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Stephen Legg

Associate Professor

School of Geography

Biography

My empirical research is focused on colonial India, with Delhi as capital of the Raj (1911-47) providing the main focus. In terms of conceptual analysis I seek to contribute to the literature on Foucault, postcolonialism, memory and scale. My research falls into five main categories with their attendant theoretical interests:

1. "Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities" (Blackwell 2007): investigations of the means by which colonial order was imposed upon the existing city (Old Delhi) and the imperial capital (New Delhi). This work seeks to explore the spatial governmentalities by which the two cities were governed as one. Four landscapes of ordering are focused upon, the last of which has led to a separate research project on prostitution (see below). These landscapes concerned: race and residential segregation; police and the disciplining of crime, nationalism and communalism; urban improvement and the colonial biopolitics of infrastructural improvement.

2. “Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos” (Ed. Routledge 2011): a collaborative enterprise to consider Carl Schmitt's writings on international law from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The project necessarily involved consideration of Schmitt's associations with the Nazi party and his anti-liberalism, alongside his use by radical thinkers and activists in the 20th and 21st centuries. The project focused on his 1950 “The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum” which was translated into English in 2003. Scholars from International Relations, Philosophy, Political Science, Jurisprudence, and Sociology of Law were brought together to debate the relationship between Schmitt’s earlier domestic work on exceptionalism and sovereignty with his later work on the nomos, Grossraum and international law.

3. “Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India” (in press, 2014): research on the regulation of prostitution in 20th century colonial India. Theoretically, this work combines my previous emphasis on the politics of material spaces with a broader ranging concern for more distant scales of influence. This requires an engagement with the problematically interlocking literatures regarding networks, hierarchies and scales. This emphatically does not entail explaining phenomenon at the scale of the international and describing them at the local. Rather, this research begins with an exploration of the regulation in Delhi and then stretches out, following archival leads from the "local" to trace the interventions of the "national", “imperial” and the "international". I have been exploring the latter through a series of papers on the League of Nations.

4. Spaces of anti-colonialism: ongoing research exploring local reactions to Delhi's spaces of colonialism, but also focuses on the development of anti-colonial nationalist communities and campaigns. These include organisations based around the Khilafat outrage, Gandhian non-violence, Congress Socialism, Communism, the Muslim League, Hindu Nationalism and revolutionary violence. There are several recurring tropes that emerge throughout this research, concerning: embodied tactics; (non-)violence; scale and urban political mobilisation; homeplaces and nationalism; and social memory.

5. Spaces of decolonialism: future research which will examine Delhi in the ten years after independence and partition. This will also be in the context of attempts to de-memorialise the two cities through the removal of colonial monuments and street names. However, the retention of many aspects of Delhi's colonial geographies (residential zoning, policing strategies, abstract urban planning and the persecution of prostitutes) problematises the "break" of Independence, as do the new policies of "development" that were imported from the west to accompany the democratisation of the new state. 

Bibliography

Publications

Books

Legg, S (in press, 2014) Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India

Legg, S (ed. 2011a) Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos Routledge, London (Interventions Series in Politics & International Relations)         **paperback released 2012**

Legg, S (2007a) Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities Blackwell, Oxford (RGS-IBG Book Series)and Rawat, Jaipur  

 

Journal articles

 

Legg, S (2014) "An International Anomaly? Sovereignty, the League of Nations, and India's Princely Geographies" Journal of Historical Geography 43 96-110

 

Legg, S (2012) "“The life of individuals as well as of nations”: international law and the League of Nations’ anti-trafficking governmentalities" Leiden Journal of International Law 25(3) 647-664

Legg, S (2012 ) "Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution Regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923) " Modern Asian Studies 46(6) 1459-1505

Legg, S et al (2012) "Dark Territory in the Information Age: Epistemic Sovereignty, Informational Citizenship and the West German Census Controversies" Political Geography (book review forum)

Legg, S (2011)"Legal Geographies and the State of Imperialism: Environments, Constitutions, and Violence"Journal of Historical Geography 37(4) 505-508

Legg, S (2011e) "Assemblage/Apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault"Area 43(2)128-133 (part of a special section on Assemblage and Geography)

Legg, S (2010c) Editor of a virtual special issue on "Scale" for theTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Legg, S (2010b) "Transnationalism and the Scalar Politics of Imperialism" New Global Studies 4(1)1-7 (part of a forum on The Practices of Transnational Studies)

