Urban Ruins: Reframing Repair in Cities of the Global South (for MLA 2023)
This panel examines literary and cultural urbanisms in the Global South in the context of reframing repair. Until recently, cities in the Global South have been examined mainly as models of crisis, dysfunction, and brokenness. The urgent work of repairing their imperfect conditions has, in turn, been perceived solely in terms of rapid and uneven development in official discourse. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Filip de Boeck, Ananya Roy, Achille Mbembe, and others, have instead urged us to rethink ruins, lacks, lags, and gaps as origin sites for emergent forms and practices that alter conditions of the possible. Our proposed panel takes its cue from these scholars to ask what aesthetic, social, and political reshapings of individual and collective life become possible when we rethink repair.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Working conditions of infrastructures of collective life
Literary form and/as urban representation
Urban informality and precarity
Urban planning and literature
Sustainability and energy futures
Multispecies cities
Alternate temporalities of the urban modern
Uneven urbanisms
Urban conflict and warfare
The work of care and repair
Crisis and disaster capitalism
Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2022
Please send a 250-word abstract and brief bio to rituparna_mitra@emerson.edu