Urban Fiction Research Articles

The city in film: Reading Dhobi Ghat and Island City as cinematic representations of Mumbai

Urban spaces harbour the capacity to embody varied social relations that constantly interact to form lived experiences. As the society has gradually transformed from a collection of rural settlements to a largely metropolitan space, urban fiction as a literary genre set in city landscapes has become increasingly popular. In a century dominated by new media technologies, the changing contours of contemporary societies became widely visible in the images and interpretations available through cinema. Cinema as one of the predominant modes of cultural expressions has played a performative role in encapsulating the changing lifestyles, attitudes and landscapes. The city as a mosaic of complexity, diversity and contradictions has consequently become an inseparable part of the world’s largest film industry – Bollywood. The Indian megacity of Mumbai has thus become a site of ‘glocal’ interconnections and polyphonic voices. Not only has the city contributed to the production and dissemination of films, but its increased influence has also allowed it to feature as a ‘character’ in many films. This article seeks to evaluate select cinematic narratives to foreground the living realities of the megacity of Mumbai. While examining the representation of Mumbai in two films released post-2010 – Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries) and Island City, the article intends to interpret the implicit and explicit meanings in the cinematic language of these films. It seeks to argue that cinematic representations of Mumbai help to characterize ways of perceiving the city as a complex, multi-layered urban text. Rather than visualizing the city as an empty space that simply holds the narrative together, the article aims to show how cities in films become characters themselves, engulfing those of flesh and bone.

Women’s Contributions to Declining Masculinities in the Urban Fiction of Meja Mwangi

This work focuses on the role women play in the declining masculinities as it emerges in Meja Mwangi’s The Cockroach Dance (1979) and Rafiki Man Guitar (2013). The increased empowerment of women over the years has continued to affect shifting gender roles, a situation that has come to pose a big threat to hegemonic masculinities, especially in the postcolonial urban setting. In its quest to empower women and achieve gender equality, feminism has played the role of subverting expressions of masculinity in a number of ways. The conditions of the postcolonial city have adversely subjected men to a foray of social, economic, and political challenges, creating a reversal in which the traditional perceptions of manhood have been repudiated. In a number of situations, the female counterparts have come to occupy the dominant position. Using theories of gender in relation to the dynamics of the postcolonial urban culture, this study is an exploration of Meja Mwangi’s representation of the circumstances that have contributed to declining masculinities in his two novels above

‘To live in a city is to consume its offerings’: Speculative fiction and gentrification in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018)

Ling Ma’s Severance () offers an interesting take on urban life after a pandemic and a resultant zombie apocalypse have turned New York City into a ghost town. The dystopian speculative fiction novel intertextually references the literary and media histories of science fiction and horror. Yet, it exceeds their often exclusively White and cis-male focus for a more comprehensive understanding of how the processes of gentrification are gendered and racialized. This contribution argues that Ma’s novel expands the repertoire of storytelling about gentrification through several stylistic and thematic features. For example, the ways that urban experiences are mediated through stories and enmeshed in global capitalist structures of consumerism. Further, the contribution explores the list of gentrification as an essential stylistic feature of urban fiction and the theme of pregnancy and its relevance in the gentrifying city.

Utopian Spaces and Dystopian Subjects in Ray Loriga’s Urban Fiction

Abstract This article examines the interplay between socio-spatial environments, social control mechanisms and alienated subjectivities in the urban fiction of Spanish author Ray Loriga. It analyses how the search for an urban utopia intertwines in Loriga’s work with an attention to processes of commodification, consumerism and social control. These represented processes are read, in turn, as driving the dystopian production of dehumanized, objectified individual subjects. Focusing principally on the futuristic cities of Loriga’s 1999 novel Tokio ya no nos quiere, the discussion also draws on relevant elements of two subsequent works – El hombre que inventó Manhattan (2004) and Rendición (2017).

‘A Whole Other World than What I Live in’: Reading Chester Himes, on Campus and at the County Jail

This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, and in the urban fiction tradition from Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim on down through today’s Triple Crown books and others. I then look at how Himes’ work has been received by the college students and incarcerated people who each spring for the past 20 years have worked together in reading groups set at the local county jail in a project linked to a class I teach, in order to raise questions about genre, audience and pedagogy. The two groups of readers, who may come to see each other as one group over the series of meetings, often develop readings of Himes’ novel that push back against the analysis I present in the classroom.

