"In his new manuscript, Shiben Banerji examines the movement toward "global cities" in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly as an outcropping of occult philosophies like Theosophy that worked toward what practitioners called "universal brotherhood." Drawing on music, art, literature, and science, Theosophy imagined a path of self-improvement that would combat social and economic alienation. Accordingly, the view of the city that it helped foster was expansive: a city that could democratically encompass all genders, ethnicities, religions, and species. Banerji's study works to recuperate this forgotten chapter of urban design history through an examination of interlinked moments in the globalized pursuit of universal brotherhood"--
The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.
War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity’s fundamental unity and common fate.
Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period’s most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.
The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.
