Nostalgia as Affective Landscape: Negotiating Displacement in the “World City”

Abstract

Bangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi-million-dollar gated communities and post-industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old-time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community-making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more-than-human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.