Trasgressive, ribelli e perdute: frammenti di periferie reali e immaginarie nella narrativa urbana turco-tedesca contemporanea

This paper focuses on the representation of German urban peripheries in Turkish-German contemporary urban fiction. Through the analysis and comparison of two novels written by contemporary German novelists with Turkish origins – Der die Träume hört (2019) by Selim Özdogan and Hawaii (2020) by Cihan Acar – this contribution is aimed at investigating how the Turkish-German community deals with life in real and fictional German urban margins as spaces where new forms of citizenship and ways of urban living take shape and how the geographical-literary depictions of this urban peripheral framework are related to issues such as feelings of loss, exclusion, abandonment, desire to escape, personal redemption and racial hatred.

Kentte Kesişmeler: Ermenek Örtmeleri

The streets, which provide the connection between the neighborhoods, and which are the smallest structures in a city where neighborhood relations are established, and the structures of this city, present a different character in the Ermenek District of Karaman Province. The streets of this city, which are located on very rough terrain, are designed to adapt to the topography. Most of the buildings were built adjacent to each other, there are no other spaces apart from the street spaces. Therefore, as a result of bringing together the urban configuration and streets within the framework of an organic union, these passages, which allow the street to continue, are strengthened with coverings, which are called “örtme” in Turkish. The topic of the study is conducted on the following four main themes: (1) the spatial readings to be made on coverings, (2) the construction of coverings in the traditional street texture, (3) the discussion of the relations of coverings with the individual, the city, and the environment, (4) the typological classification of coverings. In this context, as the methodology of the study, field studies, that is, on-site observation, detection and documentation studies, were carried out in the first stage. Afterward, a typological classification was made by examining the place of coverings in urban fiction through literature and field studies. In conclusion, urban, spatial and physical readings of the coverings, which have an influential position in the traditional street texture, were carried out. With this study, the significance of such structures, which reflect the living culture of the people, which began to disappear by being forgotten in the rural architectural structuring, in the history of architecture and urbanism was emphasized.

Geocriticism and the exploration of Mexico City-Tenochtitlán in Carlos Fuentes’ Where the Air is Clear

Where the Air is Clear , or La región más transparente (1958) in its original version, is an urban fiction of Mexico City structured from a postcolonial perspective by Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin American Boom authors. This literary biography of 1950s Mexico’s capital is portrayed with a double complexity. On one hand, the modern but chaotic space is presented through a narrative fragmentation composed of a “chorus” of inhabitants from different social classes and neighbourhoods. On the other, the author depicts a total image of the megacity by highlighting its historical particularity: Mexico City was constructed by Spaniards precisely above the ruins of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs. This article proposes a study of the Boom’s classic text with a novel approach from a geographical focus. The methodology utilized is Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism (2007) that aims to explore a space’s fictionalization from a multidisciplinary approach, in this case, literature, history and geography, and with the use of cartographic representations. This analysis is, thus, “mapped” from the perspective of Ixca Cienfuegos, an indigenous character with supernatural powers who explores the space of Mexico City-Tenochtitlán through two key years: 1951—the Dystopia of Mexico City where modernity cohabitates with antiquity, and prosperity with poverty— and 1519 —the Utopian past of Tenochtitlán before the landscape’s transformation under Spanish colonization.

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.

Rural versus urban fiction in contemporary Chinese literature - Quantitative approach case study

Abstract The study examined contemporary Chinese novels that depicted the social changes in rural and urban areas. We analyzed the texts using several quantitative methods of stylometry (lexical richness, activity, descriptivity, nominality, cluster analysis of the most frequent words) and corpus linguistics (keywords). We focused on the differences (both in style and in content) between contemporary fiction depicting life in Chinese rural and urban areas. The results revealed that rural stories are more dynamic (active), focusing more on the plot with a simpler description and a smaller vocabulary.

