Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

(Paperback)

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Description

Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience.

Reviews

""Unlearning the City" traces the ways in which subaltern groups appropriate, transform, destroy, take over, and change the authorized use and meaning of infrastructure. For Swati Chattopadhyay, the invisibility and inaudibility of subalternity is the result of scholars' inability to grasp the formal logic of subaltern practices. Her conversations with theory from other latitudes--Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe--enable her powerful vocabulary to travel beyond India." --Jose Rabasa, author of "Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewhere and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World"

"This book produces some of the most insightful intersections between urban, postcolonial, and cultural theories that I have come across. It is also a highly creative challenge to the overemphasis on local politics and social cognition that has become the usual venue to think about the capacities of urban residents to make the city in multiple ways." --Abumaliq Simone, author of "City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads"

Author Bio

Swati Chattopadhyay is professor of history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara.