Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City

8vo, softcover pp. 277. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. Introduction: Imaging the Modern City, Darkly by Gyan Prakash 1 MODERNISM AND URBAN DYSTOPIA Chapter 1: The Phantasm of the Apocalypse: Metropolis and Weimar Modernity by Anton Kaes 17 Chapter 2: Sounds Like Hell: Beyond Dystopian Noise by James Donald 31 Chapter 3: Tlatelolco: Mexico City's Urban Dystopia by RubÈn Gallo 53 THE AESTHETICS OF THE DARK CITY Chapter 4: A Regional Geography of Film Noir:Urban Dystopias On- and Offscreen by Mark Shiel 75 Chapter 5: Oh No, There Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture by William M. Tsutsui 104 Chapter 6: Postsocialist Urban Dystopia? by Li Zhang 127 Chapter 7: Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema by Ranjani Mazumdar 150 IMAGING URBAN CRISIS Chapter 8: Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930 by David R. Ambaras 187 Chapter 9: Living in Dystopia: Past, Present, and Future in Contemporary African Cities by Jennifer Robinson 218 Chapter 10: Imaging Urban Breakdown: Delhi in the 1990s Ravi Sundaram by 241