Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City

Published by Princeton University Press 2011

Noir Urbanisms

Dystopic Images of the Modern City

Edited by: Gyan Prakash

Volume 3 in the series Publications in Partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400836628

Overview
Contents

About this book

Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism.

Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience.

In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.

Author / Editor information

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His books include Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, and The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life (both Princeton).

Reviews

"This collection of essays is a welcome addition to urban cultural studies. By bridging the history of dystopian imaginings and urban social and cultural history, it opens up new territory for interdisciplinary discussion."—Jordan Sand, Georgetown University

"This is an exciting collection ranging across an impressive disciplinary span, including not only history and film studies but also anthropology, geography, and modern languages. The volume combines scholarly rigor with political and social engagement, and is full of eloquence and insight. It speaks to researchers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who are concerned with the place of urban spaces in the dystopic visions of modernity."—Jackie Stacey, University of Manchester

Noir Urbanisms deserves to be widely read and debated. In describing why inequalities or disasters have occurred, this becomes a lesson for the architects and urban designers master-planning cities of the future.---Esme Fieldhouse, Blueprint Magazine

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction. Imaging the Modern City, Darkly Gyan Prakash Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Modernism and Urban Dystopia
Chapter 1. The Phantasm of the Apocalypse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
Chapter 2. Sounds Like Hell Beyond Dystopian Noise James Donald Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
Chapter 3. Tlatelolco Mexico City’s Urban Dystopia Rubén Gallo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
The Aesthetics of the Dark City
Chapter 4. A Regional Geography of Film Noir Urban Dystopias On- and Offscreen Mark Shiel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
Chapter 5. Oh No, There Goes Tokyo Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture William M. Tsutsui Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
Chapter 6. Postsocialist Urban Dystopia? Li Zhang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Chapter 7. Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema Ranjani Mazumdar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	150
Imaging Urban Crisis
Chapter 8. Topographies of Distress Tokyo, c. 1930 David R. Ambaras Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
Chapter 9. Living in Dystopia Past, Present, and Future in Contemporary African Cities Jennifer Robinson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	218
Chapter 10. Imaging Urban Breakdown Delhi in the 1990s Ravi Sundaram Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265

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