Katherine Boo Research Articles

Looking for a way out: The dynamics of slum life, poverty, and everyday resistance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

This article looks into the implications of urban informality in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (2012) as represented in slum life and urban poverty. It aims to investigate the impact of urban poverty on the everyday practices of slum dwellers and their endeavors to escape the trap of poverty in an attempt to highlight the human dimension of the slum. The article seeks to unravel multi-layers of the interaction between people and poverty and the differing models of resistance to poverty and social exclusion depicted in the nonfiction narrative. The article examines slum life from a descriptive sociological perspective with a detailed description of how people survive in poverty. The study of the culture of slums entails an analysis of the survival techniques and everyday practices of slum dwellers, the relations and patterns of behavior among the different categories of people inhabiting a slum, and the outcomes of the interplay between place, culture, and power relations in such communities. This is implemented through an eclectic sociological approach that comprises theories of space, culture, and resistance as proposed by James Scott, Theodore W. Schultz, and Henri Lefebvre.

Delineating Delhi: Spaces of the Neoliberal Urbanism in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story Of My Assassins

Recent Indo-Anglican literature has also seen a burgeoning of the genre of urban crime fictions set against the backdrop of India’s modernizing metropolises. While explorations of the contemporary Indian city mostly consists of non-fictional, journalistic writings, like Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the genre also includes fictions like Altaf Tyrewala’s critically acclaimed debut novel No God in Sight, Vikram Chandra’s bestseller Sacred Games, Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Hrish Sawhney’s volume of short stories Delhi Noir, Atish Tasser’s The Templegoers and others, which deal with the dark underside of the cities. Significantly, as rapid urban growth deepens existing disparities, a distinct rhetoric conflating impoverishment and criminality emerges, further justifying the exclusion of certain sections from the vision of urbanism. This paper looks at the representation of Delhi in Tarun Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins, as a dystopic space riddled with contradictions of.

Literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal city: Subalternity and urban governance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

ABSTRACTThis article challenges claims made for Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers as a piece of non-fiction, using the text to explore questions around subaltern agency and voice that have been at the centre of postcolonial studies since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It foregrounds the continued relevance of Spivak’s question in the postmillennial context of the neo-liberal city, particularly as it relates to issues of urban governance, and argues that a postcolonial reading of Boo’s book reveals a new set of triangulated connections between subalternity, literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal Indian city. Beautiful Forevers reveals how the violent infrastructures of such cities continue to be shaped by the legacies of colonialism and exacerbated by neo-liberal urban governance, and how the genre of literary non-fiction is responding to, and at times both complicit with and resistant to, this neo-liberal urban regime.

Narratives with No Need for Translation?” - Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012) and David Hare (2014)

Narratives with No Need for Translation?” Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012) and David Hare (2014)

On Garbage and Ice: Ethics of the Slums in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Abstract The present paper dwells on the complex representation of the Indian slums in Katherine Boo’s 2012 novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Leaving behind the conventional oversentimentalised and over-optimistic literary and cinematographic depictions, the writer places her text on the boundary between fiction and journalism, discussing poverty, inequality, hope and despair in one of the most surprising cities of the globalised world, from a new perspective.

Annawadi on the South Bank: Global Neoliberalism and Spatial Contingency in Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s acclaimed 2012 work of narrative non-fiction, tells the story of the slum-dwellers of Annawadi, an “undercity” in the shadow of Mumbai’s glittering international airport. David Hare’s 2014 adaptation of Boo’s book, produced at London’s National Theatre under the direction of Rufus Norris, takes a quasi-Brechtian approach, focusing on the systemic corruption that undercuts the poor. Contingency and precarity are major themes of the narrative. The interwoven emplotting of many real lives represented on stage connects to the contingency of the acre of slumland known as Annawadi, which I contrast with the plot of land on the South Bank of the Thames that houses the National Theatre complex. In particular, three representational emplotments – Boo’s book, Hare’s script, and Norris’s production – connect those two places by highlighting their spatial contingency and entangle them in the global neoliberal practices (from waste to performance to mobility and tourism) that depend on these spatial arrangements.

Junk Aesthetics from South Africa, Brazil and India: Re-Evaluating the Object

My article draws on cultural production from South Africa, Brazil and India to test theorisations that read subjects and objects as ontologically comparable. Using the oceanic circulation of human waste products to link the above locales, I show how the use of junk by the urban poor shows evidence of a relationship with discarded objects that contests their national and transnational marginalisation. Concomitantly, I explore the ways in which aesthetic strategies by Ivan Vladislavíc, Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack, Vik Muniz, and Katherine Boo affirm the disruptive potential of objects while also suggesting the ways in which struggles against poverty continue to centre on humanist understandings of the subject.

