In today’s cities, corruption narratives are at the heart of a widely accepted yet highly malleable discourse about the exercise of power. Brought to life through street-corner rumors, public protests, and backroom deals, corruption talk does not simply call out the bribe-taking bureaucrat. Rather, corruption stories have become a way to perceive rapid and unequal urban spatial change. In this collaborative book project and digital platform, geographers Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi and literary and film studies scholar David Pike study the work of corruption stories in the imagination of global cities. The project begins with ethnographic forays in two Indian cities—Mumbai and Bangalore—and brings them into conversation with a cross-section of real and imagined urban worlds. In everyday life and in literature, culture, and film, the experience of urban transformation—from the sale of a plot of land to the construction of a luxury high-rise to the fate of a slum—unfolds through corruption plots. At stake in these plots are contested notions of the public, which construe who is harmed, who is to blame, and ultimately, what is the meaning of ethics and citizenship in struggles over space. These narratives and the intensities of feeling they conjure matter because they shape how people negotiate conditions of injustice and inequality and act on city spaces. Existing scholarship across the social sciences and humanities only tells part of how ordinary urban dwellers experience and narrate corruption. Rather than adopting a narrow definition of corruption often given by international development agendas, this project shows how corruption discourse enables a contradictory sense of ethics and diverse notions of the public—what is referred to here as “imagined publics.” It does so by exploring how stories of corruption are situated historically, and how they invoke shifting ethical registers for grasping both spectacular and everyday places.

Award period: August 1, 2017 through July 31, 2019