Legg, S (2010a) "An Intimate and Imperial Feminism: Meliscent Shephard and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial India"Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1) 68-94 (part of a special issue on Governing Intimacy)

Legg, S (2009c) "Governing Prostitution in Colonial Delhi: from Cantonment Regulations to International Hygiene (1864-1939)" Social History 34(4) 447-467

  • Abridged version reprinted (forthcoming) in Sundaram, R (Ed)Delhi's Twentieth Century New Delhi, Routledge

Legg, S (2009b) "An “indispensable hypodermis”? The role of scale in The Birth of Biopolitics" Journal of Cultural Economy 2(1&2) 219-225 (Part of A Symposium on Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979)

Legg, S (2009a) "Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India" Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34(2) 135-155

Legg, S and McFarlane, C (2008) "Ordinary Urban Spaces: between Postcolonialism and Development" Environment and Planning A (special issue co-edited with Colin McFarlane on Ordinary Spaces of Urban Development) 40 (1) 6-14

Legg, S (2008) "Ambivalent Improvements: Biography, Biopolitics, and Colonial Delhi." Environment and Planning A 40(1) 37-56

Legg, S (2007b) "Reviewing geographies of memory/forgetting"Environment and Planning A 39 (2) 456-466

Legg, S (2006a) "Governmentality, Congestion, and Calculation in Colonial Delhi" Social and Cultural Geography 7(5) 709-729, part of a special issued edited by Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden on Space, Politics, Calculation

Legg, S (2005a) "Foucault's Population Geographies: Classifications, Biopolitics and Governmental Spaces" Population, Space and Place 11(3) 137-156

Legg, S (2005b) "Sites of Counter-Memory: the Refusal to Forget and the Nationalist Struggle in Colonial Delhi" Historical Geography 33: 180-201

Legg, S (2005c) "Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation and Nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(4) 481 - 504

Legg, S (2004) "Conference Review: Metropolitan Catastrophes; Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations in the Era of Total War"The London Journal 29(2): 57-61

 

Legg, S (2004) "Review Essay: Memory and Nostalgia" (Susannah Radstone, Katherine Hodgkinson, Svetlanya Boym) Cultural Geographies11: 99-107

Legg, S (2003) Gendered Politics and Nationalised Homes: Women and the Anti-Colonial Struggle in Delhi, 1930-47 Gender, Place and Culture10(1) 7-27

Book chapters

Legg, S. (Forthcoming). 'City as a Site of Movements', in Nair, J.Urbanization in India, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi.

Legg, S (forthcoming 2012) "Planning Social Hygiene: From Contamination to Contagion in Interwar India" in Peckham, R and Pomfret, D.M. Imperial Contagions: Medicine and Cultures of Planning in Asia, 1880-1949 Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong (pre-publication draft)

Legg, S (2011f) “Security, territory, and colonial populations: town and empire in Foucault’s 1978 lecture course” in Teverson, A and Upstone, S (Ed.s) Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 146-163

Legg, S ( 2011f) "Violent memories: South Asian spaces of postcolonial anamnesis" in Michael Heffernan, Peter Meusburger and Edgar Wunder (Ed.s) Cultural Memories Dordrecht, Springer 287-303

Legg, S and Vasudevan, A (2011b) "Introduction: Geographies of the Nomos" in Legg, S (ed) Sovereignty, Spatiality, and Carl Schmitt:Geographies of the Nomos Routledge, London 1-24

Legg, S (2011c) "Inter-war spatial chaos? Imperialism, internationalism and the League of Nations" in Legg, S (ed) Sovereignty, Spatiality, and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos Routledge, London 106-124

Legg, S (2011d) "Governance" in Agnew, J and Duncan, JS Companion To Human Geography Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell 347-360

Legg, S and Vasudevan, A (2010d) "Q&A on Eyal Weizman's 'Elastic Territories'" In Alex Farquhatson, Fiona Parry and Abi Spinks (ed.s)Histories of the Present Nottingham, Nottingham Contemporary 225-226

Legg, S (2007d) "Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism" In Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (Ed.s) Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography Aldershot, Ashgate 265-289

Legg, S (2006b) "Postcolonial Developmentalities: From the Delhi Improvement Trust to the Delhi Development Authority" in Stuart Corbridge, Satish Kumar and Saraswati Raju (Ed.s) Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Geographies London, SAGE 182-204

Duncan, N and Legg, S (2004) "Social Class" in J. Duncan, N. Johnson and R. Schein (Ed.s) A Companion to Cultural Geography Oxford, Blackwell Publishing 250-264