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Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism.
Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience.
In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.
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 Rubén 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
Overview
Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their ...