THE CITY AND LITERATURE
Workshop Three: 10-12 May 2004 (Venue: BG05, SOAS & ICS, Russell
Square)
URBAN BODIES
Project Leaders:
Dr Stephen Dodd (Japanese, SOAS)
Dr Katarzyna Zechenter (SSEES, UCL)
Research Assistant: Dr Ross Forman
WORKSHOP RESEARCH QUESTIONS
“Urban Bodies” is the third workshop in a series of four being held by the
Centre’s project on “The City and Literature.” The first workshop, “City
Limits,” surveyed the variety of approaches that could be employed to
study urban phenomena. The second workshop, “Cities across Time,”
considered the way in which urban spaces and the temporal interact.
“Urban Bodies” carries forward the first two workshops’ interest in
thinking about cities in interdisciplinary and geographically diverse ways
but focuses especially on the place of the human subject in the city.
Because of the broad scope of the topic, the project is keen for participants
to specifically address the following research questions in formulating
their presentations and comments:




How are gender roles determined by modern urban experience? How is
modern urban experience determined by gender roles?
What is the relationship between the city and the body?
How do sexual cultures constitute themselves in urban space?
How does the city construct itself as an organic entity? Where is its
heart? How does it circulate?
To register to attend the workshop, please write to ahrblit@soas.ac.uk.
Speakers will include:
Darren Aoki (Oriental Studies, Cambridge)
The Dystopian City and the Subversive Male Body in Japan in the Early 1970s
My presentation introduces some of the ways that the cultures of malemale sexuality were constituted in the city in Japan in the mid-postwar
era. It explores how the city is a highly differentiated space whose
experience through bodily practice and inscription on the body varies
according to often conflicting constructions of gender and sex. It is based
on research I have conducted on the first commercial and national
magazines in Japan to specialise in male same-sex eroticism that appeared
in the early 1970s. Drawing on examples from a discursive analysis I have
City Workshop Three 2
conducted of nearly 1100 personal advertisements in which men seek
relationships with other men and a variety of reader contributions, my
presentation focuses on one configuration of the body and city in the
cultures of male-male sexuality, the ‘Dystopian City.’
In the mid-postwar era, the city was often a symbol for a host of social
problems that emerged as a result of rapid economic growth, for example,
ecological degradation. Yet for some groups like certain cultures of malemale sexuality, post-industrial images of concrete and steel and endless
labyrinths of alleyways and subways came to signify individual liberation
and male-male relationships. Aestheticised and celebrated by the men
who love men, these otherwise unattractive areas of the city formed little
worlds unto themselves in which desire, sexual and otherwise,
transformed the body of men and its bodily practices. Sometimes these
worlds took the form of a building, a block of buildings, or, in the largest
cities, even an entire district. At other times, they were more modest, a
train station toilet or a street corner. However they occurred, the concept
of rentaikan or ‘solidarity’ was realised. Men’s bodies were literally
brought together in a union that was not only an embodied performance
of the ‘paradise’ of the ‘dystopian city’ but also a subversion of the
heteronormative ideology and structures that had given rise to it.
Florentina Badalanova (SSEES, UCL)
The City of Jerusalem as a Woman in Medieval Eastern European Literature
Philip Broadbent (German, UCL)
Poaching and Other Uses of the Body in Post-Unification Berlin Literature
This paper will focus on the relationship between the physical body and the
city/civic body as portrayed in four Berlin novels written in the period
immediately following the reunification of East and West Berlin in 1990.
Rejecting the city-body metaphor as a representative instance of the modern
urban space, this paper, following De Certeau and Foucault, will argue for an
interpretation of Berlin’s urban fabric as a site of politically constructed
‘bodies’, which aim to define and limit the city dweller’s consciousness of and
movement in the city by way of buildings, street names and road planning. It
will be shown in what way the novels addressed in this paper use the role of
the flâneur in critical instances of ‘poaching’, by which an ensemble of
interdictions are challenged by the city walker and transformed into an
ensemble of possibilities. Within the framework of the urban fabric, poaching
serves here as a metaphor for the way users of pre-established orders come to
inhabit textual systems of which they are not the authors.
This paper will also address the issue of gendering, of gendered sites and
bodies as portrayed in the Berlin novels of the post-unification period. The
gender-based representations of Berlin East and West prior to the fall of the
City Workshop Three 3
Wall in 1989 continue to mark contemporary representations of the city space.
