Imagined Infrastructural Citizenship: Claiming Urban Space for Marginalized Communities in Indian Cinema

Keywords: infrastructure, political geography, urban geography, social space, cultural geography, film
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

This paper draws on theories of infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski 2019) and everyday territorialization (Brighenti and Kärrholm 2020) to examine the overlapping production and representation of place in and through film. Through a case study of several films from different language industries in Indian cinema, I argue for the importance of marginal urban spaces and ephemeral territorializations for marginalized communities and individuals. I further argue for approaching film itself as a way of occupying public space. Film has a long history of representing the complexity of city as a site of freedom and empancipation, but also as a site of violence that reinscribes difference, hierarchy, exclusion, and oppression.

Focussing on representations of public transportation, where territorialization is transient and often invisible, I explore the way these films reveals the multiple ways in which spaces are repurposed meaningfully to constitute identity, community, sociality, solidarity, and safety. In addition to its realism, the medium of film also provides space for imagined futurities places in the city. Fictional film thus produces new possibilities, as well as producing the “theatre” (wherever it may be) as a political space of exposure, education and advocacy, creating witnesses to the hidden and invisible in more subtle but nonetheless powerful ways than non-fiction documentaries. Studying these cinematic urban spaces productively complicates our understandings of how marginalized communities and individuals claim space and in turn shape the urban landscape, and how public/private and fixed/fluid spaces intersect and overlap.