Abstract
Indian science fiction cinema, in this chapter, becomes a tool for understanding the cultural negotiation of futuristic urban spaces in the neoliberal era. An analysis of Love Story 2050, a utopian time travel film portraying the futuristic Mumbai of 2050, reveals the hidden desires and anxieties of imagining the urban technoscientific spaces as well as a crisis of collective life in the post-liberalization period. Political culture of neoliberal India embodies a desire to inhabit utopian cities of the future, but this desire coproduces cultural anxieties about the loss of the nation’s ‘Hindu essence’. Continuous alterations between the desire for and fear of the utopian city reflect an irresolvable crisis inherent to the ongoing political endeavor of blending neoliberal developmentalism with Hindutva ideology in the making of the global city.
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Varughese, S.S. (2017). Cities of Neoliberal Future: Urban Utopia in Indian Science Fiction Cinema. In: Kuldova, T., Varghese, M. (eds) Urban Utopias. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47623-0_6
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