UNDERGROUND IMAGINARIES 2025: SPACES IN BETWEEN
Rita Lucarelli
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Fictions from the underground
City, 2015
This paper discusses an unrealized urban plan from the 1960s that proposed to build a network of tunnel motorways and monorails underneath central London. By reframing this plan as a work of fiction, I want to underscore how literary geography perpetuates a limited tradition that merely focuses on fiction produced in or about the city, and not literature produced by or for the city. In the process of re-reading and, to an extent, reclaiming these plans from the National Archives, I argue that these abandoned visions provide an interesting text for literary geographers to access a genre of literature that bisects the built environment and fiction. The scope for this tactic is potentially vast, but a renewed look at unbuilt, unrealized or abandoned architectural texts and similar unconventional forms, would allow for literary scholars to perform a greater, more active role than before: from connecting their analysis directly to the built environment and the contemporary moment in urban space, to discovering new unbuilt works that disrupt established cultural narratives.
Underground Poetry and Poetry on the Underground
2020
According to Andrew Thacker, reviewer of David Welsh's 2010 book Underground Writing: the London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf, "It is getting rather crowded down there in the field of what might be called 'subterranean cultural studies'" (Thacker 1). Thacker goes on to cite a plethora of texts which have explored the potential of The London Underground as a vehicle for cultural analysis. Known generically since 1868 as "The Tube" (Martin 99), The Underground has been the setting for a sub-genre of writings and films representing an imagined space culturally conflated with the "Underworld", with all that this implies in terms of classical mythology, darkness, criminality, and death (Pike 1-2). As Thacker puts it: "The Underground is something of a social unconscious of the city, operating as the site of fears and dreams about urban life, and many writers have taken the quotidian experience of subterranean travel as the setting or trope for understanding modernity itself" (Thacker 1). Surprisingly, despite this recent upsurge of interest in the subterranean and a number of poetic references in Welsh's book, one topic which has not been the object of close academic study has been the cultural position of poetry in The London Underground, notwithstanding the central contribution of creative writers such as Baudelaire, Blake, Apollinaire, Eliot, and other poetic voices to our current understanding of urban space. In the light of the generally bleak vision of the city offered by canonical poets such as those above and what David Pike refers to as contemporary Western culture's "obsession with the underground" (Pike 1), it is difficult not to consider the role of poetry in the Tube as one inspired by radicalism and counter-culture. Pike, like many writers of fiction and 20 th century film directors, directly associates the subterranean world with the detritus of progress which the "civilised" world strives daily to ignore: the sub-ground zero
London Underground: A Cultural Geography, David Ashford [Post-embargo - Green Open Access - Non-typset Version]
Journal of Transport History 35 (1), 2014
Visibility, Precarity and Public Spaces: Reading Matthew Arnold’s “West London” in an Indian Classroom
Radical teacher, 2024
He teaches postgraduate courses on New Literatures in English, Victorian Literature, Anglo-American Poetry, and Indian literatures and media. His research interests and publications are in the domains of popular culture, narratives of trauma, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English in India.
Cosmopolitan (Dis)encounters: The Local and the Global in Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering and Rachid Bouchareb’s London River
Cultura Lenguaje Y Representacion Culture Language and Representation Revista De Estudios Culturales De La Universitat Jaume I Cultural Studies Journal of Universitat Jaume I, 2013
c a r o l i n a s á n c h e z-pa l e n c i a u n i v e r s i d a d d e s e v i l l a aBstraCt: Through the postcolonial reading of Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) and London River (Rachid Bouchareb, 2009), I mean to analyse the multiethnic urban geography of London as the site where the legacies of Empire are confronted on its home ground. In the tradition of filmmakers like Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Michael Winterbottom or Mike Leigh, who have faithfully documented the city's transformation from an imperial capital to a global cosmopolis, Minghella and Bouchareb demonstrate how the dream of a white, pure, uncontaminated city is presently «out of focus», while simultaneously confirming that colonialism persists under different forms. In both films the city's imperial icons are visually deconstructed and resignified by those on whom the metropolitan meanings were traditionally imposed and now reclaim their legitimate space in the new hybrid and polyglot London. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming presence of the multicultural rhetoric in contemporary visual culture, their focus is not on the carnival of transcultural consumption where questions of class, power and authority conveniently seem to disappear, but on the troubled lives of its agents, who experience the materially local urban reality as inevitably conditioned by the global forces-international war on terror, media coverage, black market, immigration mafias, corporate business-that transcend the local. This paradox is also perceived in the way the two filmmakers depict the postcolonial metropolis as the locus of social inequality and disequilibrium, but also as the scenario of unexpected encounters and alliances where both the protagonists and the spectators can explore the fantasies and fears about Otherness, and thus contest racial stereotypes
