STEP 1: Research your city (Mexico City). Gather background and context about your city. Get a basic understanding of what divides the city and how that plays out in the urban landscape. This is not exactly a research paper, but an understanding of your city and its history is essential. STEP 2: Choose 1-3 aspects of a divided city that your city shares with Beszel/Ul Qoma. We focused on traits found in real-world divided cities with each new segment– nationalist movements and language, censorship and restricted movement, social inequality, and border policing– and connected those to specific moments/plot developments in The City and the City. Isolate one to three of these traits in your real-world city. You can also consider choosing an aspect that was underrepresented or was represented differently in the novel. STEP 3: Write a comparison of your real city with the fictitious cities of Beszel/Ul Qoma Use specific citations from the novel to contrast with your real city. Discuss how the fictitious divided cities are similar or different to your real city using the 1-3 traits you identified in Step 3. The goal of this paper is to think creatively and abstractly, and then advance an argument coherently. So while research is absolutely necessary, the most important piece of this assignment is to link the novel to your global city while thinking through thematic issues that have been part of the whole course. You may (and are encouraged to) draw on and cite any other course materials, and use your media analysis skills for research done via news outlets. You may consider addressing some of the larger issues about how fiction enables us to think about the “real world” and how science fiction, in particular, offers a gateway into problematizing contemporary issues.
