‘Corruption Plots’, published by India’s Yoda Press, wins 2024 CUAA Antony Leeds Book Prize

The Anthony Leeds Prize is awarded annually by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA), formerly SUNTA, to an outstanding book in urban anthropology. This year the prize was awarded to Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City written by Malini Ranganathan, David L Pike, and Sapana Doshi. The book has been published by Yoda Press in India and Cornell University Press in the US.

The prize is named in honour of the late Anthony Leeds, a pioneer in the field. The goal of the Leeds Prize is to showcase a monograph that advances methodically and theoretically innovative research in urban and globalised 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 polarisation. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi examine the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. ...

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