Simulating the “city of joy”: state choreography and the re-appropriation of public spaces in Kolkata

Videos of what seems like enforced and orchestrated solidarity, performed by celebrities from the film industry in Kolkata, each scene blending into another, upper-class urban home-space resembling other, envisioning a brighter future, rendering same song multiple voices, with metaphors cities smiling again, circulated through social media are problematic erasures particularities, “of presence poor, crime, dirt, work”. While nature public spaces performances gathering is evolving amidst pandemic, this paper, probing primarily state-sponsored strategic COVID-affected argues that simulation performance state-envisioned “joy” postcolonial neoliberal city to mimic imagined global city, embody “the ageographia, surveillance control, without end” has frightfully familiar echoes coloniality hegemonic control.