This article explores the hermeneutical force and flexibility of the 9/11 idiom, by identifying some ways in which it served as an interpretative framework for the attacks of 26 November 2008 in Mumbai. The idiom’s transposition to Mumbai represented, in part, a contest over American rhetorical capital. Re-territorialized as ‘India’s 9/11’, the idiom has re-signified a range of local interests, aspirations, and contests over urban space and identity in Mumbai. In this context, I examine two symmetrical developments within the civic (...) spaces of the city in the immediate aftermath. The first involves the emergence of an upwardly mobile middle class and elite as it took the form of collective survivor-spectator, appearing as a coherent, highly visible and effective public agent. The second involves an apparent suspension of competing narratives of urban terror, which in the past have been enacted through demotic violence in the form of the communal riot. The article suggests that these developments in Mumbai must be read through the city’s incorporation into an emergent narrative of ‘global’ or so-called ‘9/11-type’ terror. In the case of 26/11, the terrorist attacks were possibly understood as the exercise of ideological indifference to identity, as levelling the value and distinction of moral communities to the abject experience of sheer bodily life. (shrink)

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation. Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and Anand, accordingly: (...) Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction, Across the Black Waters, my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stage... (shrink)

This article introduces the themes and theoretical concerns of a special section that explores the various ways the specificities of the Mumbai attacks serve as a metonym for issues found in other urban sites within the conditions, concerns and vulnerabilities of globalization-as-urbanization and does so through the rubric of the city-as-target. As urbanization grows exponentially in unforecastable ways, the likelihood of violent urban targeting of many different kinds — state-sponsored, paramilitary, sectarian, economic, racial, tribal, etc., to name but a few (...) — grows as well. Mumbai is a specific event, but it is also the common-place, the cityscape that is our daily lives and quotidian existence rendered unusual in all the expected ways. With Mumbai, the article argues, one does not necessarily see the future of the urban, but rather a reminder of what the urban has always been, even from the great walled cities of antiquity: a target. There is an imperative, then, to rethink urban space at all levels. The pieces in this section consider immaterial and material aspects of the city: its plan, infrastructure, buildings and dwellings, polity and policy, protection and penetration. The technologies and technicities involved in the attacks, as well as the specific historicity, reveal a great deal about the Mumbai events, as well as revealing potential modes of engagement with cities in the present and future. (shrink)

This article explores the hermeneutical force and flexibility of the 9/11 idiom, by identifying some ways in which it served as an interpretative framework for the attacks of 26 November 2008 in Mumbai. The idiom’s transposition to Mumbai represented, in part, a contest over American rhetorical capital. Re-territorialized as ‘India’s 9/11’, the idiom has re-signified a range of local interests, aspirations, and contests over urban space and identity in Mumbai. In this context, I examine two symmetrical developments within the civic (...) spaces of the city in the immediate aftermath. The first involves the emergence of an upwardly mobile middle class and elite as it took the form of collective survivor-spectator, appearing as a coherent, highly visible and effective public agent. The second involves an apparent suspension of competing narratives of urban terror, which in the past have been enacted through demotic violence in the form of the communal riot. The article suggests that these developments in Mumbai must be read through the city’s incorporation into an emergent narrative of ‘global’ or so-called ‘9/11-type’ terror. In the case of 26/11, the terrorist attacks were possibly understood as the exercise of ideological indifference to identity, as levelling the value and distinction of moral communities to the abject experience of sheer bodily life. (shrink)

This article approaches the recent work of pre-eminent Indian conceptual artist Vivan Sundaram, Trash, as a supplement to dominant representational practices of, and within, the Indian megacity. Re-purposing tropes that motivate both popular and specialist discourses, Sundaram’s recent ensemble rehearses the discursive construction of the megacity-as-waste, by representing an urban totality through elaborate, ordered arrangements of garbage. Working collaboratively with waste-pickers who are members of the non-governmental organization Chintan: Environmental and Research Action Group in New Delhi, the artist sorts, re-assembles (...) and scales the found-objects of Trash into detailed models of a monumental urban landscape. Through a close reading of its formal aspects, the entry examines Trash’s reflection on logics of planned obsolescence which govern both the work as well as fantasies of economic nationalism premised on dualistic images of the global/mega-city. (shrink)