[Reader-list] The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City

[Danny Butt]

Hi Rana

A very fun essay. It made me wonder about the links to historically  
interior processes in nation states, like white U.S.' appropriation  
of black culture? And in Euro-Austronesia, the popularity of  
indigenous peoples in cultural tourism. Decline of empire psychology  
going global?

Danny

--
http://www.dannybutt.net



On 23/03/2006, at 7:30 PM, Rana Dasgupta wrote:

>
> Dear All
>
> A recent essay, deliberately sweeping and polemical, on the sudden  
> prominence of the Third-World city in Hollywood and big publishing.
>
> R
>
>
> THE SUDDEN STARDOM OF THE THIRD-WORLD CITY
> by RANA DASGUPTA
> http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp?text_id=36
>
>
> Why is the Third-World metropolis suddenly taking over western  
> culture?
>
> Tsotsi, a film about Johannesburg gangs released in the UK this  
> month, took the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Another  
> Oscar went to The Constant Gardener, an account of the dark forces  
> at work in Nairobi, whose director, Fernando Meirelles, shot to  
> international fame in 2002 with his portrait of a Rio favela, City  
> of God. The Raindance Film Festival last October climaxed with a  
> screening of Secuestro Express, a film about abduction gangs in  
> Caracas. And at the end of 2004, two best-selling books explored  
> the fiercely competitive under- and over-worlds of Mumbai: Suketu  
> Mehta’s Maximum City and Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram, which  
> will be released next year as a major Hollywood motion picture  
> directed by Peter Weir.
>
> My feeling is that these are early symptoms of a huge shift in the  
> west’s picture of the world: the Third-World metropolis is becoming  
> the symbol of the “new”. This is all the more thrilling for its  
> utter improbability: surely those suffocating piles of slums and  
> desperation are too exhausted, too moribund, to bring forth  
> futures? But it seems to me this is exactly what is happening. If,  
> for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its  
> glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the  
> stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world.  
> The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan  
> has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and  
> ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement, its homogenising  
> obsession has constricted the horizons of spiritual possibility and  
> induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess, and life- 
> forms in chaotic variety. Such desires flee the West’s surveillance  
> cameras and bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World  
> metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology.
>
> Why would it be so? For a start, the rumours crackling in from the  
> Third World have ceased to be quaint. Indian and Chinese business  
> people rattle assumptions by buying up major corporate assets in  
> America and Europe; there are stories of Asian billionaires buying  
> houses at record-breaking prices in Belgravia. There is a dim  
> awareness of something monumental happening far away, of  
> extraordinary wealth creation that goes beyond mere imitation. More  
> perceptive observers see something awe-inspiring in outsourcing:  
> for a western, metropolitan outlook could not have imagined a world  
> so devoid of centre, so unsentimentally flattened out, with no  
> cultural boundaries to stand in the way of absolute technology and  
> capital. They see other histories coming to the fore, they remember  
> those networks of Asian families spread out over four continents,  
> patiently comparing prices and moving goods across the globe from  
> where they are cheap to where they are expensive. Some have heard  
> rumours of “medical tourists” flocking from the UK to Delhi and  
> Mumbai to get operations that the National Health Service could not  
> provide; and, simultaneously awed and appalled, they wonder what  
> kind of minds, what kind of scale must exist in those places for  
> such plans to be dreamed up. All that was “backward” swings round  
> to the front, full of vast and uncanny promise.
>
> But the stories do not just come from far away, for even the most  
> intimate and secure of western refuges is now fully infiltrated by  
> the Third-World city. Dismissive talk of Chinese “sweatshops” that  
> would never meet EU regulations does nothing to dispel the sense of  
> a stupendous fertility, for the contents of every western household  
> are “Made in China”, and most Europeans and Americans are so  
> entirely ignorant about how things are made that the production of  
> the objects in their lives seems a kind of Asian alchemy. There is  
> more: the Third-World city has many economies, not just one, and  
> even this they are exporting. Large parts of western cities are now  
> gleefully given over to an international pirate economy of CDs,  
> DVDs, computer software and branded goods manufactured in Lagos or  
> Shenzhen at almost the same time as the Parisian and Californian  
> originals, and almost to the same quality.
>
> There are other, less delightful, infiltrations. While £30 “Louis  
> Vuitton” bags have obvious charms, who can say the same of illegal  
> immigrants? Or terrorists? Was there not a time when the West  
> seemed to enjoy total immunity from the violence of the Third  
