‘The Precarious Rule of Aesthetics: Form, Informality, Infrastructure.’ In Om Dwivedi ed., Representing Precarity in South Asian Fictions. London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022, pp.69-86.

My central argument in this chapter is that the emergence of a rule by aesthetics in Delhi and India’s other megacities goes some way to explaining a coterminous trend towards the genre of literary non-fiction—as opposed, that is, to creative or literary fiction. This trend, I will acknowledge, is especially the case for Indian writing in English. This corpus tends, moreover, to be authored by writers who, though they are themselves based in India, have also lived in the global North (usually the US or Britain) for extended periods of time and have therefore accumulated—and are often explicitly writing for—a global as well as Indian readership. But it is for precisely this reason that I think the transformation of ‘world class’ aesthetics into a mode of urban governance in India can be tracked through a comparable shift from fiction to non-fiction writing. Speaking to the particular concerns of this volume, the two—rule by aesthetics and literary non-fiction—come together and clash especially around their approach to the cities’ most precarious urban dwellers. While I therefore argue that the non-fictional claim of literary non-fiction is often designed to expose India’s ‘world class’ aesthetic as a precarious fiction, I also contend that it more fully upturns this aesthetic to produce the urban precariat and other forms of informality as themselves infrastructural to the cities’ construction and ongoing function. Read more.

‘Infrastructural Forms: Comics, Cities, Conglomerations.’ In Lieven Amiel ed., Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2022, pp.163-176.

This chapter responds to the “three D’s” of urbanisation with its own list of “three C’s”: it makes the case for comics as an artistic and narrative form that is particularly capable of capturing the density and dynamism of increasingly global cities, comprising as they both do a complex conglomeration of variously interrelated and unevenly autonomous moving parts. Whether the accumulations of capital that coagulate into points of urban redevelopment and gentrification, for example, or the interstices of slums and favelas that are at different times ignored by and resistant to the state, the unequal spaces of today’s cities are brought into a field of mutual play and narrative position by comics and graphic narratives. This aptitude for arresting the sociospatial dynamics of the city has been described variously as a “spatial form” (Fraser) and an “infrastructural form” (Davies), but as numerous critics have agreed, it is always a distinctly urban form (see Ahrens and Meteling). Comprising narrative building blocks and an architecture all their own, comics are able to intervene into the sociospatial dialectic of urban life (see Soja), not only revealing the infrastructure of the city as a material embodiment of competing and often invisible interests but also recalibrating and reconceiving urban space towards more socially and spatially just ends – often from the ground up. Read more.

‘Infrastructural Violence: Urbicide, Public Space, and Postwar Reconstruction in Recent Lebanese Graphic Memoirs.’ In Ian Hague, Ian Horton, & Nina Mickwits eds., Contexts of Violence in Comics. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp.128-144.

This chapter argues that the cartographic and architectural representations of the city in Ziadé’s and Abirached’s graphic memoirs expose the less visible, though fundamentally embedded, infrastructural violence that both exacerbated and actively participated in the more visible instances of Lebanon’s wartime violence. In so doing, these comics allows us, following Zižek, ‘to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent,’ to instead perceive the contours of an otherwise ‘invisible,’ structural violence (2008, 1). Published some two decades after the overt violence of the Civil War came to an unstable conclusion, these Lebanese graphic memoirs engage ‘post-memorially’ with the infrastructure space of Beirut’s wartime urban landscape. By foregrounding the deeper spatial and structural violence of the war, they seek first to emphasise how this violence endures in the present, and second, to offer a future-oriented vision of a more inclusive, desegregated post-war city space. Read more.

‘Urban Comix: Subcultures, Infrastructures and “the Right to the City” in Delhi.’ In Alex Tickell & Ruvani Ransinha ed., Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity. London & New York: Routledge, 2020, Chapter 9.

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric. Read more.

‘Rudyard Kipling and the Networks of Empire: Writing Imperial Infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous.’ In Promodini Varma & Anubhav Pradhan eds., Proximate Strangers: Kipling and Yeats at 150. London & New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.192-210.

In the decade preceding the publication of Kim (1901), the novel widely regarded as Kipling’s masterpiece, he wrote two other novels: The Light that Failed (1891) and Captains Courageous (1896). Kipling’s first attempts at novel writing, unlike the short stories and poems he had already published to critical acclaim, have widely been regarded by literary critics as failures, and their publication and sales history suggests as much. I argue that Kipling, at a historical moment in which communication and transport networks were drastically expanding across the face of the globe, was struggling to write a novel that represented these imperial infrastructures and global networks in the worldly reach they were beginning to attain. In so doing, Kipling was trying to write a new kind of networked literature, one both formally and geographically expansive in scope, often with an eye on the U.S., but always with an eye on the world. The fact that these efforts failed in this regard is revealing – by counter-intuitively looking at the moments when his novels fail, this chapter asks what they might be able to tell us about imperial identity, global consciousness, and the rise of an imperial network of physical infrastructures and highways of communication and exchange that still, at least in some part, shape the world in the twenty-first century. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature & Culture.’ In Boehmer & Davies eds., Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature, & Culture. London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, pp.1-25.

In this collection, we focus on the ways in which literary and cultural production is able to offer a critical purchase on planned violence, a concept we outline in more detail below. How does culture excavate, expose and challenge such violence? As importantly, we are interested in how these cultural forms contribute to more productive processes of social and infrastructural re-imagination and reconfiguration, and therefore also include three pieces of creative writing at the collection’s turning points. In these various ways we repeat and expand with respect to a range of cities the questions that cultural critic Sarah Nuttall asks specifically of Johannesburg: How does the post/colonial city ‘emerge as an idea and a form in contem- porary literatures of the city?’ What are the ‘literary infrastructures’ that help to give the city imaginary shape? What forms can build ‘alternative city-spaces’ (2008: 195)? And finally, what are the ‘disruptive questions’ that literary texts ask of urban infrastructure, ‘including in actual practice, on the ground’ (Boehmer and Davies 2015: 397)?. Read more.