A B S T R A C TIn this article, I draw from fieldwork on the micropractices of hawkers' illicit dealings with low-level state functionaries in Mumbai, India, to explore how claims to city space are negotiated. I argue that what is often understood as a breakdown in urban governance is, instead, what I call an "ordinary space of negotiation" that constitutes the grounds on which claims to substantive citizenship are made. This ethnographic exploration of what practices of corruption produce has the possibility to expand how scholars think about the state and political claim making in liberal democratic contexts at large.
This article examines the new phenomenon of "citizens' groups" in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the city's public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbai's efforts to become a "global" city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as espoused by the Indian state following the "liberalization" of the economy in the early 1990s. However, in this case, it is these civil society organizations, not the state-whose functionaries in fact benefit from a certain element of unruliness on the streets-who are the agents of increased control over populations and of the rationalization of urban space. This article, based on fieldwork-based research, argues that the way in which citizens' groups exclude poor populations from the city is more complex than a straightforward deployment of neoliberalism, and is imbricated with transnational political economic arrangements in uneven and often inconsistent ways. In particular, this article explores how civic activists in these organizations envision their role in the city, and how their activism attempts to reconfigure the nature of citizenship. For instance, civic activists consider themselves to be the stewards of the city's streets and sidewalks, and wage their battles against what they consider unruly hawkers, a corrupt state, and a complacent middle-class public. Moreover, civic activists render street hawkers' political claims illegitimate by speaking on behalf of the abstract "citizen"of Mumbai, thus implying that hawkers' unions speak only on behalf of the vested interests of a single population. In this way, they mobilize a normative notion of civil society in order to exclude the vast segment of city residents who either sell or buy goods on the street. In doing so, the civic activists transform the discourse and practice of politics in the city, so that, ironically, while on one hand using the rhetoric of citizen participation, they in fact undermine the radically heterogeneous forms of democratic political participation the city offers.
The goal of this special section of South Asia is to generate new ways to describe and theorise mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu word that can mean fun, pleasure and play. Scholarly writing often treats fun and pleasure as either frivolous, and therefore irrelevant, or as symbols of a more important social phenomenon. At times, this is motivated by political critique; researchers often believe that entertainment necessarily supports the status quo. At other times, researchers avoid mazaa because we are sceptical of things that have an embodied pull on us. Indeed, mazaa is sensuous; it draws us in with its viscerality. Rather than see these qualities as obstacles, we argue that mazaa's embodied, unwieldly and seductive properties can generate new ways of knowing, analysing, critiquing and writing. Contributors to this section write on a wide range of topics-including, but not limited to, dance, fashion, food and flirting. Together, the essays demonstrate a methodology for making mazaa an optic. This methodology includes keeping mazaa centre stage, allowing oneself to be moved, maintaining an open-ended reading practice that allows for indeterminacy, and writing with an abundance of detail. Dwelling in mazaa does not mean ignoring inequalities, violence or power, but finding new ways of writing about the forms of life that thrive even in times of crisis. It also means illuminating how pleasure can generate new communities and political possibilities as well as new understandings of the role of the critic in social analysis.
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