Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia

ISBN-13: 9783319476223 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 289 str.

Tereza Kuldova; Mathew Varghese

Opis

This book brings anthropologists and critical theorists together in order to investigate utopian visions of the future in the neoliberal cities of India and Sri Lanka. Arguing for the priority of materiality in any analysis of contemporary ideology, the authors explore urban construction projects, special economic zones, fashion ramps, films, archaeological excavations, and various queer spaces. In the process, they reveal how diverse co-existing utopian visions are entangled with local politics and global capital, and show how these utopian visions are at once driven by visions of excess and by increasing expulsions. It's a dystopia already in the making - one marred by land grabs and forced evictions, rising inequality, and the loss of urbanity and civility.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Urban Utopias - Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal India and Sri Lanka 

PART I: Futuristic Visions of Urbanity and Socio-Economic Expulsions 

2. The Impossibility of World Class Slum Free Indian Cities and the Fantasy of ‘Two Indias’

3. Guarded Luxotopias and Expulsions in New Delhi: Aesthetics and Ideology of Outer and Inner Spaces of an Urban Utopia

4. Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa

5. Vikasanam: The Expansionist Choreography of Space-Making in Kerala

6. Cities of Neoliberal Future: Urban Utopia in Indian Science Fiction Cinema

PART II: Urban Megalomaniac Visions and Heritage Utopias 

7. Manifesting Sri Lankan Megalomania – the Rajapakses’ Vision of Empire and of a Clean Colombo

8. A Modern Chakravartin: Mayawati’s New Buddhist Visual Culture

9. Past as Metaphor in the New Utopian Imaginations of Heritage in Kerala

10. Excavating the City: Metro Rail Construction and Imagination of Past in Contemporary Jaipur

PART III: Urban Queer Utopias and Bodily Expulsions

11. Utopia or Elsewhere: Queer Modernities in Small Town West Bengal

12. Utopia Interrupted: Indian Sex/Gender Dissident Activism and The Everyday Search for a Life Worth Living

13. ‘Queerness's Domain? Queer Negotiations, Utopian Visions, and the Failures of Heterotopias in Bangalore

14. Philosophical Epilogue

O autorze

Tereza Kuldova is Researcher at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation, and History, University of Oslo, Norway, and Visiting Senior Researcher at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria. 

Mathew A. Varghese is a non-resident research fellow with The Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR), Kochi, India, and Lecturer at The Maharajas College, Kerala, India.