Topic
Magical Urbanism and the Everyday City: Micro-Urban Experiences in Lispector and Lahiri
In my research, I am interested in developing magical urbanism as a critical framework for exploring contemporary urban experiences, with a special focus on micro-urban experiences. This paper focuses on micro-urban experience in the works of Clarice Lispector and Jhumpa Lahiri, with particular attention to Lispector’s Too Much of Life (crônicas) and Lahiri’s Whereabouts. Through these texts, I examine how everyday gestures, fleeting encounters, and minor spatial practices become central sites through which urban life is perceived, narrated, and reimagined.
In my analysis of micro-urban experience, I employ the interrelated concepts of translocality, porosity, and heterotopia. Translocality captures how spaces, people, and meanings circulate across scales and contexts; porosity highlights the permeability of urban thresholds; and heterotopia reveals spaces of coexistence, contradiction, and potentiality within the urban fabric.
The works of Lispector and Lahiri provide particularly productive case studies for this framework because they resist monumental or panoramic representations of the city and instead foreground fragmented, intimate, and affective urban encounters. Lispector’s crônicas register the city through brief observations, interior monologues, and sensory disruptions, capturing moments in which ordinary urban settings become sites of existential and spatial intensity. Lahiri’s Whereabouts, by contrast, strips the city of specific names and coordinates, producing a deliberately indeterminate urban space that reflects the protagonist’s affective dislocation and translocal subjectivity.
In both cases, the city emerges not as a stable backdrop but as a porous and mutable environment shaped by memory, movement, and perception. By reading Lispector and Lahiri together, this paper demonstrates how micro-urban experiences complicate established urban imaginaries, opening spaces for socio-spatial negotiation and forms of everyday cosmopolitanism grounded in the minor, the habitual, and the fleeting.
Tetyana Kasima (University of Tartu)
Tetyana Kasima is a PhD student and Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu. Her research interests include urban literature, the study of heterotopic and liminal spaces, magical urbanism, and the exploration of micro-urban experiences in the works of Jhumpa Lahiri and Clarice Lispector. She is also interested in the figures of the flâneur and the flâneuse, and their roles in exploring urban experience and mobility.