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Actors and Networks in the Megacity Prachi More Actors and Networks in the Megacity Urban Studies Prachi More (PhD) taught at the English Studies Department at the University of Tubingen, Germany. Her research interests include New Materialisms, Smart Cities and Weird Fiction. Prachi More Actors and Networks in the Megacity A Literary Analysis of Urban Narratives An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative de- signed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-3834-3. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 (BY-NC-ND) which means that the text may be used for non-com- mercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To create an adaptation, translation, or derivative of the original work and for commer- cial use, further permission is required and can be obtained by contacting rights@ transcript-verlag.de Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or re- trieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Image of Hackney Map #1: © Oona Grimes Image of Sam Miller’s hand-drawn map of Connaught Place in Delhi as “The Hole”: used with author’s permission Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: view7 / photocase.de Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3834-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3834-3 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839438343 Table of Contents List of Illustrations | 7 Acknowledgement | 9 Introduction: Urban Narratives And Bruno Latour’s Empiricism | 11 I. Contextualizing Contemporary Urban Narratives as Literary Documentary | 21 The Postmodern Crisis of Realism and Representation | 21 The Documentary Impulse in Literature | 26 Referential Narratives and their Empirical Anchorage | 30 II. Bruno Latour’s ‘New Empiricism’ | 37 Shaking the Modern Foundation of Epistemology | 39 Modifying the ‘Scenography’, Renewing Empiricism | 47 Clearing Obstacles, ‘Translating’ Latour for Literary Studies | 56 III. The Poetics and Politics of Rambling in Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire | 65 Strategies of Literary Documentary: The ‘Art of Describing’ | 68 Maps and Mappability: A ‘Not Telling’ in Hackney’s ‘Space War’ | 93 What is There and Which is Here? That is Fact and this Concern! | 108 IV. Strategies, Spatial Trajectories and Scenography: Micro-Mapping the Megacity in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City | 113 Mehta’s Strategies for an ANT Methodology | 118 Tracing Spatial Ecologies: Mumbai ‘Unfolding’ | 133 Mehta’s Metaphors and Matters of Concern | 144 V. Of Spirals and Capitals: Sam Miller’s Delhi, Adventures in a Megacity | 151 Sam Miller’s Strategies of Literary Documentary | 153 SIM-City, Sam’s City: Cities in Crisis and Unforeseen Spatial Trajectories | 166 Mimesis of Process and Self-Reflexivity in Miller’s ANT: Revising Preconceptions, Enabling Ethical Encounters? | 176 Conclusion: Actor-Network Theory and Literary Criticism | 181 Looking Back | 181 Reading Networks as a Form of Literary Criticism: The Affordances of Networks and Narratives | 190 Works Cited | 199 List of Illustrations Image 1: Adrian Walker drawing from a specimen in a laboratory Image 2: Oona Grimes’ Etching – Hackney Map #1 Image 3: Hand-drawn map of the centre of Miller’s spiral – Connaught Place in Delhi as “The Hole” Acknowledgement This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, which was accepted at the Faculty of Philosophy, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in 2016. My long-term research interests arose from my Magister thesis. Prof Christoph Reinfandt at the University of Tübingen helped me to see the potential of my Magister thesis for further research and encouraged me to pursue and develop the idea of literary documentary. He also introduced me to Bruno Latour’s scholarship. While Latour has been the boon and bane of the past few years, I am very grateful to Christoph for having enormous amounts of patience while I tried, tested and wrestled with Latour’s work, and for the innumerable ways in which he supported me in the different phases of being a graduate student. He has been a steady and reliable mentor to me, always open to exploring even my more unorthodox ideas, and helped me shape them into what is now this book. I owe a very crucial revision in my thesis to the points raised by Prof Ingrid Hotz-Davies in her official report on my doctoral thesis and our subsequent discussion during my viva. I am grateful to her also for all those times when she patiently read different parts of my thesis, commenting them with her minimalistic question marks, whys, whats and smilies. The thesis has profited immensely from all the right questions Ingrid asked that have guided me throughout. Many insights for the close readings have also arisen from the classes we conducted together. Thank you for all the opportunities you “afforded” me – pun intended! I would like to thank the Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-Württemberg for funding my research project. I especially appreciate their principle of non- interference in the development of the project itself, as it gave me the necessary intellectual and personal freedom to pursue the different paths that have led to this book. In lieu of financial support, I express deep gratitude to the Gleichstellungsbüro and Universitätsbund Tübingen for funding my conference trips that gave me the academically stimulating and much appreciated international exposure. 10 Actors and Networks in the Megacity I would like to express my utmost appreciation to the FAZIT Stiftung for their generous contribution towards the publication of this book. I must thank Oona Grimes for permission to use an image of her etching of Hackney. Thanks also to Iain Sinclair for our exchange via email and permission to use “anything I needed” from his book. I want to thank Sam Miller for our exchanges that helped me understand his book better, and for his permission to use one of his brilliant, hand-drawn maps of Delhi. I am also grateful to Patrick Neate, who answered my questions on his book with much clarity and patience. Over the past few years at the university, I was part of an inter-disciplinary colloquium. I am grateful to all the people who participated in it and reviewed my contributions. This was an essential and useful activity for my research results. A big whoop and thanks to some of my friends who helped me by never really trying to analyse or understand my choice to go down the academic path. We got along splendidly anyway, or maybe because of that. A special thanks to Sonja and Albina, my dear friends and partners in crime, for their love and support from the beginning of my time here in Germany. I thank Frank, my husband, for his unending patience and loving support, and especially for reminding and showing me that there is more to life, for indulging my whims, and for always buying me flowers. Lukas, “my darling piece of the moon” as we say in India, my besty, my jaan, my pride, has been my mood- upper so many times, and it is because of him that I have learned more discipline in my life. Without Gudrun and Werner, my in-laws, I would not have finished my thesis. I am ever grateful for their unconditional love and support – please know that I appreciate everything you are and do for me from the bottom of my heart. I owe a big thank you to Patrick, my dear, oh-so patient and highly skilled brother-in-law, for taking the time to understand what I mean and for all those precious hours that he put into making this book aesthetically viable. I cannot even begin to tell what an inseparable part of me my sister, Gitanjali, is and that having her makes me a stronger person. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents. They have given me strong roots and wings. Without them, I would be nothing. Introduction: Urban Narratives And Bruno Latour’s Empiricism Contemporary representations of cities and megacities are manifold. Cities are sometimes portrayed as rich semiotic fields or breeding grounds for poverty. They are a site of space wars, but also Steuerungszentralen1. We observe an emergence of fashionable metaphors and concepts that become associated with cities such as SimCity, urban labyrinths, imagined cities, media city, and so on.2 All these terms and concepts point us to various discourses that not only describe the city, but also constitute it as a concept. They indicate on the one hand, a treatment of the city as a nexus of global-local networks and entanglements of capital, people, cultural or political interests, and so on. On the other hand, these notions and discourses also represent varying interpretations of and reactions to the global, or local effects of this ‘connectivity’.
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