggle in Delhi in periods of protest mass-movement and also in everyday spaces of political mobilisation. Here he will reflect on ongoing debates regarding geographies of “resistance”, the decolonial, and the nature of the city. Finally, he will share ongoing research regarding the synergies between global urban history and global urban studies, and ask what “anticolonial urbanism” might be, what it could contribute, and how we might explore it comparatively between South, Southeast and East Asia.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the twentieth-century British empire, with particular interest in the study of cities as spaces and scales of colonial, anticolonial, communal and internationalist politics. His monographs include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007), Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014), Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023), and Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2025). In 2024, he chaired the International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London, and he is currently Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Historical Geography.
