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Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City: Mapping the Mean Streets of Mumbai and Naples

Ridda, Maria (2022) Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City: Mapping the Mean Streets of Mumbai and Naples. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures . Routledge, 250 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-30387-4. E-ISBN 978-0-203-73064-5. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:96832)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)
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Abstract

This book investigates the literary imaginings of the postcolonial city through the lens of crime in texts set in Naples and Mumbai from the 1990s to the present. Employing the analogy of a ‘black hole,’ it posits the discourse on criminality as a way to investigate the contemporary spatial manifestations of coloniality and global capitalist urbanity. Despite their different histories, Mumbai and Naples have remarkable similarities. Both are port cities, ‘gateways’ to their countries and regional trade networks, and both are marked by extreme wealth and poverty. They are also the sites and symbolic battlegrounds for a wider struggle in which ‘the North exploits the South, and the South fights back’ (Gran). As one of the characters of the novel The Neapolitan Book of the Dead (Palmieri) puts it, a narrativisation of the underworld allows for a ‘discovery of a different city from its forgotten corners.’ Crime provides a means to understand the relationship between space and society/culture in a number of cities across the Global South, by tracing a narrative of postcolonial urbanity that exposes the connections between exploitation and the ongoing ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano).

Item Type: Book
Subjects: P Language and Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Maria Ridda
Date Deposited: 09 Sep 2022 07:36 UTC
Last Modified: 02 Oct 2023 16:06 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/96832 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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