Promotional Information

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

Table of Contents

Introduction: Imaging the Modern City, Darkly by Gyan Prakash 1 MODERNISM AND URBAN DYSTOPIA Chapter 1: The Phantasm of the Apocalypse: Metropolis and Weimar Modernity by Anton Kaes 17 Chapter 2: Sounds Like Hell: Beyond Dystopian Noise by James Donald 31 Chapter 3: Tlatelolco: Mexico City's Urban Dystopia by Ruben Gallo 53 THE AESTHETICS OF THE DARK CITY Chapter 4: A Regional Geography of Film Noir:Urban Dystopias On- and Offscreen by Mark Shiel 75 Chapter 5: Oh No, There Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture by William M. Tsutsui 104 Chapter 6: Postsocialist Urban Dystopia? by Li Zhang 127 Chapter 7: Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema by Ranjani Mazumdar 150 IMAGING URBAN CRISIS Chapter 8: Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930 by David R. Ambaras 187 Chapter 9: Living in Dystopia: Past, Present, and Future in Contemporary African Cities by Jennifer Robinson 218 Chapter 10: Imaging Urban Breakdown: Delhi in the 1990s Ravi Sundaram by 241 Contributors 261 Index 265

About the Author

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

"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