In the final analysis, it will be argued that for a number of post-unification
Berlin writers, poaching consists of a re-writing of the body text, both the
physical body in its interaction with the city and the body of discourses that
make up the urban fabric. This de-gendering of the body and the urban space
not only undermines prescribed gendered spaces, but significantly
problematises the notion of city representation.
Harry Cocks (History, Birkbeck)
The Sodomite as Impersonator in 19th and 20th century London
Martin Dines (English, Kingston)
From Subterranean to Suburban: John Rechy, Dennis Cooper
and the Locations of Gay Outlaw Writing
This paper will contrast John Rechy’s prose 'documentary' The Sexual
Outlaw (1978), which follows one man’s adventures in the underworld of
public gay sex in Los Angeles accompanied by voiceover narration
outlining a manifesto for sexual revolution, with Dennis Cooper‚s novel
Try (1994), which explores the obsessions of alienated gay youths in bleak
Angelean suburbs.
The work of both writers has been characterised as 'outlaw writing', a
mode that celebrates an archetypal outsider figure who operates freely
beyond the spatial and moral bounds of mainsteam society. 'Outlawism'
possesses a strong fixation with territory and an embedded hostility to the
straight mainstream. For Rechy, a central exponent of gay outlaw writing,
the preoccupation with territory and the perpetual struggle between
promiscuous 'sexhunters' and the Police literally constitutes the
revolutionary appeal of the outlaw. However, so strong is the attachment
to this outlaw identity and his habitat, that the possibility of change is
undermined; Rechy is only able to envisage revolution through the
discourse of sexual liberation.
Dennis Cooper's novels are still marketed as the work of an outlaw writer,
but this misdiscribes his project. Significantly, Cooper effects a
deterritorialization of gay writing, and moves awa from Rechy’ s
“traditional” gay sexual locations, the subterranean, nocturnal shadows of
urban public space. However, the suburban locale of Try represents much
less an attempt to infiltrate and unsettle the mainstream than it does the
creation of a blank space that allows for considerably more freedom of
expression and association than earlier forms of outlaw writing were able
to describe.
Rajinder Dudrah (Screen Studies, Manchester) and Amit Rai (Global
Literatures, English, Florida State University)
City Workshop Three 4
Urban Diasporic Bodies and Film Skins: Bollywood Cinema-Going in Manchester
(UK) and New York City (USA)
This paper will disseminate the authors’ findings into the social act of
Bollywood cinema-going as a cultural and leisure activity for British- and
American-South Asians in Manchester and in New York respectively. The
paper draws on theoretical and interdisciplinary developments in film studies
(audience and reception models, metaphors of the body and skin, haptic
codes in the cinematic experience, and Indian rasa theory), social geography
(the location of places and spaces as informing subjectivity formation), and in
cultural studies (identity, representation and the diasporic imaginary) to
situate and offer an exploration of diasporic South Asian identity formation
vis a vis Bollywood cinema-going in the West. What is suggested is a
complexifying of the Bollywood cinematic assemblage that is consumed and
incorporated in the cultural geographies and urban bodies of Bollywood’s
diasporic audiences.
Cam-corder footage and a slide presentation will illustrate the participant
observation methodology, undertaken simultaneously by both
researchers, that was used to elaborate on and refine the aforementioned
theoretical work on cinema-going and the diasporic imaginary in and
around the Bollywood cinema sites in Manchester and in New York.
Sara Godfrey (Italian, UCL)
Roman Fatherlands and Female Organs: The Reclamation of the City of God through
the Drainage of Lake Fucino
Lake Fucino was the largest lake in Southern Italy. Lacking a natural outlet it
was notorious for dramatic rises in water levels and was partially drained
under Emperor Claudius (41-54AD), but was not until Prince Torlonia (18541876) that it was finally drained. Considered the largest land reclamation
project in the world, the Torlonia work was compared to Lesseps’ Suez Canal
and Sommelier’s Fréjus tunnel. However Italian historiography has entirely
ignored the work or Torlonia, the wealthiest Prince of the Papal Court and
made Prince of Fucino by the Italian monarchy, an unprecedented case.
At the Philadelphia Universal exhibition (1876) the Torlonia presentation
compared the modern emissary to the Claudian work. Alongside technical
comparisons, flaws in the Claudian emissary were viewed as the result of an
impotent emperor – Claudius – whose weak leadership had led to the
engineer’s design being corrupted. In contrast the perfectly executed modern
tunnel was a model of the right-relations between Torlonia (the creator), the
engineers, and the labourers while the reclaimed land was planned as a
model of perfect civil order.
