As the name implies, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life is the second in a series of readers edited by the Sarai Group, a collaborative formed by fellows at Delhi’s well-known institute for social and political research, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and the media artists and critics at the Society for Old and New Media in the Netherlands and the Raqs Media Collective in Delhi. Sarai Reader 01 explored the contemporary contours of the idea of public domain, particularly in relation to changing forms of knowledge, proprietorship, and notions of publicity. Sarai Reader 02 examines how media institutions and practices bear on urban culture and politics in the contemporary city. The resulting collection of more than fifty short pieces covering a turf of ten thematic sections includes essays, memoirs, images, and e-mails and considers both historical and contemporary case studies. This hypertext format reflects the group’s desire to read the city on different registers as well to examine the city’s involvement with various urban public projects. Though some authors explore European and American case studies, the focus remains on the urban in the so-called third world.

Urbanism in the third world, or what has come to be known as the global economic South, has largely been approached through the developmentalist frame championed by international aid organizations and national governments that views the third world as a homogenized space on an evolutionary journey of urbanization and industrialization. Urbanism is the science of managing the regrettable but inevitable ills of this process: population explosions, unstoppable migration from rural to urban areas, the reorganization of sociocultural values in the face of modernization, and so on. Though the critiques of development have been extremely valuable in undoing myths of “progress,” their understanding of the urban terrain often remains vetted by categories provided by the development discourse itself, such as infrastructure, household, factory, labor, and traditional artisan. By introducing rumor, memory, surveillance, violence, illness, film, urban folk music, theater, and e-mail communication as possible archives of urbanism, Sarai Reader 02 breaks away from traditional frameworks of urbanism and draws our attention to the texture of power that escapes synthesizing narratives.

This book’s approach also runs against the grain of a certain cultural essentialism implicit in the self-deprecating warnings of world homogenization, the globalization of mall culture, and the like, which presume a world of predisposed differences and withdraw the possibility of recognition to the cultural Other they seek to preserve. The archives explored by Sarai Reader 02 disrupt the essentializing economy of world homogenization and debate on placelessness by framing cities in the South in, to borrow a term from Veena Das’s article, “translatable” cross-cultural terms. As the editors point out in the introduction, this is the language of small, unspectacular conflicts through which contemporary global crises work themselves out. The individual sections can be seen as an ongoing catalogue of these micropolitical contestations.

The collection opens with a section entitled “Urban Morphologies,” which, as the name suggests, deals with how cities are shaped both physically and symbolically by their experiences. The papers in this section explore India and feature well-known Indian historians. Gyan Prakash looks at how Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s linear narratives of national progress, in which the village and the city figure as mythic models of modernization and tradition, cannot account for the geography of interstitial spaces of power and culture, where rural and urban cannot be distinctively identified. Ashis Nandy describes the eruption of politically motivated violence in Calcutta before the division of India and Pakistan in the poorer sectors of the city, resulting in a new cartography of religious and political affiliation that eroded older structures of tolerance. Both papers interrupt historicist narratives of Indian modernity by drawing our attention to, in Nandy’s case, the texture of violence and ruin as shadows of national self-imagination and, in Prakash’s case, the historical contours of the myth of modernization. Also noteworthy in this section is Aditya Nigam’s essay that, in contrast, asks the question of how the national subject is constituted within the frame of the contemporary urban politics of Delhi. Nigam examines how the division of the city into conceptual spaces of rumor and reason in the press, and how official statements during the sightings of an alleged “Monkeyman” in the poorer areas of Delhi in 2001, worked as means of controlling entry into the representational domain of civil citizenship.

The next section, “City as Spectacle and Performance,” explores the distinct history of entertainment mediums and modern spectatorship practices in the South to encounter broader social, cultural, and political transformations. Kathryn Hansen’s essay looks at the development of theater under the patronage of the wealthy Parsi community as a spatial index of neighborhood and community development and class consolidation in late-nineteenth-century colonial Bombay. Avishek Ganguly examines the emerging political-cultural undertones of the subculture of urban folk music in Calcutta soon after the government crackdown on ultraleft Naxalite movement in Bengal. Both Ravi Vasudevan and Ranjani Mazumdar investigate how the political anxieties of Bombay in the early 1980s came to be represented in the genre, narrative form, and film style of urban action film. The section effectively combines different historical and contemporary archives to give us the sense of the multiple temporalities that fill the space of the media in the city.

