Writing A Post-colonial City: Theory In Medias Res

Engaging with ideas of Singaporean literary theorist Rajeev Patke through his montage essay, Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Postcolonial City, this article explores how the techniques of montage text can inspire theoretical writing to go beyond its conventional representational function. Besides challenging the conventional nature of theoretical writing as reflection, I will suggest the montage form can inspire readers to engage with the city they inhabit in new ways, and in turn produce new kinds of subjectivities, spaces and meanings that can resist (neo)-colonial and conventional sociological modes of categorisation. What readers – including artists, designers and other writers – may ‘learn’ from encountering a montage text arises from their own process of ‘producing’.