Where's the capital? A geographical essay.

This paper is inspired by Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty does a wonderful job of tracing income and wealth over time, and relating changes to trends of economic and population growth, and drawing out the implications for inequality, inheritance and even democracy. But, he says relatively little about where capital is located, how capital accumulation in one place relies on activities elsewhere, how capital is urbanized with advanced capitalism and what life is like in spaces without capital. This paper asks 'where is the geography in Capital' or 'where is the geography of capital in Capital'? Following Piketty's lead, the paper develops its analysis through a number of important novels. It examines, first, the debate that Jane Austen ignored colonialism and slavery in her treatment of nineteenth century Britain, second, how Balzac and then Zola provide insight to the urban political economy of capital later in the century, and third, how Katherine Boo attends to inequality as the everyday suffering of the poor.

Stories of poverty in India: An ethnographer reviews Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers

ABSTRACTKatherine Boo's work of literary nonfiction, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is an insightful and tragic account of poverty in India. In this essay, I compare Boo's book with two books published in the same year, Akhil Gupta's ethnography Red Tape and Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis, a fictional account, to analyze representations of the poor and marginalized in an economically liberalized and rapidly growing India. While ethnography possesses the explanatory power of social theory, fiction and literary nonfiction relish the tragic consequences of social life that make for good stories.

The Death of the Social Katherine Boo . 2012 .Behind the BeautifulForevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York , Random House .

The Death of the Social Katherine Boo . 2012 .<i>Behind the BeautifulForevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity</i>. New York , Random House .

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Children, Youth and Environments 23(1), 2013 Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity Katherine Boo (2011). New York: Random House, 288 pages. $27.00 USD (hardcover). ISBN 978-4000-6755-8. eBook ISBN: 978-0-679-64550-4. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a great read, and a difficult book to review. My own position as an expatriate Indian, who studies places like Annawadi and Mumbai, and teaches planning in an American University, colors what I write, just as Katherine Boo’s position as an American journalist interested in issues of social justice married to a well-known Indian academic shapes her book. The Author Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo’s first book. Winner of the prestigious McArthur Fellowship in 2002, Boo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist whose writing has focused attention on the lives of those with little power and who are often ignored by society. She brings her formidable observation and well-honed writing skills to this book, which is beautiful to read. It is wickedly funny and gut-wrenching in its finely drawn descriptions of the lives and souls of a handful of residents of Annawadi, a slum clawed back from swampy marshlands by immigrant Tamilian construction labor in 1991 and now home to a rotating mix of 3,000 residents packed into 335 huts. Only six people hold permanent jobs, while the others rely on the informal economy for their livelihoods. A concrete wall hides Annawadi from the car-driving “overcity” public’s view, even as it sits next to the entrance to Mumbai’s glittering new international airport and five high-end luxury hotels. Painted on the concrete wall is an advertisement for Italian tiles with the slogan “Beautiful Forever” repeated thrice. This gives the book its metaphor-laden title. Boo has been interviewed several times after the book came out. The contrast of her halting, frail blonde presence—she has rheumatoid arthritis and has written and spoken of the difficulties of negotiating Annawadi given her health challenges—with the thick, dark twists and turns of life in swampy, off-kilter Annawadi seems to add to various reviewers’ fascination with her book. The Plot Boo is a gifted writer who captures life and living in Annawadi by following a group of people, many of whom are young, and all of whom are striving to find their ways out of poverty. They do this either through identifying an “entrepreneurial niche as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption in which Asha placed her hopes; [or through] education” (62). The book pulls together over three years of© 2013 Children, Youth and Environments Book Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope... 230 interviews, observations, and secondary research culled from reports and legal documents to follow the trial of the Husains, who get ensnared in the Indian judicial system following a false death-bed accusation by their neighbor who set herself on fire. Other residents of Annawadi are carefully, sharply, yet empathetically—even lovingly—presented, including Asha, a rising politician who yearns to leave Annawadi with her young daughter Manju; and the glue-sniffing, trash-sorting children fleeing police and the rapacious appetites of their elders. Also present— only through the occasional reference—are a host of other hazy schematic characters and policy frameworks familiar to anyone involved in development: the well-fed upper-class Indians, the international NGO World Vision, the oily politician, the western-funded Catholic orphanage, and the range of government policies on education, micro-credit, gender quotas in local government and so on. Boo is masterful in capturing the complexity of India’s micro-scale daily life and its challenges against the background of larger forces that drive growth and change in Mumbai and in Annawadi, from the movement of “restless capital” to terrorist attacks on the city and the intricate ways in which corruption grips the entire statesystem . What stands out, however, is the grinding nature of poverty in Annawadi and the ways in which it closes off opportunities to move away and up, yet does not manage to fully vanquish the humanity of small acts of kindness and a...

