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Imaging Urban Breakdown

This essay connects Sundaram’s arguments in 'Pirate Modernity' with his more recent research topic on urban fear after media modernity. First presented at an urban fear workshop in Princeton University, “Imaging Urban Breakdown” looks at the interface between vision, law and urban crisis. The essay takes off from Delhi’s ‘crisis years’ of the late 1990s, with media expansion, urban disorder and displacements of the urban poor. Sundaram tracks the feeling of urban paranoia and disorder by looking at a montage of sensational writing, and middle class mobilisations against old-style formal politics. Here, media effects and legal strategies play a crucial part. Sundaram suggests that court judgements acted as a vision device to uncover the formerly invisible subaltern city for the middle-class elites, adding to the loop of urban crisis. The essay examines the connection between the legal event and the media event, both of which were now a crucial part of the urban contemporary. For Sundaram, the urban crisis led to a new kind of mediatised urban politics in India. This article was researched using Hindi and English writing on Delhi and fieldwork in neighbourhoods and courts. It drew upon debates in urban anthropology, media theory, legal research and contemporary politics. The essay’s ambivalence on representational strategies echoes the work of Deleuze and Guattari, but develops this to suggest that the ‘bypass’ rather than classic urban politics was the new tactic of a post-media city.