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The book studies the social production of motion in a capitalist urban context. In the city of capital, motion refers to a fetish. The bourgeois order posits motion as a metaphor for energy, positivity, and progress – a norm – and obstruction (motion's dialectical opposite) as delinquency. The book uncovers the social tectonics of spatial mobilization and thus demystifies motion. Who and what set spaces on the move? How did various classes of city dwellers activate, experience, and negotiate it? Streets in Motion develops an approach to urban history by theorizing and historicizing the 'street' as an apparatus of city-making and subject formation. It works at two registers – a local history of Calcutta in colonial and post-colonial periods, and a theorizing of the logistical and political-cultural centrality of the street within this rubric. It is argued that the street is politics in as much as politics is the production of space.
Studies Calcutta's 20th century features through the dialectic of motion and obstruction, analysing how space and polity shaped each other.
This book explores the spatial characteristics of the city of Kolkata in India in terms of the physical, economic, social, political, and environmental aspects of urban geography, and focuses upon the inherent processes that impact its transformation. It discusses different facets of urban geography and highlights the contemporary challenges of a major primate city in South Asia, which represents the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the rich and the poor, the skyscrapers and the shanties. With its detailed empirical research and mapping exercises based on real-time remote sensing data, the book offers an understanding of a range of contemporary urban issues. It examines the ...
Imagining the city as a series of interconnected spaces, the book explores how several such connections – between the home and the street, family and public spaces, religious and non-religious contexts, for example – relate to the topic of masculinity. How do men – elite, subaltern, consumers, 'heads' of the family, members of 'Hindu fundamentalist' organisations, readers of pulp fiction and 'footpath pornography', those who admire the 'strong' political leader – move between these spaces, define them and are defined by them? Urbanisation in India is a vibrant site of an extraordinary cultural, social and economic churn, a context of both the consolidation of masculine identities as well as anxieties regarding their place in the city. The book suggests that sustained and in-depth engagements with specific historical and social contexts avoids tendencies to imagine cities as nodes of comparison that frequently generates universal models of urbanism.
Examines whether the Indian Supreme Court can produce progressive social change and improve the lives of the relatively disadvantaged.
This book analyses the question of the right to the city, informal economies and the non-western shape of neoliberal governance in India through a new analytic: the right to sell. The book examines why and how states attempt to curb, control, and eliminate markets of urban informal street vendors. Focusing on Kolkata, the author provides a theoretical explanation of this puzzle by distilling and analysing the inherent tensions among the constitutive elements of neoliberal governance, namely, growth imperative, market activism, and corporatization, and demonstrates its implications for the formal/informal boundaries of the economy. A useful addition to the existing literatures on the right to the city, informal economies, and the shapes that neoliberalism takes in the non-west, the book provides a non-western counter to accounts of neoliberalism and will be of interest to academics working in the fields of South Asian Studies, Urban Studies, and Political Economy.
A sudden announcement was made by the government on 24 March 2020 of a complete lockdown of the country, due to the spectre of Coronavirus. India’s Migrant Workers and the Pandemic was being written as the crisis was unfolding with no end in sight. Migrant workers from different parts of India had no choice but to trek back hundreds of kilometres carrying their scanty belongings and dragging their hungry and thirsty children in the scorching heat of the plains of India to reach home. How did caste, race, gender, and other fault lines operate in this governmental strategy to cope with a virus epidemic? The eight papers in this collection, highlight the ethical and political implications of the epidemic—particularly for India’s migrant workers. What were the forces of power at play in this war against the epidemic? What measures could have been taken and need to be taken now? Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West locates the origins of this development in the turbulent dynamics of the capitalist world market. Rather than reducing global conflict to a matter of great power rivalries or the process of economic decoupling, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson investigate the increasing centrality of war to capital operations and to the transformation of capital ism. The goal is to forge a theory of imperialism adequate to a world in which the 'rest' no longer provides a putative unity that defines and opposes the 'West'.
This volume looks at how accumulation in postcolonial capitalism blurs the boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on one hand, and creates zones and corridors on the other. It draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. From these two major inquiries it develops a new understanding of postcolonial capitalism. The case studies in this volume discuss the production of urban spaces of capital extraction, institutionalization of postcolonial finance capital, gendering of work forms, establishment of new forms of labour, formation of a...
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian history and popular culture. It examines partition's impact on cultural production, based on hard to access archives and collections situated in India, Pakistan, United Kingdom and the United States.