Liberating genealogies in Amman: Urban histories between a colonizing legacy and a decolonizing illusion

Abstract

Colonialism operated in Amman through a matrix of power generated from a Western emphasis on its biblical and classical pasts. The cultural dominance of this matrix persisted in the postcolonial period. It perpetuated the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being as it accentuated Western imperial pasts and marked the local – whether heritage or something else – as marginal. Coloniality is reflected in the successive planning and regeneration projects of Amman’s place of origin: Amman Valley (Wadi Amman). A postcolonial approach is usually used to discuss these projects on the basis of locals’ “otherness” and passivity. However, we shift the discussion toward examining local intelligence as having the power to resist the persistent colonial matrix, using the example of an art initiative by local activists in Wadi Amman as part of its regeneration. Using the concept of decoloniality, this article grapples with local knowledge and being in Wadi Amman and their capacity to turn urban heritage spaces into places of resistance. It reveals that despite the resistance potential in urban heritage spaces, the persistent colonial matrix of power reduces them to spaces of illusion. Because of the cultural dominance of the art initiative in Wadi Amman and the marginalization of locality, we conclude that resistance itself is being colonized and decoloniality is but an illusion. In line with decolonial theory, we call for a geopolitical turn that allows us to unfold the different shapes of struggle in the urban heritage spaces of postcolonial cities in order to locate, celebrate, and criticize the liberating genealogies found in them.