Bombay/‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders, 2012
Ana Cristina Mendes, “Bombay/‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” in Ana Cristina Mendes (ed.), Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders. New York and London: Routledge, 158-181. This essay focuses on the ways images of Bombay are in the writer Salman Rushdie’s case bound to affective practices. Besides addressing the issue of photography as representation and affective practice, a correlated purpose of the chapter at hand is to bring together two apparently unconnected texts, penned more than half a century apart by two seemingly unrelated authors: Benjamin’s essay on the project of European modernity epitomised by the city of Paris under the Second Empire – ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ – and Rushdie’s novel, set during its first half in the Indian metropolis of Bombay depicted as an example of a former European colony in belated quest of a modernity disavowed by colonialism. This image of Bombay, today one of the vast megalopolises that are contributing to reconceptualize the idea of the city, is the rationale for the present brief incursion into the meanings of the city in modernity. Even if an European city might appear an atypical starting point for addressing the representation of an Asian postcolonial city, the essay ‘Paris, the Capital’ can productively act as a counterpoint to Rushdie’s text chiefly because Benjamin’s Paris, the urban centre of European modernity, generates in itself a discourse that might be transposed to postcolonial urban contexts.
Picturing urban subterranea: Embodied aesthetics of London's Sewers
As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London's sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London's sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London's main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes body-space interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality.
Dorothee Richter
, “Learning from Dhaka” in Critical Writing Ensembles (Katya Garcia-Anton with Antonio Cataldo, eds.), Mousse Publishing: Milan, 2016, pp.234–247. ISBN 978-82-92495-26-1 (OCA, Norway) ISBN 978-88-6749-270-1 (Mousse Publishing)
I saw us – curators, theoreticians and professors from the US and Europe – the usual suspects in major art events, walking through the overcrowded streets of Dhaka. I saw children sorting rubbish in the streets. I became acutely aware that globally we are more deeply connected economically than I could ever have imagined, and how dependent the economy of the West is on this exploitative relationship. In the midst of the bunch of writers, artists and curators, I remembered the feeling Lacan describes when he recognises himself as ‘being seen’ by a box of sardines on a fishing trip. He then suddenly realises that he, when seen from the outside, is somehow weird in the picture, out of place, being a young bourgeois student amongst the fishermen on a boat. The gaze captured him. He encountered being a split subject, a subject that is not situated in the midpoint of a central perspective; instead, he recognises that he is being registered from the outside. This moment of seeing myself in a picture, in a context that I hardly understand, stayed with me. I remember the argument made by Andrea Fraser claiming that the art market is strongest in countries with the biggest gap in income between the super rich and the very poor. (Fraser explores this matter using the GIINI Index Income Disparity since World War II in many different countries.) I wondered what kind of art a society needs, when struggling to provide basic services to its community, as well as unpolluted air and water, a challenge faced by so many countries around the world. I wondered what decolonising art might mean. In what way should art institutions be revisited, reorganised?
The City as Literary Field
Public Books, 2012
An article adapted from my book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, about the publisher Ravi Dayal and his role in the post-1970s 'boom' in Indian fiction in English. Why is global Indian literature represented by works originally written in English rather than translations from Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, or a host of other languages that are spoken by many more people? I argue that we need to study literary production in order to understand the historical and political dynamics that led to the flourishing of English after the British left India in 1947.
Violence in the city: A look at the city-scape in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.
