Noir urbanisms: Dystopic images of the modern city

Research output: Book/ReportBook

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe.Noir Urbanismstraces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism.Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 filmMetropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges inNoir Urbanismsis the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience.In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rub n Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.

Original languageEnglish (US)
PublisherPrinceton University Press
ISBN (Print)9780691146430
StatePublished - Sep 27 2010
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Arts and Humanities

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Noir urbanisms: Dystopic images of the modern city'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this