City Workshop Three 5
The Torlonia presentation occurred at a crucial moment in Rome’s history,
since after its annexation to Italy in 1870, it was no longer the Eternal City and
capital of Catholicism but a temporal national capital. The shock of this
historical event echoed the sacking of Rome (410 AD), which drove many
Romans back to Pagan worship and inspired St Augustine’s City of God. In
Augustine’s work he apperceives the city as a psychical space and is
concerned to show how humans can most effectively co-exist through the
right relations between man and God, which he shows through the difference
between a dystopic earthly city and a utopic heavenly city. One way that this
difference is illustrated is using the female organ of the womb. “Natural”
conception and birth are likened to the earthly city where man is enslaved,
unlike the freedom of the heavenly city and the Immaculate Conception,
which reveals God’s grace.
Torlonia dedicated the entire work to the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, placing a statue of the Virgin upon the emissary head and in this
paper I shall argue that he sought to build an ideal Christian Roman space
through draining Lake Fucino. Deleuze has argued that paternalism is a
socialized form of sadism, and if in this pathology the sadistic “father”
chooses the primitive uterine mother as his victim, I shall examine the degree
to which the draining of the lake and its transcendence into the semen-less
womb of the Immaculate Conception may be thought of as the model of a
new Roman fatherland.
Kusum Gopal (Gender Institute, LSE)
Disembodied, Rational Worlds? A Critique of Cartesian Cogito
In contemporary ethnographic practice the Body in many urban cultural
contexts is seen to make its own intervention in the world yet it is also a
body that which is moulded not solely through language and the
symbolic, but through other kinds of material cultural practices. It has a
sacred and material ontological reality that is different from the power
relations that take the body as a site for investments.
Genital differences, the role of biology, anatomy, physiology are vested in
important rites and constitute symbolic and social capital. Sex, gender and
sexuality are the product of such a set of interactions; material and
symbolic conditions mediated through language and representation
through the use of our embodied selves. They are concepts, which are
grounded in our own bodies and our own experiences, a consequence also
of different cosmological traditions. This paper attempts a critique at the
Cartesian body/mind dualism within various non western cultural
contexts not only because it distorts temporal and spatial references but its
ascription to the primacy of the biological over the emotional and the
City Workshop Three 6
social is seen in many urban cultures to limit self-development and selfrealisation.
Scott Ickes (History, University of Maryland)
Adorned With the Mix of Faith and Profanity that Intoxicates the People':
The Festival of Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 1930-1954
The research presented in this paper relates to the Festival of Nosso
Senhor do Bonfim from 1936 to 1954, one of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil’s most
important religious festivals. The focus is primarily on the public ritual
washing of the Church of Bonfim, and the struggle between the Catholic
Church, who periodically banned the washing from the larger four-day
festival, and a variety of historical actors including politicians, journalists,
authors and working-class Salvadorans whose efforts eventually
contributed to the lifting of the prohibition once and for all in 1953. I
suggest that the successful defence of the place of the washing within the
festival both reflected and contributed to a wider process of hegemony
formation taking place after 1930 in Salvador, as actors within Salvador’s
dominant class accepted and discursively constructed Afro-Bahian
cultural practices as integral parts of a larger Bahian identity.
Frank Mort (Cultural History, UEL)
Striptease, the Erotic Moving Body and the Origins of the ‘Permissive Society’ in
Post-War London
Striptease expanded rapidly in central London in the late 1950s and early
1960s and its epicentre was Soho in the capital’s West End. Strip was a
potent and heavily contested symbol of Britain’s rapidly changing sexual
culture; it stood alongside pornography, male homosexuality and the
contraceptive pill as one of the early icons of “permissiveness.” Striptease
is a productive departure point from which to unpack a number of
important strands in the iconography, sexual meanings and forms of
commercial organization associated with London’s pleasure economy
during the high moment of post-war sexual modernization. A
performance that was principally though not exclusively centred on the
female body, striptease condensed a number of erotic genres that were
closely associated with the sexual climate of the 1960s. In particular, strip
dramatized in heightened form broader tensions implicit in women’s
contemporary sexual roles, as both active and passive agents.
