SPACE: Seminars on Politics, Art, Culture and Entertainment - The Mean Streets of Naples and Mumbai
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The Mean Streets of Naples and Mumbai
This one-off seminar explores the relationship between politics and literature. Despite their different locations and histories, Naples and Mumbai have remarkable similarities. Both are port cities, ‘gateways’ to their countries and regional trade networks, and both are marked by extreme wealth and poverty. Most importantly, their criminal organisations, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Mumbai D-company, exert a powerful influence on the power relations of urban space. In this seminar, Dr Maria Ridda (Birkbeck College and University of Kent) will talk about her research on how transnational criminal organisations challenge traditional reconfigurations of the city through a comparison of Mumbai and Naples in Indian and Italian fictional and non-fictional texts from 2000 to the present. By going beyond the accommodational space negotiated between the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘resister’, Dr Ridda posits an alternative to conventional ways of reading the city as an arena of contestation. Her cross-disciplinary comparison exposes hidden connections between the ‘underworld’ and conventional power structures that both disrupt and reinforce the rhetoric of global capitalism and conventional state relations. Dr Ridda’s presentation will be followed by comments from Dr Caroline Edwards and Dr Jason Edwards and the event will be chaired by Dr Dermot Hodson.
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Dr Dermot Hodson