An Archive of Development
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12457399 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ateya Khorakiwala (0000-0002-3707-7859, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 541-564 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1089-201X • E-ISSN: 1548-226X |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/1089201x-8747513 |
| OpenAlex | W3116130381 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
This article argues that a fantasy of Indian road infrastructure was archived in official documentary films. It analyzes two 1960s road construction projects through three corresponding Films Division of India documentaries, which represented India's northern borders. These show how the playfulness of film, the unruliness of infrastructure, and the precariousness of the border and its imaginary have meant that even propaganda films with set narratives erupted with an aesthetics of pleasure and violence. Replete with such dramatic signifiers, the films offer a psychic archive of the developmental state. The projective capacity of architectural knowledge enables this article to speculate on this archive of fantasy and thus interrogate infrastructure, modernization, and development, not as normative categories, but as aesthetic techniques. These produced for the Indian state a spatial narrative of fraught borders contiguous with metropoles, a condition that created a new tyranny of proximity
Aesthetics · Art · Fantasy · Literature · Media studies · Modernization theory · Narrative · Normative · Pleasure · Political science · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · State (computer science · The Imaginary · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · History · Law · Psychology · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure
India's political economy, 1947-1977
Visions of Development
Unlearning the City
Producing India
Archive Fever
The Tyranny of Proximity
You've Told Me That Three Times Now
The Will to Motorization
Moving pictures
Flaws in the Flow
Encountering Development
Seeing Like a State
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Communicationism
| Highly cited | No |
|---|