Orchestrating the idea of a “liberated” sexual style that was supposedly
freed from the constraints of English prurience, the striptease
phenomenon raises important questions about the gendered dynamics
and international character of commercial forms of sexuality that were
repeatedly characterized as “emancipated” or “progressive.”
Historians who attempt a detailed investigation of the cultural and sexual
meanings embedded in non-verbal, ephemeral acts, such as forms of erotic
City Workshop Three 7
dancing and display, confront a number of particular difficulties of
interpretation. There is no complete, surviving visual and auditory record
of the striptease performances, rather what exists are a range of written
and photographic texts, together with a number of oral testimonies from
the entrepreneurs and theatre managers, and from women who worked in
the sex and entertainment industries. Yet this problem of the archive
draws attention to the fact that strip was always circulated through
diverse and plural forms of representation which included not only the
experience of live performances, but also the record of official agencies,
such as the police and the press, and the influence of various techniques of
promotional culture. Rather than viewing this fragmented evidence as an
impediment to a full assessment of the significance of striptease, my paper
will show how strip was always produced through multiple and
frequently contested channels, how it spoke to heterogeneous sexual
constituencies and how it generated diverse cultural consequences.
Situating the sexual meanings encoded in the striptease phenomenon
within the longer transatlantic history of modern dance and
representations of the kinetic and static female moving body, I shall argue
that strip’s erotic dynamics were themselves part of wider changes in
contemporary mass culture. Images of female nudity and nakedness acted
as major symbols of social transformation across many sectors in the
consumer and entertainment industries during the post-war years. But
striptease in London also had more concrete roots and associations that
were indelibly linked to Soho. Striptease was one of the most visible forms
of the heavily commercialized sex industry that was consolidated in this
district in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Strip’s forms of business
organization, together with its appeal to a distinctive set of consumer
appetites, was articulated on the same historical ground of cultural
exceptionalism and geopolitical difference that had shaped many other
aspects of Soho’s cosmopolitan economy since the late nineteenth century.
Understood in this way, striptease was not an isolated sexual
phenomenon, nor was it exclusively about sex. It was part of a broader
continuum of gendered and sexually specific forms of production and
consumption that was grounded in Soho’s distinctive social geography, as
this environment was simultaneously distinguished from and connected
to the wider world of London’s West End.
Stephen Quirke (Petrie Museum, UCL)
‘How Great is the Lord for his City’: Class, Gender, Race as Bodily Variables in
an African City 1850 BC
‘How great is the lord for his city!’
This refrain comes from a cycle of songs for a king of Egypt 1850 BC.
According to a conventional reading, the verse embodies the spirit of its
City Workshop Three 8
age – the second classical age of ancient Egypt, when centralised kingship
was reasserted after a period of political disunity. The king, so we are told,
was no longer the unassailable divine being of the earlier pyramid age;
instead he has become merely a ‘lord for his city’, in a less golden age that
historians have even characterised as feudal. That line of interpretation
obscures a central and unusual feature of the manuscript – its
archaeologically documented urban context. The manuscript was found in
the ruins of a mudbrick palatial townhouse, one of eleven mansions in a
low-desert Nile Valley town that flourished 1850-1750 BC. Here we might
expect more varied resonance for the word ‘city’ when spoken by
inhabitants of the place that produced the manuscript. In this paper I
present what we know of the term for city that occurs in this refrain, and
where we find the term in its sparsely preserved contemporary intertext
tales, laments and teachings 1850 BC. As site of a particular category
‘archaeological fragment’ the city invites rereadings of this verse from
within the individual bodies and collective bodies in the walled urban
environment of ancient al-Lahun.
Jordan Sand (East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown)
City of Moving Bodies, City of Artifacts:
Modernolojio and Street Observation Studies in Tokyo
In downtown Tokyo in the summer of 1925, architect Kon Wajiro and theater
designer Yoshida Kenkichi began a series of surveys of public space, fashion
and human behavior with the ambition of creating a new science they called
“Modernology” (which they designated with the Japanese neologism
kôgengaku and the Esperanto modernolojio). Like entomologists studying an
insect colony, they timed, counted, mapped and sketched the movements of
their human specimens. The nascent science of modernology was abandoned
without developing institutional forms, but the records it left were of equal
sociological and aesthetic interest. Two groups emerged in the 1970’s and
1980’s to take up the discarded mantle of modernology. The Everyday Life
Studies Association sought to shape Kon and Yoshida’s methods into an
applied science that could be useful to the social welfare state. In the process,
they carried modernology indoors. The Street Observation Studies
Association remained determinedly in the street and drew from Kon and
Yoshida an avant-gardist sensibility about the aesthetics of urban space rather
than a practical sociology. Ambiguous in meaning at the outset,
modernology in its revived forms entered a terrain of explicit contest between
science and art. Yet neither of the late twentieth-century revivals sought to
capture the animated and entropic character of human movement in urban
space that had been the focus of interest in 1925. The city was rendered
strangely still, artifactualized. What had changed in a half-century? Had the
fascination with bodies in motion itself somehow made possible the
ambiguous disciplinary space of modernology in 1925, and if so, why did this
vision of the city lose currency for modernology’s heirs? Through an analysis
City Workshop Three 9
of images and texts, I will trace the variations in this strain of Japanese
representation of the city and offer speculations on how the relationship
between surveyor and environment changed.
