Urban Utopias - Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia (Broché)

"What does the contemporary efflorescence of the urban imagination and consumerist culture in India tell us about imaginations of the good life ? How is well-being to be defined ? Who will be included and who left out of the new worlds of consumerist modernity ? By exploring a diverse set of contexts—gated communities, Bollywood cinema, mega infrastructure and other urban projects, caste and heritage politics and sexual cultures—these chapters map the making of desires, aspirations, and exclusions." —Sanjay Srivastava, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, India "This book brilliantly unfolds the many imaginaries and often cruel circumstances of life in contemporary urban India.
The editors offer a wonderful alternative to older stereotypes for too long dominated by understandings drawn from village life rather than the cities and towns which are the pulsating centres of the new India that the contributors subject to critical examination. The authors challenge many of the visions of India's future exposing the often harsh realities that is hidden by the utopian promises of neo-liberal hope." —Bruce Kapferer, Professor of Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway 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 utopias 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.