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Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s-60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
List of Figures and Tables; Acknowledgements; Note on Conclusions, Spellings and Abbreviations; 1. Introduction: Squaring Round Tables; Part I. Geographical Imaginations: 2. Dominion and Dyarchy: The Absent Presences; 3. Community: A Nation and a Table Divided; Part II. Conference Infrastructures: 4. The Conference Method: Between Intention and Desire; 5. Staffing the Conference: Experts and Subaltern Diplomats; 6. The Speech Factory: Palace Materials and Communication Technologies; Part III. The Conference City: 7. A Hospitable City?: Official Socialising; 8. Social London: Residing and Dining; 9. At Homes: Political Hostessing and Homemaking; Part IV. Representations: 10. Petitions and Protests: The Page and the Street; 11. Failure: Ending and Failing; 12. Conclusion: Squaring Round Tables; Notes; References; Index.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at University of Nottingham, England. He is a specialist on interwar colonial India with a particular interest in the politics of urban space within imperial and international frames. He has analyzed these spaces and frames through drawing upon theoretical approaches from memory scholarship, postcolonialism, political theory and governmentality studies. He published the co-edited volume (with Deana Heath) South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings with the Press in 2018. Some of his other publications are Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (2007), Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014) and the edited collection Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).
Zusammenfassung
Explores the spaces and events of the interwar Round Table Conference which drafted the blueprint for colonial India's constitutional future. This geographical analysis explores the imaginations, infrastructures, urban spaces and contestations of the meeting.