Urban Apocalypse, Global Precarity, and Uncanny Liminality in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Ling Ma’s Severance

ABSTRACT This paper will examine the representation of zombie apocalypse in Zone One (2011) by Colson Whitehead and Severance (2018) by Ling Ma. Whitehead and Ma both situate their narratives in New York City, a contested setting oscillating between utopian possibilities of progress and dystopian realities of alienation. The novels reveal the zombifying impact of capitalism that permeates local and global networks of exploitation, and perpetuates what Judith Butler identifies as precariousness and precarity of life. The representation of New York as a metonymic urban space, which displays the arrested development of global capitalism through a zombie apocalypse, renders Zone One and Severance critically relevant today. Whitehead and Ma articulate the catastrophic consequences of uneven development as well as the reader’s ontological proximity to the liminal category of zombies. I argue that the authors’ narrative choice of total collapse over survival in and of New York, albeit the discursive privilege of urban growth, is a powerful gesture of “creative destruction” toward unsettling, if not breaking, the detrimental cycles of capitalist repetition. Whitehead and Ma reflect the anxiety of the contemporary moment by subverting problematic assumptions about cityscapes and civilization with their innovative combination of urban fiction, zombie tropes, and apocalyptic discourse.

Contemporary Scottish Urban Fiction (2000-2020): Space, Emotions, Identity.

Contemporary Scottish Urban Fiction (2000-2020): Space, Emotions, Identity.

Voices Carry

AbstractThis article examines the urban fiction of Jeanne Marni’s 1898 Fiacres, a collection of twenty-five stories that first appeared in the daily newspaper Le Temps. The stories are presented in the form of dialogues transcribed by an invisible spectator from within the horse drawn carriages for hire, the fiacres, the fin de siècle taxi cabs. Training her eye on and lending her ear to Belle Époque Paris, Marni registers the conversations of Parisians as they move about the city. In these feminocentric, and by turns humorous or ironic texts, Marni hones an “urban comic” that merges two nineteenth-century figures: the “invisible” flâneuse and the “inaudible” rieuse, or funny woman. Focusing on the intersection of the representation of urban experience and the humorous in Fiacres, this article situates Marni’s sound bites within a genealogy of women writers and the city that looks back to Delphine Gay de Girardin’s witty chronicles of July Monarchy Paris, the “Courrier de Paris” (1836–1848), and ahead to Annie Ernaux’s ironic journal of urban selfhood in transit, Journal du dehors (1993).

From the Penile to the Pinnal: Anatomizing Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea

KEYWORDS Louis Chu; patriarchy; urban fiction; vengeanceAlthough last year’s republication of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea as part of University of Washington Press’ Classics of Asian American Lit...

Driven by the Market: African American Literature after Urban Fiction

Abstract Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) compelled literary historians to question deeply held assumptions about periodization and racial authorship. While critics have taken issue with Warren aligning African American literature with Jim Crow segregation, none has examined his account of what came after this conjuncture: namely, the market’s wholesale cooptation of Black writing. By following the career of African American popular novelist Omar Tyree, this essay shows how corporate publishers in the 1990s and 2000s redefined African American literature as a sales category, one that combined a steady stream of recognized authors with a mad dash for amateur talent. Tyree had been part of the first wave of self-published authors to be picked up by major New York houses. However, as soon as he was made to conform to the industry’s demands, Tyree was eclipsed by Black women writers who developed the hard-boiled romance genre known as urban fiction. As Tyree saw his literary fortunes fade, corporate publishing became increasingly reliant on Black book entrepreneurs to sustain the category of African American literature, thereby turning racial authorship into a vehicle for realizing profits.

Urban Furniture in Historical Process

The city is an artificial environment that forms the settlements of societies formed by different social classes in which people live their lives in accordance with certain rules. These areas have different socio-economic structures that are socially different from each other and therefore have different urban fictions that have been followed throughout the ages. The city is in constant renewal and change. In time, human beings turned to instinct to regulate the physical environment in which they live. The changing environmental forms such as the development of transportation networks and the spread of communication systems have created a more concrete architectural understanding and related environmental regulation. Urban equipment elements have continued to develop as the main elements of these regulations. Urban furniture has contributed to the formation of elements such as communication, aesthetics and functionality in the city, in addition to being the elements that facilitate the personal and social urban life of the individuals forming the society. In a more specific definition, urban furniture are all elements used in landscaping arrangements that respond to basic functions such as sitting, sheltering, transportation, lighting, consultation, communication, games and sports in areas such as streets, roads and squares. The most important features of these elements, which are the building blocks of multi-purpose planning, are the management and direction of pedestrians. Urban furniture emphasizes the rules of living together in order to sustain collective life. Within the scope of this study, historical developments of urban furniture such as sheltered waiting area (stop), lighting element, kiosk, signboard, seating element and garbage can which are the building blocks of cities and contributing to the society to live together in a regular and regulated way are examined.

