Malini Ranganathan, Corruption Plots
A new book by SIS Professor Malini Ranganathan鈥 co-authored with David Pike (麻豆果冻传媒, College of Arts & Sciences) and Sapana Doshi (University of California, Merced)鈥攅xplores the rotten, predatory, and normalized practices of elite accumulation that drive capitalist urbanization.
Corruption Plots聽illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, the authors pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption.
Praised by reviewers as 鈥渃aptivating,鈥 鈥済roundbreaking,鈥 and a 鈥渕ust-read,鈥澛Corruption Plots聽demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.
Corruption Plots was published by Cornell University Press.