> World, and is that absolute division not becoming a trifle blurred?  
> Did not the fascination of Dirty Pretty Things, Stephen Frears’  
> 2002 drama about illegal immigrants in London, rest on our  
> troubling sense that the Third World organ stealing industry might  
> plausibly interface, now, with the cool order of western healthcare  
> systems? Good or bad, however, it is all the same: the image of the  
> Third-World city floats insistently behind the most startling new  
> formations in the life of the west, and the secret of everything  
> “we” are turning into seems increasingly to be held not “here”, but  
> “there”.
>
> All of this would be less disruptive to thought if Third-World  
> cities had got to such a place by following the rules. According to  
> the time-honoured process of ‘development’, cities and states  
> attain maturity only when they have standardised the population  
> into one language and cosmology, contained poverty, made clear  
> divisions between different kinds of land use – humans and animals,  
> factories and residences – and imposed a unified code of law.  
> Clearly, these things have not happened in Mumbai or Shanghai, and  
> even so those places are producing things that anyone can look up  
> to. Western tourists have been commenting for decades on the  
> ingenuity they find on third-world streets – “I never knew there  
> were so many ways of making money” – but now they see the  
> improvisational ethos of these bricolage cities elevated into a  
> form of global ambition, and realise that the unlikely potential of  
> the third-world city was never unlikely at all. It is conceivable,  
> in fact, that the cities from which the grand thoughts of the  
> future will flow may look entirely unfamiliar to Americans and  
> Europeans.
>
> This seems more likely still when you contrast the intense  
> vulnerability of western, especially European, cities to blasphemy  
> and difference with the radical variety of third-world cities. The  
> happy fiction of Europe’s robust liberalism is in severe doubt as  
> it fails even to accommodate a single group of dissenters:  
> politically articulate Muslims who wish to assert a different  
> vision of social life and law. Compared to this, my adopted city of  
> Delhi, which has its own disputes and violence, seems positively  
> tranquil when one reflects that it must balance the life demands of  
> 15 million people with so many languages and cosmologies, and such  
> varied notions of commerce, law, healthcare and education, that  
> they are not a “population” in the European sense at all. “When  
> will all the camels and cows depart, when will all these strange  
> human varieties finally be banished and India become modern?”  
> tourists ask. They forget two crucial truths – first, that Europe’s  
> centuries-long project to banish all life forms it could not  
> understand or empathise with was a destructively violent process;  
> second, and most importantly, that Delhi already is modern, and  
> this – all this – is what it looks like. It is an alternative kind  
> of modernity: a swirling, agglomerative kind that seems, at this  
> point in history, to be more capable than the western version of  
> sustaining radical diversity – to be better equipped, perhaps, for  
> the principle of globalisation.
>
> This brings us to the most perverse suspicion of all. Perhaps the  
> Third-World city is more than simply the source of the things that  
> will define the future, but actually is the future of the western  
> city. Perhaps some of those tourists who look to the Third World  
> for an image of their own past are reflecting uneasily on how all  
> the basic realities of the Third-World city are already becoming  
> more pronounced in their own cities: vast gulfs between sectors of  
> the population across which almost no sympathetic intelligence can  
> flow, gleaming gated communities, parallel economies and legal  
> systems, growing numbers of people who have almost no desire or  
> ability to participate in official systems, innovations in  
> residential housing involving corrugated iron and tarpaulin. Is it  
> going too far to suggest that our sudden interest in books and  
> films about the Third-World city stems from the sense that they may  
> provide effective preparation for our future survival in London,  
> New York or Paris?
>
> Our fast-moving media culture, groping always for any image of the  
> “new” that can be used to produce more astonishment, operates in a  
> zone slightly ahead of knowledge. The “rise of China” may remain  
> for many a fantastical rumour, but as the blind sense of such large- 
> scale shifts accumulates, it becomes possible for the media to  
> peddle a new form of futurism: a strange and dazzling  
> hypermodernity that bewilders western understanding but that seems  
> to harbour the plenitude of ideas and aspiration that the west no  
> longer finds within itself.
>
> But the images we see in these books and films are not uniformly  
> pretty. Far from it. The media’s grandest and most successful  
> spectacles are invariably full of danger; and this one is no  
> different. In the erotic delectation of these yawning life forms,  
> which rise up with such titanic ambition, with such indifference to  
> the history of western ethics and aesthetics, is the terror, the  
> exhilaration of a death wish.
>
>
>
>
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