Splintering urbanism and nationalism in the “world-class city”: reflections on field work on stand-up comedy production in Mumbai

ABSTRACT This paper explores the contradictions I encountered during fieldwork in the city of Mumbai, India, studying stand-up comedy as a site of struggle over globalization and national identity. In this essay I will focus on my engagement with the theoretical framework of “splintering urbanism” (Graham and Marvin 2001)—which I adopted to situate the emergence of stand-up comedy in the context of the production of ‘global’, ‘world-class’ urban space in Mumbai. During my fieldwork, I observed that the processes of splintering urbanism in Mumbai had produced conditions that encouraged the rise of nationalism, which runs contrary to the assumption that splintering urbanism creates a “global urban archipelago”. This paper argues that producing Mumbai as a world-class city is equated with national advancement and cultural transformation. Specifically, Mumbai becomes India’s global city, and the mobilizing of resources and labor for the global city based economic growth is promoted through nationalist rhetoric. Mumbai’s stand-up comedy scene is a good site to study these transformations because it has been a site of controversy over national identity since the 2010’s and because its emergence is almost entirely dependent on the splintering of Mumbai’s infrastructure services.