Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor

In Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, Ankhi Mukherjee offers a magisterial work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Spanning three continents, this hugely ambitious book reads fictional representations of poverty with each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, particularly as that culture is fostered by state policies toward the welfare needs of impoverished populations. It explores the causal relationship between precarity and mental health through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy. In Unseen City, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the unconscious is key to poverty alleviation.

Author: Ankhi Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/09/2021
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9781316517581

About the Author
Mukherjee, Ankhi: - Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. She is the author of two monographs and the editor of three essay collections. What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2014) won the British Academy Prize for English Literature. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the British Academy, AHRC, and Wellcome Trust.