Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Patke, Rajeev S. (Rajeev Shridhar)

Titel

Benjamin in Bombay? An Extrapolation

Ist Teil von

• Postmodern culture, 2002-05, Vol.12 (3)

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Walter Benjamin read cities as if they were texts in which one could read the progressive development of the materiality of culture. He applied to this reading a form of interpretive violence recognizable as the ideal of an idea enshrined in the surrealist movement. His characteristic metaphors for the modern metropolis included the labyrinth, the maze, the rune, the fragment, and kitsch. The essay explores the uses and limits of such metaphors when applied to times and places later and other than those that provided Benjamin with his terms of reference. The aim of the experiment is to test the viability of the Benjaminian perspective as a refractive lens focused on metropolitan culture, while using it to generate a discourse about the diversity of metropolitan experiences as globalized forms of the local. The literary productions of contemporary Bombay, ranging from the fictional Parsi world of Rohinton Mistry to the polemic and political writings of the Dalit movement in Marathi poetry, are used to identify the limit factor of the extrapolation. In his essay "Critique of Violence," Benjamin had envisioned a form of divine and bloodless violence as an apocalyptic end to history. The irony of that vision has been often noted in the context of his own subsequent flight from persecution into suicide. The present essay addresses another, and equally bitter, irony that serves to show how the history of a modern and postcolonial city like Bombay resists the Benjaminian in its bloody version of a communitarian apocalypse.