The next section, “The Street is the Carrier and the Sign,” is devoted to the work of the Raqs Media Collective. Here we see images of neon signs competing for street frontage, Medusian wiring of electricity poles, eroded scripts of layered posters and handprints on public walls, bicycle wheels adorned with shining compact discs, and more. At first, these images seem similar to those usually found in something like the World Bank’s annual World Development Report, testifying to the general makeshift status of technology and infrastructure in the third world. A closer look at the images and the accompanying fragments of text, however, reveals that this bricolage of incongruent ends and means is a testimony to the fragmented encounters between modern media practices associated with economic globalization and the unregulated corresponding legal terrain of the cites in the South. The street signs are actually hotel billboards that advertise Internet, e-mail, and fax access; unused rolls of electric wires lying on the street are overladen with reverse reflections from computer screens; the tiny CD-R insignias on the CDs adorning bicycle wheels indicate their status as byproducts of the software copy industry. Strewn among these images are screen shots of the FBI copyright warning and handwritten notes declaring the hourly rates of different workers in the global cybereconomy. These suggestive and uncanny images question the traditional relationship between visibility and infrastructure and bring into focus the texture of unrepresented spaces of the city that keep the networks of global media and finance from short circuiting.

The next section, “For Those Who Live in the City,” brings the hypertext energy of the previous section to bear on the notion of the urban everyday. Michel de Certeau’s urban sociological term, “everyday,” determines the theoretical parameters of the majority of articles in this section in as much as these articles remain preoccupied with the perception of the city through activities of walking, looking, and so on—that is, romantic categories with overtones of early-twentieth-century behavioral psychology. Yet, unlike its referent, which assumed a commonality of experience in the city, the focus here remains on the means and mediums through which notions of sameness and difference are constructed in urban environments, particularly the role played by violence and technologies of control. Dealing with different urban contexts—London, Mexico City, Beirut, Srinagar, Sarajevo, Delhi, Lagos, Berlin, and Calcutta—essays in this section vary from diary to interview to essay format, highlighting how intuitional violence, surveillance, war, and political demonstrations affect the memory and perception of the city. Yasmeen Arif, for example, looks at how the large-scale demolition and reconstruction of postwar Beirut since the formal declaration of ceasefire in 1989 became a form of mnemonic violence itself that was more painful for the residents than the destruction caused by the war. Debjani Sengupta’s paper looks at how the setting up and expansion of the “informal empire” of trade (149) by the colonial government in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta changed the structure and organization of occupations and figured in the area’s cultural, social, and political life.

The next section, “CyberMohalla Diaries,” is a selection from the diaries maintained by users of a media lab called the Compughar in Delhi’s LNJP basti, a working-class settlement constantly threatened by dislocation. Compughar is one of many nodes in a network of free software and low-cost media equipment called CyberMohalla (or cyberneighborhood) that was set up by the Sarai group in May 2001 in collaboration with Ankur, an NGO experimenting for the last two decades with alternative educational practices. The network was established as a step toward more horizontal access to the digital domain that can also provide a specific mode of reading the city.

The following section, “9/11-Media City,” is a collection of essays, memoirs, and postings from the electronic discussion forum on media and city hosted by Sarai after September 11, 2001, discussing the repercussions of the new positioning of violence in global politics. The focus remains on the specificity of modern media—how it shapes and brands catastrophic events through propagation and repetition of selected sound bites and images—as well as the broader sociopolitical discourse shaping the new ethics of war and revenge. Particularly noteworthy in this section is Veena Das’s piece, in which she looks at how the play of classical concepts of anthropology and sociology in the emerging discourse of war and violence precludes the possibility of accounting for cultural difference in translatable terms, thus resulting in a withdrawal of recognition to the cultural Other. The framing of the conflict in terms of a defense of privileged embodiment of moral values deemed universal, rather than protection of interests that are a contingent outcome of historical struggles, prevents the current debate on terrorism from understanding when and under what circumstances individual life ceases to hold value. Das ends her essay with a question crucial for the framing of contemporary political ethics: Can we mourn with the survivors of catastrophic events without appropriating their grief for other, grander projects? The section also features an interview with Paul Virilio, who talks about the emergence of global terrorism as a phenomenon larger than any individual demonized figures and ideologies. The failure of governments all over the world, he argues, to understand the invisible nature of the “enemy” in the new global warfare promotes rather than diminishes the danger of a global civil war. For Virilio, terrorism is the latest step in a series of “crimes against humanity” (216) that started at Auschwitz and Hiroshima in the form of political war and culminated with the end of the military format of war in New York.

