The Post-Colonial Unconscious

Postcolonial nation-building could be said as inhabiting the structure of what Ashis Nandy calls the ‘cultural pathology of colonialism’. ¹ In this structure, the colonial past continues to live on as the ‘unconscious’ finding expression within the socio-political struggle of the postcolonial present. The image-making of urban centres in postcolonial cities, while bound up with the global circulation of capital, can therefore also be seen as motivated by a cultural enterprise that stems from an unconscious national desire to overcome colonial legacy of ‘development’.