The Urban Grotesque: Life and Debt in Jakarta

In The Urban Grotesque, Doreen Lee shows how ordinary life is made and sustained in Jakarta, one of the world’s largest and most dense cities, through obligation and debt, grift and grounded financial practices. Lee centers the concept of the urban grotesque as a fiscal imaginary and ethical schema, demonstrating how it moves comprehension of urban life beyond the aspirational toward a more sober understanding of the costs of living alongside others in an unequal and expensive modern city. Weaving ethnographic descriptions with parables that illuminate core urban lessons, Lee draws readers into the movements and moods of everyday experience in Jakarta across the city’s most common spaces and problems. Utilizing tropes of circulation to reveal and critique the social forms of Jakarta, The Urban Grotesque explores how compliance and resistance to debts and gifts inform the financial streams that underlie the urban landscape.