Bodies against modernity: politics of slum rehabilitations in India
Author(s)
Jatkar, Harshavardhan
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
India continues to modernize, and the legacy of political modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment continues to reify itself in India through the performative practices of the body politic. The body politic is a totalized conceptualization of a society imagined in the form of a body, with real exclusionary effects on those without citizenship rights. This body politic is made real through performances of popular sovereignty, bureaucratic state practices and liberal democratic electoral procedures performed during urban development processes. Ethnographic accounts of politics of slum rehabilitations in Pune show that the modern body politic is indeed performatively practised, and reshaped, by the very bodies that are expected to be alienated for the making of the body politic. Bodies meet one another in different spaces and times and generate the possibility of reshaping the liberal body politic into relational and affective bodily politics. Together, bodies become both the site and the means through which political modernity is reshaped in India.
Date Issued
2024-01-01
Date Acceptance
2023-07-27
Citation
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2024, 48 (1), pp.111-125
ISSN
0309-1317
Publisher
Wiley
Start Page
111
End Page
125
Journal / Book Title
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Volume
48
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Authors. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Urban Research Publications Limited. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-11-02