Industrial debris : memory, materiality, and the making of Mumbai's mill lands
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation, Industrial Debris: Memory, Materiality, and the Making of Mumbai's Mill Lands, explores everyday life within Mumbai's declining textile mills and working-class tenement buildings, also known as "chawls." Like many cities across the globe, Mumbai is facing the grim realities of deindustrialization, urban restructuring, and the casualization of labor. The city's many textile workers once inhabited most of the city's centrally located chawls, but the collapse of the industry in the early 1980s has led to job loss, resettlement, redevelopment, and gentrification. Based on two years of ethnographic research amongst textile workers, mill owners, developers, activists, city bureaucrats, architects, and planners in the transforming mill lands of Central Mumbai, this study asks: "How does the experience of work help people create a sense of themselves? In asking this question, I travel between the last privately owned operational textile mill (which I call Dhanraj Spinning and Weaving, Ltd.) and the chawls inhabited by Dhanraj's remaining work force. Through these spaces, I ask what the place of work is in the production of personhood. By moving beyond the factory floor and into the domestic spaces of working-class life, the intersection of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and regional origin is in direct and unavoidable conversation with large-scale narratives of belonging. In drawing attention to the simultaneity of multiple social positions, I argue that both Mumbai's written working-class history and its contemporary post-industrial landscape actively omit the diversity of mill labor, still evident on the factory floor and in the disappearing chawls. Specifically, I show how women and ethnic minorities are doubly marginalized through processes of transition. However, the dynamic built environment of postindustrial landscapes reflects the shifting livelihoods of poorer residents fighting to remain visible in urban centers. This study demonstrates that while the built environment may change, landscapes remain infused with memories. Through ethnographic methodology paired with feminist geography, queer theory, and theories of urban space, I excavate these traces of memory and juxtapose them against official narratives in order to make visible these processes of gendered erasure and racial anxiety. While ethnographically specific to Mumbai, this study speaks to current global economic and political trends of deindustrialization, privatization, and neoliberalism and highlights their gendered entailments.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Finkelstein, Maura Susan |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
| Primary advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Lawrence, 1961- |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas |
| Thesis advisor | Voss, Barbara L, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Advisor | Cohen, Lawrence, 1961- |
| Advisor | Hansen, Thomas |
| Advisor | Voss, Barbara L, 1967- |
| Advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Maura Finkelstein. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2012 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Maura Susan Finkelstein
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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