A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

Tom Taylor Brock’s Traitor Hancock & Dean Brock’s Traitor, the third volume of a trilogy including Brock’s Agent and Brock’s Railroad, takes place during Canada’s pivotal War of 1812. The likable character of Jonathan Westlake is brought vividly to life as he navigates through intrigue, harrowing battles, honor, and love. Tom Taylor’s prose is crisp and lively, incorporating well-researched historical detail with wit, humor, and imagination. Aaron Shurin Citizen City Lights Books These agile prose poems by Aaron Shurin wander and leap sensually from bed, to lover, to home, to natural wonders, both personal and universal. The individual words of each poem collide and mingle, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes with a purposeful dissonance. Citizen is a lyrical and affirming look into the vibrant life of San Francisco and into the mind of one of its most accomplished poets. Nota Bene The Secret Life of Vladimir Nabokov is a tremendous book, but perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that Pitzer inspires us to return to Nabokov, to go back and re-read his entire oeuvre with a new, now unsentimental eye. If the concentration camp is the dominant political paradigm of the twentieth century , then the works of someone so entangled with revolution and its exilic aftermath could not have escaped unscathed. Perhaps it’s time to return to Nabokov with the eye of a detective, searching for clues not only to the author and his work but to ourselves as well. Andrew Martino Southern New Hampshire University Aman Sethi. A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. New York. W.W. Norton. 2012. isbn 9780393088908 Aman Sethi’s A Free Man joins such excellent recent nonfiction accounts of India as William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing. Like the authors of these books, Sethi approaches the complexity of Indian society by telling a life story, that of Mohammed Ashraf, a laborer living on the streets of Delhi. Sethi’s account is distinguished by the way his own persona shapes the book in endearing and often humorous ways. As he spends time with his interview subjects in one of Delhi’s poor neighborhoods, Sethi embraces and worries about his role as participant journalist. Initially, Sethi drinks and smokes with Ashraf and his companions . “I may just contemplate a hit of that joint—not because I want to, no sir, but because I have to. That joint . . . shall be for research purposes only.” Soon Sethi changes course. “We sat down for a smoke: me with my cigarettes —no more beedis; after a year . . . I realized being one of the boys is an experiment fraught with peril.” Admitting that he often asks “undeniably boring questions,” Sethi discloses a fundamental rift between the way he—as a more affluent, well-educated Indian—and his subjects understand their lives: “I am still trying to build a year-wise timeline of Ashraf’s life but as far as Ashraf is concerned, he was brought up in Patna and is now in Delhi—everything else can only be accessed via oblique enquiries. As a result, every interview is a bit like playing a word association game.” While the details of Ashraf’s life are compelling, Sethi more significantly captures a philosophical dimension in the lives of Ashraf and other laborers in Delhi. Ashraf seeks a balance between kamai—working for wages—and azadi—freedom . Freedom is often expressed in the following manner. After being slapped by his boss because he missed a day of work, Ashraf “turned around and never went back.” When Sethi asks why, Ashraf replies: “The maalik owns my work, Aman bhai, he doesn’t own me.” While the regularity with which Ashraf loses work and drinks up his earnings seems irresponsible and unhealthy, his effort to retain nominal freedom in a society increasingly structured by the market is inspirational. Rather than getting caught up in politics or social analysis, Sethi instead reveals the potency of stories in his, Ashraf’s, and the reader’s lives. September–October 2013 • 75 76 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Ashraf remarks: “funny how every short...

Doing for Political Science What Darwin Did for Biology

This essay begins with a comparison of Mumbai and Shanghai, using the recent 2012 book on slum conditions in Mumbai by Katherine Boo, but suggesting that an analysis of public administration (PA) in essential in this regard. Unfortunately, PA is a neglected field in the social sciences. Partly this may be due to doubts about the usefulness of PA, along the lines suggested by a 2004 book by Francis Fukuyama: why, for example, what works in one place and time does not work in another. Political Elasticity (PE) theory is put forward as a way of overcoming these doubts. In so doing, the author attempts to do for the political science what Darwin did for the biology. Case studies (e.g., solid waste management failure in Lagos, as against achievement in Tokyo; the inability of Ghana to improve agricultural outputs, despite its progressive and democratic government) are used to illustrate PE theory. At the conclusion, the impor-tance of motivation is emphasized, using Vietnam (in comparison to Bangladesh) as an example of a country that has been able to link PA to economic development.

Reviews and resources

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo reviewed by Linda Jones