Waiting Town ? Life in Transit and Mumbai?s Other World?Class Histories (Asia Shorts)

Lisa Björkman

ISBN 10: 0924304936 / ISBN 13: 9780924304934

Published by Association for Asian Studies, 2020

2021. Paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9780924304934

Synopsis:

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town is an unconventional little book - experimental in form - about how we come to know the worlds about which we write. The narrative follows the author's fieldnotes diaries as they wend their way through a series of ethnographic puzzles that emerge in the wake of a high-profile mega-infrastructure project that became an internationally celebrated prototype and model. Waiting Town complicates this celebratory narrative by revealing the conflicting temporalities and procedural pretentions of 'world class' developmentalism. On one level, Waiting Town is a book about Mumbai - about housing schemes and scams, about 'duplicate' documents (and 'duplicate duplicates'), and about the material wreckage wrought by the city's 'world-class' ambitions. And at the same time, it has a larger story to tell about truth and falsehood, time and memory - and about the promises and pitfalls of knowledge production, interpretation and representation more generally.

About the Author: Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville and Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Waiting Town ? Life in Transit and Mumbai?s ...
Publisher: Association for Asian Studies
Publication Date: 2020
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: New