Introduction: imaging the modern city, darkly / Gyan Prakash -- Modernism and urban dystopia. The phantasm of the Apocalypse : Metropolis and Weimar modernity / Anton Kaes -- Sounds like hell : dystopian urban noise / James Donald -- Tlatelolco : Mexico City's urban dystopia / Ruben Gallo -- The aesthetics of the dark city. A regional geography of film noir : urban cystopias on- and off-screen / Mark Shiel -- Oh no, there goes Tokyo : recreational apocalypse and the city in postwar Japanese popular culture / William M. Tsutsui -- Postsocialist urban dystopia? / Li Zhang -- Friction, collision, and the grotesque : the dystopic fragments of Bombay cinema / Ranjani Mazumdar -- Imaging urban crisis. Topographies of distress : Tokyo, c. 1930 / David Ambaras -- Living in dystopia : past, present and future in contemporary African cities / Jennifer Robinson -- Imaging urban breakdown : Delhi in the 1990s / Ravi Sundaram
Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the m
