Ends of the Global City

“ Ends of the Global City offers an unsurpassed guide to the underlying causes of the urban polycrisis. The essays in the collection survey the terrain of contemporary urban life, parsing the new affective and aesthetic registers that germinate in global cities, and, in the process, opening new vistas on a common right to the city.”

— Ashley Dawson , author of Environmentalism from Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet

“The contributors to this volume succeed in laying out a set of propositions regarding both Global North and Global South cities that will resonate with thinking in this field for a long time to come. Ends of the Global City provides a fresh new paradigm for re-thinking the very idea of the global city.”

— Ato Quayson , author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

“Responding to the pandemic’s crisis narrative, this remarkable collection navigates the landscape of urban ruin that has doggedly shadowed the discourse of the global city. The result is a powerful and significant intervention in reimagining the global city's past, present, and future.”

— Ranjani Mazumdar , author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City

This volume of essays explores how the global city is confronting new forms of crises and disruption. Examining cities in the Caribbean, North America, Africa, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Australia, the essays use literary and cultural analysis to examine the pasts, present and futures of the global city. Ranging from the period of high postcolonial development, industrialization and compacted modernization to present-day neoliberal urban planning, the collection considers arrivals and departures in the global city, offering new critical vocabularies to analyse ongoing processes of migration, economic immiseration, and environmental collapse.

Rashmi Varma is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne, Australia.