Ravi Sundaram: Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (2009)

“Using Delhi’s contemporary history as a site for reflection, Pirate Modernity moves from a detailed discussion of the technocratic design of the city by US planners in the 1950s, to the massive expansions after 1977, culminating in the urban crisis of the 1990s.

As a practice, pirate modernity is an illicit form of urban globalization. Poorer urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres: unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps and bypass legal technological infrastructures (media, electricity). This pirate culture produces a significant enabling resource for subaltern populations unable to enter the legal city. Equally, this is an unstable world, bringing subaltern populations into the harsh glare of permanent technological visibility, and attacks by urban elites, courts and visceral media industries. The book examines contemporary Delhi from some of these sites: the unmaking of the citys modernist planning design, new technological urban networks that bypass states and corporations, and the tragic experience of the road accident terrifyingly enhanced by technological culture. Pirate Modernity moves between past and present, along with debates in Asia, Africa and Latin America on urbanism, media culture, and everyday life.
　
This pioneering book suggests cities have to be revisited afresh after proliferating media culture. Pirate Modernity boldly draws from urban and cultural theory to open a new agenda for a world after media urbanism.”

Publisher Routledge, Oxford & New York, 2009
Asia’s Transformations series
ISBN 9780415409667, 0415409667
xix+224 pages
HT Geraldine

Reviews: Diya Mehra (SAMAJ, 2011), Fei An Tjan (Masters of Media, 2010).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, Vol 4: Shanghai Modern: The Future in Microcosm? (2012)

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research is a journal for border-crossing cultural research, globally open to articles from all areas in this large field, including cultural studies as well as other interdisciplinary and transnational currents for exploring cultural perspectives, issues and phenomena. It is peer-reviewed and easily accessible for downloading as open access.

This issue of the journal gathers articles that represent a range of different reflections on Shanghai past and present. The global city of Shanghai is taken as a starting point to explore issues of urban space, modernity, and the Chinese transition in the twentieth and twenty-first century. And it also allows
for contributions that challenge the traditional forms of academic representation to explore the modern city in a more essayistic manner.

With contributions by Justin O’Connor, Owen Hatherley, Anna Greenspan, Hongwei Bao, Lü Pan, Ma Ran, Sheng Zhong, Xin Gu, Haili Ma, Ian Ho-yin Fong

Edited by Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu
Published by Linköping University, Norrköping
ISSN 2000-1525
242 pages

View online (PDF articles)
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