The sudden stardom of the third world city.(echoes and shifts)

Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, October, 2006 by Dasgupta, Rana

Why is the third world metropolis suddenly taking over Western culture?

Tsotsi (2005), a film about Johannesburg gangs recently released in the U.K., took the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Another Oscar went to The Constant Gardener (2005), an account of the dark forces at work in Nairobi, whose director, Fernando Meirelles, shot to international fame in 2002 with his portrait of a Rio favela, City of God. Last October's Raindance Film Festival climaxed with a screening of Secuestro Express (2005), a film about abduction gangs in Caracas. And at the end of 2004, two best-selling books explored the fiercely competitive under- and over-worlds of Mumbai: Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Gregory David Roberts's Shantaram, which will be released next...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.