Ends of the Global City

This edited volume explores how the global city – so integral to processes of globalization and neoliberalization worldwide – is now facing new forms of disruption. The essays in this collection use the lens of resistance and critique across a range of literary and cultural texts to explore the potential futures of global cities. They reread neglected histories and fault lines of representation in urban literature around the world to shed new light on 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, including the forced movement of undocumented people. Rashmi Varma is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (2011) and co-editor of Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (2018). Her book Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India is forthcoming. She is a founding editorial collective member of the journal Feminist Dissent and has published numerous essays on postcolonial and feminist theory, activism and literature in edited volumes and journals. Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures in the School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (2021) and The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (2011). She is also co-editor, with Gary Wilder, of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (2018) and, with Ato Quayson, of The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature (2023).