Completed PhD Thesis Completed Doctoral Projects/As Second Supervisor
Eviction, relocation, and negotiation. Urban-rural and gendered migration to and within Delhi from a literary perspective
Valentina Barnabei
The dissertation project inquiries on the interplay of migration, mobility, changes in urban landscape, and beautification of the city of Delhi. In so doing, this research analyses a corpus of contemporary Hindi literary texts through a combined methodological approach that includes the methods of literary geography and literary anthropology. The texts of the corpus have been written between the 80s and nowadays and their stories are set in Delhi during this same timeframe. The project, therefore, aims to analyse the perception of the changes of the urban space in the last decades from the point of views of its residents, particularly focusing on the perceptions of bastī's residents and migrants. This research also wants to investigate the social role that contemporary Hindi literature plays in the current debate on migration and gentrification in contemporary metropolises by reporting and expressing the instances of evicted and relocated dwellers.