Malini Ranganathan's Corruption Plots Wins CUAA Anthony Leeds Book Prize
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, co-authored by SIS Professor Malini Ranganathan, has been awarded the 2024 Anthony Leeds Book Award by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association.
The Leeds Prize is named in honor of the late Anthony Leeds, an American anthroplogist best known for his work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and on urban-rural relations in Brazil, and is awarded annually to an outstanding book in urban anthropology that "advances methodologically & theoretically innovative research in urban and globalized communities."
Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Ranganathan and co-authors David L. Pike and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.
The prize will be awarded at during the annual American Anthropological Association conference in Tampa on Friday, November 22nd.