LANDSCAPES OF CITY AND LANSIA THAT SUFFER (THE CASE OF FATHER'S SPION GLASS, HUANG YONGMEI WORK)

Abstract. City is a symbol of modernity. The revival of the Urban Fiction genre in contemporary Chinese literature is driven by writers of the 1970s. It portrays not only urban landscapes with the beauty in their works, but also exposes the souls that suffer in urban spaces. As a symbol of a modern, advanced and civilized life portrayed in Huang Yongmei's short story "Rearview Mirror", it has a dark side. Various changes that move to bring progress do not necessarily change the fate and fortune of urban people who live in it. Instead of being able to enjoy a comfortable and orderly urban space, an elderly former truck driver in the text seems to be moving back in time. Huang Yongmei, literary winner of the 7th Lu Xun literary award (2018), builds allegories about denial of the progress or modernity of today's China. The Rearview Mirror property serves as a kind of reminder of how many parts of past lives have been left behind as we go fast in the flow of change. The magnitude of the progress and the change can only be measured by constantly looking back to its rickety and worn-out past. The suffer of the city people in old age is symbolized with the scene of going backwards, as a healing therapy for the abnormal spine due to sitting behind the wheel for too long. When the city people rush over each day, this old man goes backwards. The complexity of big city problems make the elderly desperate. Widower in old age, deceived by false loyalty, habit of going back to the past have turned into a swimming backstroke. Huang Yongmei has arrived to the point of firmness by keeping the urban’s subject away from the sparkling city life that just makes the little people suffer. The Father's Rearview Mirror text asserts that the urban subject who suffers in his last days leave his hometown, for good. 

The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

“Irreversible Torpor”: Entropy in 1970s American Suburban Fiction

Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade

The Unsettling Portrayal of Migrant Existence in Rawi Hage’s Urban Fiction

espanolThis essay considers the function of the grotesque mode in Rawi Hage’s novels Cockroach (2008) and Carnival (2012). The grotesque is a provocative tool with which Hage draws attention to the predicament of the class of poor and disadvantaged new immigrants in contemporary Montreal. He offers a male immigrant’s unsettling perspective on the Canadian multicultural ideal that proclaims the acceptance of ethnic and racial difference. Formal aspects that generate a grotesque effect include the first-person narrator’s self-image, his disruptive discourse of resistance, his disorienting view of urban reality, and spatial metaphors in the context of the protagonist’s social alienation and marginalisation. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection throws light on the sense of fear and repulsion felt towards the urban poor, and on the protagonist’s deliberate identification with vermin in the context of his discourse of resistance. Even though the underprivileged migrant is able to answer back, Hage’s novels are devoid of true regenerative and liberating power. The literary texts give prominence to the migrant’s isolation and socio-economic outsider position. Nonetheless, the grotesque mode also functions as a powerful tool with which the author depicts the recent immigrant as someone with a resilient and mobile identity EnglishEl presente ensayo considera la funcion de la vision de lo grotesco en las novelas de Rawi Hage Cockroach (2008) y Carnival (2012). El ‘grotesque’ es una herramienta de provocacion con la que Hage pretende llamar la atencion hacia la situacion del grupo social de los nuevos inmigrantes de clase trabajadora en el Montreal contemporaneo. Hage ofrece la perspectiva perturbadora de un inmigrante varon frente el ideal de multiculturalidad canadiense que proclama la aceptacion de las diferencias raciales y etnicas. Los aspectos formales que generan un efecto grotesco incluyen la imagen introspectiva del narrador en primera persona, su discurso disruptivo de resistencia, su desorientadora vision de la realidad urbana y las metaforas espaciales en el contexto de la alienacion y marginacion social del protagonista. La teoria del abyecto de Julia Kristeva arroja luz sobre el sentido del miedo y la repulsion hacia las clases bajas urbanas y hacia la deliberada identificacion del protagonista con las plagas dentro del contexto de su discurso de resistencia. Aun a pesar de que los inmigrantes desfavorecidos poseen capacidad de replica, las novelas de Hage estan desprovistas de un verdadero poder regenerativo y liberador. La narrativa enfatiza el sentimiento de aislamiento del migrante y la posicion de marginadosocio-economico. Con todo, el modo grotesco funciona igualmente como herramienta poderosa para el tetrato del inmigrante contemporaneo como un sujeto de identidad movil y resiliente.