Description
Contemporary conceptions of cities in global politics (e.g., “networked cities” (Curtis 2016), “planetary urbanisation” (Brenner and Schmid 2012), or postcolonial critiques of Eurocentric bias in the notion of “global cities” (Robinson 2006)) disrupts the conceptual, subjective, and spatial hierarchies of “local” within “global”. This challenges critically-inclined scholars to see, feel, and know the urban/global politics interface differently by attending to neglected sites, subjects, and methods (e.g.: Closs Stephens 2016, McLean 2018). We respond to this challenge by rethinking the political agency of urbanization. Building on Shapiro’s approach to the “aesthetic subject” – the subject that mobilises thinking – we ask: what global politics can be seen, felt, and known when we approach the city as an “aesthetic subject”? The paper engages two sites that enact the urban as aesthetic subject: the production of “the urban” in fiction in the novels of China Miéville (e.g.: The City and The City (2009), The Last Days of New Paris (2016)); and the fashioning of “the urban” through textiles and dress in city museums in London and New York. Drawing on accounts of the circulations that fix and value subjects within aesthetic (Entwistle 2009) and affective (Ahmed 2009) economies, we use these sites to witness the agential capacity of the urban emerge from circulations that “stick” and confer aesthetic subjectivity, and to witness other circulations that “slip” and slide from view.
