Dedication; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations and Translations; Foreword; List of Figures; Introduction: Antinomies of an agrarian city; 1. The experiment; 2. The village in the city; 3. The plot; 4. The bureaucrat and the survey; 5. The tenement; 6. The camp; Conclusion: Urban limits; Index.
The book examines how globalised urban labour and property markets are produced by agrarian actors, institutions, spaces and territories.
Thomas G. Cowan teaches economic geography at the University of Nottingham. His research interests are urban geography, South Asian political economy, labour studies and economic development and growth.
'In Subaltern Frontiers, Tom Cowan skillfully explores agrarian and
subaltern processes that continue to remake the shifting
geographies India's flagship private city of Gurgaon. Through
theoretically-informed, politically-committed, grounded research
unafraid to take on real-world and scholarly shibboleths, Cowan
shows how subaltern processes, labors, actors, forms of imagination
and political struggles continue to animate the urban frontier.
This book is a model of excellence in Geography and Urban Studies.'
Sharad Chari, University of California at Berkeley
'In this rich and ethnographically grounded study of peripheral
urbanization in India, Tom Cowan offers a compelling account of how
sedimented relations of land and labour suture the urban and
agrarian worlds, in contingent yet forceful ways. Through the
analytic of subalternity as a processual relation, Subaltern
Frontiers traces the careful compromises and contestations that
make the city of Gurgaon possible and makes a valuable contribution
to our understanding of agrarian urbanism. It is a brilliant and
clearly written book that will be of interest to scholars of
urbanization, comparative urbanism, labour geographies, and urban
theory.' Shubhra Gururani, York University
'Subaltern Frontiers is a superb, sometimes surprising, and often
moving analysis of agrarian transformations in Gurgaon, an iconic
peri-urban frontier of Delhi. Eschewing tired developmentalist
scripts of urban modernity and its impediments, Cowan instead
underscores how agrarian and working-class actors and spaces
subtend the material and imaginative possibilities of this new
urban India. He shows how heterogenous agrarian worlds,
encompassing land, property, and working frontiers, enable as well
as thwart the designs and desires of state and capital, unsettling
hegemonic trajectories of city-making and accumulation.
Theoretically luminous, ethnographically plush, and vividly
narrated, Subaltern Frontiers provides singular insights into the
under-noticed geographies and cultural politics of agrarian
urbanization. It is a surpassing contribution to the fields of
agrarian and urban studies.' Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota
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