Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy

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.

Shiben Banerji is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.