prezentare appadurai spectral housing

7/29/2019 Prezentare Appadurai Spectral Housing

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Spectral housing and urban cleansing: notes on Millennial Mumbai

Arjun Appadurai

A brief history of decosmopolitanization

- Cities like Bombay (now Mumbai) are instances of the elusiveness of global flows at thebeginning of the new millennium; they are large and are currently shifting from

economies of manufacture and industry to economies of trade, tourism and finance.

- They often contain shadow economies.

Bombay:

- A city where crime is an integral part and where fear of the poor is steadily increasing;- Prior to the 1970s it retained the ethos of a well-managed, Fordist city- After the 1970s, the environment changes: jobs become harder to get, more rural arrivals

found themselves economic refugees, slums and shacks began to proliferate etc.; the most

markedly xenophobic regional party in India- the Shiva Sena (founded in 1966 as a pro-

native, Marathi-centered, movement for ethnic control of Bombay) gained control until

today of the city and the state.

- In this essay the author tries to note two specificities about Bombay: 1. The peculiarambiguities that divide and connect cash and capital from one another; 2. To show that

disjuncture is part of what might let us understand the peculiar ways in which

cosmopolitanism in Bombay has been violently compromised in its recent history

- City of cash: Bombay after WWII was a cosmopolis of commerce; today money is eitherlocked, hoarded, stored, and secreted in every possible way: in jewelry, in bank accounts,

in land and housing etc.; hidden money made visible through cars and mansions, sharp

suits etc, or we have

-visible money: cash (stacks of rupees are openly and joyously

transacted); cash+chance+wealth=linked

- yet there is a lot of interest in bank accounts, shares, and insurance

policies (instruments used to protect money); even poor wage-earners strive to have small

savings accounts


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-Bombays film industry runs on black money (film financing is a

notoriously gray area of speculation, risk and violence in which the key players are men

who have maid killings in other markets who seek to keep the money out of the

governments hands; corruption everywhere

- Liquidity is the dominant criterion of prosperity for both corporations and

individuals; this is also money that is seeking immediate expenditure

- Since the 1970s cash and capital have come to relate in a new and contradictory manner

in Bombay: while cash still does its circulatory work, guaranteeing a complex web of

social and economic relations, capital in Bombay has become more anxious: 1. The flight

of industrial capital away from the city; 2. Financial capital in Bombay operates in

several disjunct registers: as the basis for multinational corporations tempted by new

market seduction in India; as speculative capital operating in illegal or black markets, and

as entrepreneurial energy operating in a city where it is increasingly difficult to

coordinate the factors of capitalist production

Housing(this disjunct relationship can be followed and here we see an outcome of it:

ethnic violence)

To speak of spectrality in Bombays housing scene moves us beyond the empirics of

inequality into the experience of shortage, crowding, and public improvisation. It marks

the space of speculation and specularities, empty scenes of dissolved industry, fantasies

of urban planning, rumors of real estate transfers, consumption patterns that violate their

spatial preconditions, and bodies that are their own housing. The absent, the ghostly, the

speculative, the fantastic all have their part to play in the simultaneous excesses and lacksof Bombays housing scene. It is these experienced absurdities that warrant my use of the

termspectralin a setting where housing and its lack are grossly real. (pg. 63)

- Homes as unstable products: a vast range of insecure housing; the poor are everywhereand they are only partly concentrated in slums. Almost every one of these kinds of

housing for the poor is subjected to socially negotiated arrangements. The poor set house

everywhere and when they are servants to the rich, they usually have a small room in the

penthouses and bring friends or dependents; small commercial enterprise sprout on every

possible spot;

- Public sleeping is the bottom of the hierarchy of spectral housing. The sleeping body inits public, vulnerable, and inactive form is the most contained form of the spectral house.

- Bombay has a shrinking but still large body of tenants, governed by an obsolete rentcontrol act that has been the subject of enormous contention since the beginning of


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economic liberalization in the early 1990s and landlords are at war with their old

tenants, who pay tiny rents for real estate worth fortunes

- Dreams and fantasies: tenants dream of a day when they will be allowedby state fiat- tobuy their houses for less, and landlords dream of a free market where they can kick out

their poor tenants and bring in wealthy multinationals. Meanwhile, as tenants die or move

but hold onto their places by locking the door, the building look like ghostly spaces

(spaces of houses without occupants, and bodies without houses on the streets).

- The market in rental houses is illegal- The pyramid: the upmarket end is occupied by the multinationals who pay huge down

payments, below there is the universe of the middle - class owners and renters who

entertain dreams of the big kill, further down: the varieties of rights in tenements,

slums, pavements etc.; knitting together this complex edifice of housing related hysteriais the huge disorganized army of brokers and dealers.

- Today, national and transnational manufacturing is steadily leaving Bombay, and anothermajor spectral narrative has started to emerge: thousands of acres of factory space are

rumored to be lying idle behind the high walls that conceal dying factories, and thus it

might yield housing for those without a secure house.

- What killed Bombay and how did Mumbai emerge?= the repositioning of Bombays streets, shops and homes as sacred national space, as anurban rendition of a Hindu national geography

Urban cleansing

- In 1996 the Shiva Sena proclaimed that Bombay would henceforth be only known asMumbai: a Mumbai of the future ethically pure but globally competitive.

- 1992-1993: a big effort to Hinduize India based on Anti-Muslim sentiments- On 6 December 1992 a Mosque was destroyed = a symbolic epicenter of this more

general campaign to cleanse Hindu space and nationalize the polity through a politics of

archaeology, historical revisionism, and vandalism

- syndicated Hinduism= also included the liberation of Hindu temples from what theyargued to be their illegitimate Muslim superstructures.

- The Shiva Sena went from being a regional party to a national political force; focusing onthe border wars with Pakistan, it has used a powerful media campaign of hate against the

figure of the Muslim as the archetype of the invader, the stranger, and the traitor.


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- - about 50% of Munbais 12 million citizens live in slums or other degraded forms ofhousing, but slum dwellers occupy only 8% of the citys land; the rest is either industrial

land, middle- and high-income housing or vacant land in control of the state

- - in the riots of 1992-1993 the worst zones of violence were among the very poorest- The maha arati= a kind of guerilla form of public worship organized by Hindu groups

to push Muslims out of streets and public spaces: they were hunted down with listes of

names, Muslim businesses and properties were relentlessly put to torch.

- There is also a battle for space- In 1992 -1993 spectral housing met ethnic fear, and the Muslim body was the site of this

terrifying negotiation

- Appadurai concludes that in a city where daily sociality involves the negotiations ofimmense special stress, the many spectralities that surround housing (from indigent

bodies to fantasy housing schemes and empty flats) can create the conditions for a violent

reinscription of public space as Hindu spacea bizarre utopia of urban renewal.

prezentare appadurai spectral housing

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