ABSTRACT
The forms colliding within Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People and in Naomi Wallace’s play The Hard Weather Boating Party participate with the conflicting urban forms that shape their respective cities: Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, and Louisville, Kentucky, US. Urban imaginaries that mean to address the chemical industry toxins that most affect industry’s residential neighbors and workers in both cities should derive from focused attention on the complex encounters of social, political, material, and aesthetic forms rather than on singular ideologies or assumptions of rationalist progress. Literature has a role to play in informing such urban imaginaries and, indeed, being such urban imaginaries.