Sant Suwatcharapinun (Bartlett School, UCL)
Bangkok: Building Gay Paradise
Bangkok, the capital of the developing nation of Thailand, has been
recognised as one of the major gay cities in the world. Its growing reputation
as a ‘gay paradise’, in the context of abundant commercial sex services and
the easy availability of sexual encounters, is not only built by the absence of
legal and religious injunctions against homosexuals, but also Thai society’s
greater tolerance towards them compared with the West. Nevertheless, the
conditions may be insufficient to explain how Bangkok has continuously been
regarded as a gay paradise.
According to historian Peter A. Jackson, it was not until the 1970s (after the
Vietnam War) that Bangkok’s urban image was collectively built. Before that
period, the visibility of homosexuals in Bangkok was relatively rare. Of
course it does not mean that homosexuals did not exist in Bangkok before
then. In fact, there was no space for them to identify themselves as
‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ as they are identified nowadays. The influx of gay
Westerners in the urban city of Bangkok has served as a catalyst to help
establish the discourse on ‘gayness’ as well as to support the continuity of
Bangkok’s portrayal as a gay paradise.
The question arises whether we can perceive this particular urban image
through or in spaces, places or any built environments. If so, can this
particular urban image determine the appearance of the body, groups of
people, and ways of using space to create an image of gay paradise? To truly
investigate the conditions requires a study not only into some particular local
conditions, such as the unequal development of nationalist policies and
certain cultural differences that focus on a self-identification system, but also
into specific locations where homosexuality is able to geographically and
spatially manifest itself.
The aim of this paper is to examine Bangkok in relation to its urban image as
a gay paradise. Two specific locations are selected to demonstrate how
homosexuality is able to manifest itself through and in their spaces. In this
study, Sanam Luang area (including Saranrom Park) and Surawong’s Boys
Town area (including Silom) will be considerably explored through a
discourse on male commercial sex workers. The fundamentals of the study
are not only based on the fact that a Thai homosexual community has
emerged from sex industrial venues, but that male commercial sex workers
can be seen as an alternative way to identify homosexuals, particularly in
terms of how gay people come to use space, to establish urban territory, and
City Workshop Three 10
to invent gay places. Not only does the discourse on male commercial sex
workers become a specific medium in this paper, but the dialectic relationship
between urban spaces and the bodies are also employed to portray either
implicit or explicit ways of building Bangkok’s gay paradise.
I tend to explore Sanam Luang on the basis of the ‘from place to body’
principle. Because of the urban configuration of Sanam Luang regarded as a
grand open public space in the inner city, it has become well-known as a
‘cruising ground’ amongst gay people since 1972. In the mean time, Sanam
Luang also provides a great opportunity for male sex workers to meet for
casual and commercial sex. While Sanam Luang becomes an application to
investigate the condition of how urban space constitutes the body, an explicit
gay commercial sex business in Surawong will be comparatively applied to
explore the condition of the ‘from the body to place’ principle. The bodies and
the image of male go-go dancers inevitably constitute the urban image of
Surawong. Undoubtedly, the sex-oriented commercial business in Surawong
creates divisions amongst local gay people. While Surawong serves as a major
gay commercial sex venue and is largely identified as the place for ‘lowerclass gay people’, gay people who regularly go to Silom tend to identify
themselves as ‘upper-middle class’ gays and to establish Silom as the centre of
the gay urban lifestyle.