The next section, “Virtual Architecture + Digital Urbanism,” introduced by Geert Lovink, however, seems curiously out of place in this book. Despite Lovink’s extensive work on the technopolitics of virtual mediums, the articles by architects, designers, and theorists in this section outlining the relationship between the virtual and real appear unconcerned with the complex political underlining of the rest of the sections. To explore the virtual, Lovink argues in the introduction, is to approach the interval between the built and the unbuilt where the political struggles of the contemporary city are enacted, rather than an escapist response to the “dirty reality” of today’s megacities. Yet for Ole Bouman, the “dirty” politics of the virtual only amount to incorporation of reprogrammable interfaces and surfaces within the tradition definition of architectural objects through a personal four-step metaprocess. Also, taking the exchange between the virtual and the real in the most literal sense of the fabricating interfaces, Lars Spuybroek, in an interview with Cho Im Sik, discusses the various interactive methods employed in his work. Even though Brian Caroll takes exception to the formal interpretations of the virtual, his rather overarching framing of globalization as a shared predicament of a homogenous “electrical civilization” that needs to give up its current exploitation of natural and human resources ignores the divisions and differences within this shared politics that the other sections in the reader strive to bring to the surface. The section ends on the methodologically outdated device of an “archifesto” by the design collaborative Archimedia (Molly Hanwitz and David Cox) that—in claiming an end to the current culture of mass consumption, surveillance, control, and exploitation, primarily through equal distribution of new technologies—appears only naïvely enthusiastic. Perhaps Das’s article can be instructive here in pointing out how the politically unexamined terms of emancipation can in fact work to silence the cultural Other.

The next section, “Politics of Information,” deals with the new complex of information management that controls the flow of global capital, goods, labor, and technology. The new networks of flows and controls, involving everything from states, businesses, and technologists to voluntary organizations, map out a new world geography of solidarities, differences, borders, and permeability. As Jeebesh Bagchi, one of the members of the Raqs Media Collective, points out in the introduction to the section, while this complex serves millions, it is “always inhibited by a million mutinies” (275). The papers in the section seek to bring the weight of the strategies of collaboration and the language of freedom animating the digital domain to bear on other social and political domains. The first two papers look at the ethicopolitical terrain of biotechnology. Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s article, “Banking (on) Biologicals,” examines how the different processes and models of information about human bodies relate to the changing politicoeconomic terrain, of which the intellectual-property rights and the ownership debate relating to human genetic material is the current configuration. Rana Dasgupta looks at how the biometrics industry manages its investments in the increasing levels of technological control by drawing on the unquestioned socioethical foundations of the notion of “progress.” The remaining papers in the section deal with technologies and ethics of surveillance. Shuddabrata Sengupta investigates the potential social consequences of the growth of the surveillance and data-gathering industry in India, a legal context where privacy is not outlined as an individual right in the constitution. David Lyon examines the surveillance responses to September 11, 2001. Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider look at how the digital domain can redefine traditional social practices of dissent that were considered destructive into constructive, innovative, and creative strategies of political thinking and action. K. Ravi Srinivas considers how the extension of intellectual-property rights to varieties of General Motors plants through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) shape the asymmetric balance and monopolistic structure of world trade in agricultural products.

The last section, “Alt/Option,” takes its name from the only modifiable key on the computer keyboard as a metaphor for opportunities of dissent in the globalization discourse. Noteworthy in this section is McKenzie Wark’s paper, which examines the unsettling figure of the boat person, the asylum seeker, or the refugee as a sign of globalization from below in the externalizing and internalizing discourse of national sovereignty. Wark’s case study is the Tampa incident, in which the ship of the same name carrying Afghan refugees made national headlines when it was denied access to Australian waters by John Howard, the conservative Australian prime minister who wanted to capitalize on the unemployment anxieties of the Australian electorate for his reelection. 

The texts in this book, with certain exceptions that may be found in any large collection, not only describe the long-ignored complex of media and urbanism in the South, but they also bring it into focus outside the evolutionary cultural framework of development and national progress. Given the evolving complicity of new-media technology with the circuits of economic globalization, however, the trust placed in it by the editors as a critical medium of analysis may seem premature. In this regard, it must be pointed out that the majority of the papers in this collection acknowledge the inevitable complicity of media technologies with narratives of power. For these authors, criticality can only be practiced by exploring the terms of complicity itself, rather than imagining notions of escape.