DOI: https://doi.org/10.34680/urbis-2025-5(2)-244-262
Victorian steampunk as urban mythology: the city-palimpsest in the series Carnival Row
Yervand Margaryan
Russian-Armenian University, Yerevan, Armenia
Institute of Oriental Studies of NAS RA, Yerevan, Armenia
[email protected]
ORCID: 0000-0001-7396-2399
ABSTRACT
In this study, the TV series Carnival Row (2019–2023) is considered a modern urban myth presented in the aesthetics of Victorian steampunk. The article analyzes the fictional city of Burg as a multi-layered palimpsest of cultural and historical layers that act as tools for criticizing modern urbanism. Steampunk is understood here not as nostalgic decoration but as a retrofuturist optic that fuses past and future to expose the hidden mechanisms of power, social control, and the systematic exclusion of marginalized groups. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Andreas Huyssen, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and other theorists of critical urbanism and postcolonial studies, the author analyzes the architecture of power, social stratification, and biopolitical practices of the Victorian metropolis as an allegory of the contemporary global city. Particular attention is devoted to the Carnival Row ghetto as a heterotopia of otherness – a space where alternative forms of identity, social imagination, and political resistance emerge. Through metaphors of the body, disease, palimpsest, and carnival, the series appears as a multi-layered commentary on the city as a living organism and an arena of struggle for the “right to the city.” In this context, Victorian steampunk functions as a tool of neoliberal urbanism, revealing new forms of social segregation and repressive mechanisms of a disciplinary society. The carnivalesque, understood in Bakhtin's sense as a temporary liberation from dominant hierarchies, becomes a source of social renewal – a space where society's suppressed energies return as hybrid culture, transgressive laughter, and utopian imagination. Thus, Carnival Row represents the postindustrial city as a complex interweaving of memory and oblivion, trauma and possibility, control and liberation. In this city-palimpsest, imperial past and utopian future exist in a state of constant, tense dialogue.
KEYWORDS: steampunk, urbanism, heterotopia, palimpsest, postcolonialism, biopolitics, carnival, social space, city, Carnival Row.
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Information about the author
Yervand G. Margaryan
Dr. Sci. (Historical Sciences), Professor,
Director of the Institute of Humanities
Russian-Armenian University
123, Hovsepa Emina St., Yerevan, 0025, Armenia
ORCID: 0000-0001-7396-2399
Web of Science ResearcherID: ABH-2113-2021
Scopus AuthorID: 57202683981
e-mail: [email protected]
For citation:
Margaryan, Ye. G. (2025). Victorian steampunk as urban mythology: the city-palimpsest in the series Carnival Row. Urbis et Orbis. Microhistory and Semiotics of the City, 5(2), 244–262. https://doi.org/10.34680/urbis-2025-5(2)-244-262