Richard Phillips (Geography, Salford)
Sexuality Politics in a Contact Zone: Interventions by Creole Journalists
European imperialism, particularly in Africa, was marked by anxieties
and allegations about the sexualities of those on the other side of the
colonial divide. This was a two-way street, for while Europeans were
preoccupied with the sexuality of the colonial subjects and would-be
subjects, Africans also expressed concerns and made allegations about the
morality of the British, and indeed of each other. Though the British had
greater means to act upon this – through the legal, medical and other
branches of the colonial establishment, which regularly legislated on
moral issues – others were neither silent nor powerless within sexuality
politics. Indeed, they were extremely vocal, for instance in Sierra Leone in
the second half of the nineteenth century, when members of the Creole
community took their place within a series of articulate professions such
as law and journalism. This paper explores some interventions by Creole
journalists in contemporary morality and specifically sexuality politics. It
situates these interventions in Freetown, which was not simply the home
of the colonial and regional newspaper industry, but also the setting and
subject for many of the stories, which addressed sexual questions through
descriptions, reflections and interpretations of the city and its eclectic
population. They explored and used the city as a contact zone in which the
moralities and sexualities of different groups were brought into sharp
City Workshop Three 11
relief. At the same time, they constructed Freetown as a sexualised
imaginative geography, which borrowed tropes and stereotypes about
cities and sexualities, but also adapted and altered these to suit their own
purposes. Given the media’s effective role as Sierra Leone’s unofficial
opposition, these interventions played an important part in sexuality
politics and sexualised social politics, if not necessarily in changing or
securing legislation, then at least in holding Europeans and their
administration to account in the short term and influencing their direction
in the longer term.
Alan Tansman (East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of
California, Berkeley)
Boredom and the Urban Body in the Literature of Shiga Naoya
Divya Tolia-Kelly (Cultural Geography, Lancaster)
Sensory Memory in the City: Cartographies of memory in the South Asian
Imaginary.
This paper considers the vale of memory and sensory memory to postmigration populations in London. For the South Asian population living
in London, enfranchisement to the urban environment and the landscapes
of Britishness, involves connecting with sensory memories of past
landscapes and 'other' national cultures. Through an investigation of
sensory memory as refracted through contact with material cultures and
visual cultures, I argue that visual and material cultures are employed by
British Asians, to triangulate co-ordinates of identification, and new
citizenships. Visual and material cultures refract environmental memories
and thus allow for diasporic groups to position themselves in Britain—
politically, culturally and socially. By using research with British Asian
women this paper demonstrates the political nature of memory and its
mportance in recovering oral histories of migratory populations, as they
shape environmental experience in the city. Using the theory of bodymemory, I examine the value of visual and material cultures in refracting
memories that are sensory, which locate remembered landscapes through
scent, touch, taste and aesthetics. Re-memories are considered as social
memories which form a resource of heritage and social and political
identifications. These refracted memories constitute a dialogic force
operative within processes of identification for those migratory groups
living in Britain. Memory is considered as a critical lens through which
post-colonial peoples negotiate, shape and are figured within new
landscapes and environments. By situating memory in the everyday
cultures of domesticity I have theorised these essential in understanding
the dialectical relationships between colonial landscapes and residency
within the U.K., for British Asians. In combination, these processes of
memory-history are considered as important reinscribing cultural memory
City Workshop Three 12
within thinking about the city and thus providing an inclusive medium
for researching post-colonial, British histories.
Valentina Vitali (Film and TV Studies, Brunel)
Changing City-Body Relations in the Hindi Action Cinema
Histories of the Hindi cinemas have tended to neglect the 1960s. During that
decade India underwent significant industrialisation and urbanization – both
of which impacted on the cinema made in Bombay to such an extent that its
generic stock changed radically. When, by the mid-1970s, a new genre had
emerged, the modern action film and its urban anti-hero, the Hindi film
industry had found new ways of coping with those changes. This paper
considers what made the urban anti-hero and his action body possible by
looking at the ways in which urbanization and industrialisation became
manifest in some Hindi cinema from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.
Whether or not they feature city landscapes and/or the bodies of urban
heroes, as industrially produced narratives rooted in the economy of Bombay,
the films in question are constitutive of that urban configuration. Where, in
the films, are we to detect that process of urbanisation? Are notions of
‘representation’ the best way to conceptualise the ways in which that process
manifests itself in – or as’ - the film? The paper closes with a series of
questions about more recent action films. Focusing on the 1990s, when
Bombay underwent a drastic process of de-industrialisation, the question
asked is: what do these films and their muscled heroes tells us about Bombay
in the 1990s?