Crowds and riots are a frequently recurring feature of public life/sphere in cities and nations since the onset of modernity. They figure in democratic politics and struggles in complex ways, but are rarely approved or endorsed by the liberal democratic tradition. From the liberal perspective, there is something intrinsically “illiberal” about the crowd to the extent that it leads to the dissolution of the “individual.” Within the liberal imaginary, the individual is the bedrock of social ontology, moral responsibility and economic calculation and the crowd jeopardizes all those invaluable assets. Every crowd is a potential mob and susceptible to rioting and violence. Literary and cinematic representations of crowds and riots often express this liberal bias. At the same time, while negatively portraying crowds and riots, specific literary narratives and film scenes depict them as generative sources of collective action and energy indispensable for sustaining the social bond through a dialectic of conflict and reconciliation. His presentation will dwell on the implications of this representational ambivalence.
