Art Deco: A mode of mobility

Preface

Preface I n the very early hours of November 26, 2008, I was awakened to the sound of my cell phone. I had just arrived in Mumbai a couple of days earlier, and after two somewhat frustrating days, I was starting to feel more comfortable and confident that I would be able to handle the challenges of researching in an environment very different from what I was accustomed to. It was my wife Rebecca on the phone asking if I was okay. That is how I learned about the terrorist attacks going on around me. For the next three and a half days, I was mostly quarantined in my Art Deco hotel, a few blocks away from one of the sites under siege and from the principal sites of my research. ART DECO—A MODE OF MOBILITY XIV As an historian of architecture and visual culture I have asked myself (or have been asked), “What is at stake with this project?”—basically , “Why do what you’re doing?” Being so close to the brutality of terrorism in some ways provided for me one answer. I had already done a fair amount of work on the material related to Bombay, including some reading about the Taj Mahal Hotel. The photographs I took of that enormous structure (see fig. 3.13, p. 184) are rather unsettling for me since they are full of anticipation of what would transpire just a day later, and they blur together with the televisual images I watched constantly for three days. In asking myself what is at stake in studying places of public culture like hotels, movie theatres, department stores, train stations, etc., I saw firsthand the symbolic potency of such spaces. That the attacks on Mumbai—the financial heart and considered the most “Westernized” city in India—were aimed not at financial institutions but at sites of public culture and mobility reinforced for me the idea that these spaces carry a significant socio-political valence that is often overlooked. The Art Deco spaces I investigate in this book—spaces that might be characterized as everyday and in some cases frivolous sites of escape—likewise should be seen as socially, culturally, and politically significant. ...