Colombo: Layered histories in the global south

A Chinese-financed $15 billion dollar port city project is dramatically restructuring today's Colombo. Yet, Colombo has a deeply layered imperial past: it was initially a Muslim settlement, before it came under a succession of European empires, Portuguese (first trading post in 1518), Dutch (1656-1796) and British (1796-1948). This project interrogates how these outsiders made a city in an unstable environment at the centre of the Indian Ocean, in which arose a diverse society, generating an abundance of cultural production and a sequence of violent politics. The four pathways of research: 1) In environmental terms, this multiply- colonised and repeatedly-engineered city is built in a wetland without a significant natural harbour; 2) In social terms, in a heavily nationalised state, the city has resisted indigeneity, as it is inhabited by many minority communities with long narrations of origin; 3) As for culture, Colombo was represented in keeping with recurrent motifs, as a site of transit across the Indian Ocean, including for enslaved and indentured labour as well as settlers; 4) And on politics, the heavy work needed, at the bridge of sea and land, gave rise to urban violence between communities in the midst of civil war; sustained strikes and new political movements, even in the months prior to this submission. For all these reasons, Colombo's past is a mirror to the legacies of enslavement, empires, postcolonial conflict and inequality; the long history of global Islam; the rise of China at the doorstep of India; and the environmental crisis. To critique these relations of pasts and presents, the project will bring artists together with historians and develop an open- access platform which works towards a more inclusive future. By decentring global North narratives of diffusion, global South narratives forged out of nationalism, and narrow accounts of empire, port cities or bonded labour, this will be a transformative exemplar of research on and for cities.