Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture

This book brings the insights of social geographers and cultural historians into a critical dialogue with literary narratives of urban culture and theories of literary cultural production. In so doing, it explores new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between urban planning, its often violent effects, and literature. Comparing the spatial pasts and presents of the post-imperial and post/colonial cities of London, Delhi and Johannesburg, but also including case studies of other cities, such as Chicago, Belfast, Jerusalem and Mumbai, Planned Violence investigates how that iconic site of modernity, the colonial city, was imagined by its planners — and how this urban imagination, and the cultural and social interventions that arose in response to it, made violence a part of the everyday social life of its subjects. Throughout, however, the collection also explores the extent to which literary and cultural productions might actively resist infrastructures of planned violence, and imagine alternative ways of inhabiting post/colonial city spaces.

Table of Contents:
1 Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies Section I Planned/Unplanned Cities .- 2 White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native Maps in Richard Wright’s Chicago and Modikwe Dikobe’s Johannesburg  Loren Kruger.- 3 Grey Space, Tahrir Laser: Conspiracy, Critique and the Urban in Julie Mehretu’s Depictions of Revolutionary Cairo  Nicholas Simcik Arese.- 4 Thames Valley Royal (or, Maxwell in Oxford): The Story of a Football Club and the History of a City  William Ghosh.- 5 Slums and the Postcolonial Uncanny  Ankhi Mukherjee.- 6 The Not-so-Quiet Violence of Bricks and Mortar  Zen Marie.- 7 Intervention I. What You Find in the River: Isolarion Ten Years On  James Attlee Section II Forensic Infrastructures .- 8 The Intimacy of Infrastructure: Vulnerability and Abjection in Palestinian Jerusalem  Hanna Baumann.- 9 Sound Systems and Other Systems: The Policing of Urban Aesthetic Spaces in the Poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson  Louisa Olufsen Layne 10 ‘Throwing Petrol on the Fire’: Writing in the Shadow of the Belfast Urban Motorway Stephen O’Neill .- 11 Writing the City and Indian English Fiction: Planning, Violence, and Aesthetics  Alex Tickell 12 Blue Johannesburg Pamila Gupta.- 13 Intervention II. Take Me There  Selma Dabbagh Section III Structural Violence, Narrative Structure .- 14 ‘A Shadow Class Condemned to Movement’: Literary Urban Imaginings of Illegal Migrant Lives in the Global North Ruvani Ranasinha 15 ‘A Dagger, a Revolver, a Bottle of Chloroform’: Colonial Spy Fiction, Revolutionary Reminiscences and Indian Nationalist Terrorism in Europe Ole Birk Laursen.- 16 Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban Crimes in the Nineteenth Century  Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee.- 17 Weird Collocations: Language as Infrastructure in the Storyworlds of China Miéville  Terence Cave.- 18 Aquacity Versus Austerity: The Politics and Poetics ofIrish Water  Michael Rubenstein.- 19 Intervention III. Control  Courttia Newland.- 20 Afterword  Sarah Nuttall Index.