Ends of the Global City

This volume of essays explores how the global city is confronting new forms of crises and disruption. Examining cities in the Caribbean, North America, Africa, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Australia, the essays use literary and cultural analysis to examine the pasts, present and futures of the global city. Ranging from the period of high postcolonial development, industrialization and compacted modernization to present-day neoliberal urban planning, the collection considers arrivals and departures in the global city, offering new critical vocabularies to analyse ongoing processes of migration, economic immiseration, and environmental collapse.

Argues that the global city is facing new forms of disruption after the COVID-19 pandemic Explores the potential futures of global cities via a focus on resistance and critique within a range of literary and cultural texts Considers the representation of global cities in television drama, film, architecture and narrative fiction

Autorentext

Rashmi Varma is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Klappentext

Ends of the Global City offers an unsurpassed guide to the underlying causes of the urban polycrisis. The essays in the collection survey the terrain of contemporary urban life, parsing the new affective and aesthetic registers that germinate in global cities, and, in the process, opening new vistas on a common right to the city.

Ashley Dawson, author of Environmentalism from Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet

The contributors to this volume succeed in laying out a set of propositions regarding both Global North and Global South cities that will resonate with thinking in this field for a long time to come. Ends of the Global City provides a fresh new paradigm for re-thinking the very idea of the global city.

Ato Quayson, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

Responding to the pandemic's crisis narrative, this remarkable collection navigates the landscape of urban ruin that has doggedly shadowed the discourse of the global city. The result is a powerful and significant intervention in reimagining the global city's past, present, and future.

Ranjani Mazumdar, author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City

This volume of essays explores how the global city is confronting new forms of crises and disruption. Examining cities in the Caribbean, North America, Africa, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Australia, the essays use literary and cultural analysis to examine the pasts, present and futures of the global city. Ranging from the period of high postcolonial development, industrialization and compacted modernization to present-day neoliberal urban planning, the collection considers arrivals and departures in the global city, offering new critical vocabularies to analyse ongoing processes of migration, economic immiseration, and environmental collapse.

Rashmi Varma is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Chapter 1: A World of Confinement and Compartments: Fanon, Césaire and the Suffocating City.- Chapter 2: Postsecular Ecology and the Global City in Chris Abanis The Virgin of Flames.- Chapter 3: The Gulf City in Crisis: Reimagining Migrant Labour Protests in Deepak Unnikrishnans Temporary People.- Chapter 4: Food and Memory in a Global City: the Khanapados/Living Lab Project in New Delhi, by Mrityunjay Chatterjee and Sreejata Roy.- Chapter 5: Narrative Energetics and Energy Ontologies in Singapore: Powering Petro-conscious Dystopian Novels.- Chapter 6: Aesthetics of Mythorealism in Ma Jians The Dark Road: The Rural Peasant in Chinas Global Cities.- Chapter 7: More Hell Than Hell: Seoul, Korean Drama, and Global Imaginaries of Capitalism.- Chapter 8: Archipelago of Illegals: Sydney, Migrant Spatiality, and Aravind Adigas Amnesty.- Afterword: The Global City at a Tilt.