Urban Utopias Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia

This book brings anthropologists and critical theorists together in order to investigate utopian visions of the future in the neoliberal cities of India and Sri Lanka. Arguing for the priority of materiality in any analysis of contemporary ideology, the authors explore urban construction projects, special economic zones, fashion ramps, films, archaeological excavations, and various queer spaces. In the process, they reveal how diverse co-existing utopian visions are entangled with local politics and global capital, and show how these utopian visions are at once driven by visions of excess and by increasing expulsions. It’s a dystopia already in the making – one marred by land grabs and forced evictions, rising inequality, and the loss of urbanity and civility. 

1. Introduction: Urban Utopias - Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal India and Sri Lanka.- 2. The Impossibility of World Class Slum Free Indian Cities and the Fantasy of ‘Two Indias’.- 3. Guarded Luxotopias and Expulsions in New Delhi: Aesthetics and Ideology of Outer and Inner Spaces of an Urban Utopia.- 4. Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures and Resistance in Goa.- 5. Vikasanam: The Expansionist Choreography of Space-Making in Kerala.- 6. Cities of Neoliberal Future: Urban Utopia in Indian Science Fiction Cinema.- 7. Manifesting Sri Lankan Megalomania – the Rajapakses’ Vision of Empire and of a Clean Colombo.- 8. A Modern Chakravartin: Mayawati’s New Buddhist Visual Culture.- 9. Past as Metaphor in the New Utopian Imaginations of Heritage in Kerala.- 10. Excavating the City: Metro Rail Construction and Imagination of Past in Contemporary Jaipur.- 11. Utopia or Elsewhere: Queer Modernities in Small Town West Bengal.- 12. Utopia Interrupted: Indian Sex/Gender Dissident Activism and The Everyday Search for a Life Worth Living.- 13. ‘Queerness's Domain? Queer Negotiations, Utopian Visions, and the Failures of Heterotopias in Bangalore.- 14. Philosophical Epilogue.