EVENTS

About th Speaker

Mark W. Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and Academic Director of the India China Institute at The New School (New York City). His forthcoming book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines long-term changes in political geographies and patterns of popular protest in the two cities. He is also the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010) and The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is also Co-Editor of the SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China (2018, with Weiping Wu).

Abstract

This talk examines the politics of urban citizenship in Shanghai and Mumbai from the perspective of changing urban political geographies and contentious politics. Civic spaces, industrial districts, retail streets, tenement housing, among other urban forms of urban political geography created spatial-social differentiations that gave meanings to urban citizenship and shaped forms of contentious politics. The patterns of popular protest and political mobilization in Shanghai and Bombay/Mumbai during the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s transpired under divergent ideological and institutional contexts but reflected similar debates over urban citizenship, or membership in the city and claims to jobs, housing, and other collective resources.