LAUSR

ABSTRACT This article challenges claims made for Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers as a piece of non-fiction, using the text to explore questions around subaltern agency and voice that have been at the centre of postcolonial studies since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It foregrounds the continued relevance of Spivak’s question in the postmillennial context of the neo-liberal city, particularly as it relates to issues of urban governance, and argues that a postcolonial reading of Boo’s book reveals a new set of triangulated connections between subalternity, literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal Indian city. Beautiful Forevers reveals how the violent infrastructures of such cities continue to be shaped by the legacies of colonialism and exacerbated by neo-liberal urban governance, and how the genre of literary non-fiction is responding to, and at times both complicit with and resistant to, this neo-liberal urban regime.