Leuven: Cities in Development: Spaces, Conflicts and Agency’ (November 22nd)

Mumbai and Kinshasa as speculative cities

Professor Appadurai will try to unravel how justice is imagined through various dream factories in the cinematic city of Mumbai. Home to Bollywood, Mumbai is a media-saturated city, whose products have shaped popular dreams, scripts and stars for almost a century. The industries of crime, mass media and justice in this city reflect and refract each other in numerous ways. In his lecture, professor Appadurai will focus on a single major case, the story of Sanjay Dutt, a major film-star who was tried for working with terrorists in the famous bombings of 1993 in Mumbai.

The covert violence, the risk, the uncertainty and the possibility of daily life in Kinshasa reside in the gap between official visions and unofficial reality. Using two cases in which water is being turned into land, Filip De Boeck reveals the need to envision a 'near future' that hyphenates dream and reality; a plan predicated on incremental transformation rather than destructive, radical, exclusionary change.

Arjun Appadurai and Filip De Boeck

Professor Appadurai is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in New York City, NY. His major accomplishment has been the construction of anthropological frameworks for the study of global media, consumption, and migration. His current work focuses on poverty, violence, and social inclusion in mega-cities with a special focus on Mumbai (India). He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006, Duke University Press) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (1996, University of Minnesota Press; 1997, Oxford University Press, Delhi). His previous scholarly publications have covered such topics as religion, cuisine, agriculture and mass culture in India. He is one of the founding editors, along with Carol A. Breckenridge, of the journal Public Culture.

Professor Filip De Boeck is a Professor of Anthropology (Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, K.U.Leuven) with extensive research experience in rural and urban Central Africa. His current theoretical interests include local subjectivities of crisis, youth and the politics of culture, and the transformation of private and public space in African urban contexts. Filip De Boeck is the author of Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City, a joint book project with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart (Ghent/ Tervuren: Ludion / Royal Museum of Central Africa, 2004), and co-editor of Makers and Breakers. Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). De Boeck has also been active as curator and film-maker, in an effort to straddle the interdisciplinary divide between the social sciences, architecture and art.

Cities in development

This debates and presentations series offers an interdisciplinary reflection on the development of cities in the Global South and the different dynamics that shape them today. Renowned experts will share their alternative readings of these specific urban spaces. The lectures will acknowledge both the tensions and frictions in such sites, as well as the opportunities that are generated thanks to, or in spite of them. The debates pay much attention to the specific ways in which civil societies’ and city dwellers’ ‘agency’ is enabled or disabled.

Organised by

The Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) and the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA) of the K.U.Leuven

Info

Tuesday 22 November 2011 / 7.30-9.30pm

Stuk Auditorium

Aula Max Weber, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven

The debates are free and open to all. Registration is recommended. Debate with Arjun Appadurai and Filip De Boeck will begin at 20.00h.

More info: www.cades.be/debates

 

Contact

Dominique.Joos@soc.kuleuven.be / Ann.Cassiman@soc.kuleuven.be / Filip.Deboeck@soc.kuleuven.be