Sarat Centenary College Journal Post Scriptum, 2018
Violence in the city: A look at the city-scape in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. With the fragmenting of the world around us and the disintegration of narratives of culture and religion and a re-questioning of what constitutes reality, the city-space has emerged as one of the key areas of interrogation and analysis over the past few decades. If previously the urban landscape was taken to be the canvas against the backdrop of which the political, social and cultural contours of a society and state were played out, it has now become a site of power struggle, and the future of the said landscape a mirror and the future of the nation-state. The city I choose to look at is Calcutta (now Kolkata). My paper, would interrogate the changing dimensions of the city, after sectarian and political violence erupts in the city, as has been portrayed in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. Violence, specially, communal violence brings into sharp focus the dichotomy and the problematics of the binary between 'good' (state sponsored or approved) and 'bad' (against the interest of the nation state) violence. Violence can bring a city together (as it happens sometimes during a coup or most recently in the case of the Catalunia Referendum), and sometimes fractures and shatters the myth of a unified social, community space. In The Shadow Lines, the narrator is shocked to find the city that he once called his own to have suddenly become so alien. Calcutta has recovered from the gashes of
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2021
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Interrogating Urban Spaces: Kali and the Intellectual in Dan Simmons' 'Song of Kali' and Paul Theroux's ' A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta'
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'Fictions of the City' reviewed by Richard Hornsey
Over the last couple of decades, the critical investigation of the constitutive links between literature and urban modernity has been a steadily expanding field. Through ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues with cultural geography and urban cultural studies, literary scholars have become not only more aware of how various types of writing have made sense of the disjointed flow of metropolitan experience, but of their larger contributions to the formation of urban imaginaries and ongoing cultural debates about the meanings of city life. Matthew Taunton's Fictions of the City and David Welsh's Underground Writing are two welcome additions to this body of work. Both books set out to provide a historical survey of how literature (and in Taunton's case, film) has engaged with a particular aspect of the built urban environment -the mass housing of London and Paris, and the London Underground, respectively -while situating the texts they examine within wider conversations around speculative development and municipal civic policy. These two volumes have markedly different provenances; Fictions of the City is based on Taunton's recent PhD thesis, while Underground Writing has its roots in Welsh's considerable experience as both an employee of London Transport and a community oral historian. They thus arrive at contrasting moments in the two authors' careers and this has given each book its own set of qualities, which marks them apart in both style and tone.
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2023 “The Subject of the Underground,” Current Anthropology (64:1): 1-26.
Romania’s 2007 accession into the European Union (EU) initiated a surge in foreign direct investment (FDI) into its capital, Bucharest. New middle classes quickly took shape that pressed against the limits of the city’s socialist-era infrastructure. To accommodate the new middle classes, city planners and private developers have invested billions of euros to redesign and expand subterranean transportation, commercial, and residential spaces. This essay takes these subterranean developments as an opportunity to consider what I call the subject of the underground. This is the person imagined and acted upon by the call to move underground. While the subject pressed underground has long been characterized by extreme marginalization, the ethnographic argument here is that projects of middle-class formation drive the assembling of underground urbanism in Bucharest. The imperative for rethinking the subject of the underground is to bring analytical attention onto the sagging “place” of the new middle classes, where “place” refers both to a location in space as well as to a rank in a social order.
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'Writing Invisibility: Conversations on the Hidden City is a journey into the spaces of the city often bypassed in public debate and public story-telling: the ship, the slum, the wall, the market-place, the church, the mine, the rooms of sex workers, and even the rural areas which remain a part of urban life. Eight writers and journalists from South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and the USA have contributed to stories drawing on themes within social science research, and eight academics have given critical responses to the pieces. The narratives cover a range of topics from immigrant African sex workers in Belgium, to patterns of urban survival among Tanzanians in Point Area in Durban, to the story of a book seller in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, urban prophecy among immigrants in Johannesburg, how immigrants turned an empty square into a vibrant flea market, how marginal residents of Cape Town resist social control through graffiti, the lives of Cape Town dock workers, and the aftermath of the mine worker massacres in Marikana. This freely available e- book – stemming from a collaboration between the African Centre for Migration & Society and the Mail & Guardian, and supported by the Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity – aims to bring to the fore the importance of linking narrative non-fiction and social sciences
CHAPTER 2 Oh Calcutta!1 The New Bengal Movement in Diasporic Indian English Fiction
2014
Let me begin with a subjective statement. A couple of years ’ back I accidentally picked up a debut novel published by Phoenix House in London and reprinted by Penguin India. The novel was titled Across the Lakes and the short biographical introduction of Amal Chatterjee, the author, stated that he was born in Colombo, grew up in England and now lives and works in Glasgow. Mentally prepared to read a novel set in the beautiful Lake District of England, made so popular by Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets, it came as a great surprise to me when I found the first chapter beginning thus: “The Dhakuria Lakes are the lungs of South Calcutta. Once upon a time they marked the boundary of the city, beyond them lay the railway lines and beyond those the fields and villages”(Chatterjee, 1998). The rest of the story talked about incidents that were firmly rooted in Calcutta and captured its sights and sounds as authentically as possible. This set me thinking about the possible reason fo...
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