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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“A valuable addition to a growing, interdisciplinary body of work that provides new avenues for thinking African urbanism to ‘decolonize urban theory’ … . this collection not only offers a range of nuanced historical and ethnographic studies of urban life, but also provides new insights and avenues for research on citizenship, infrastructures, and the built form. Perhaps most importantly, these essays enable us to think anew about the politics of cities and city-ness in Africa and beyond.” (Antina von Schnitzler, American Ethnologist, Vol. 43 (2), 2016)
"This collection is a major contribution to a recentred and more global urban studies it provides a definitive demonstration that conceptualisations of the urban must also begin with cities in Africa. Starting with the diverse experiences of life in cities across Africa, this volume collects the insights of a new generation of urban scholarship committed to contributing to wider understandings of urban citizenship through analysing the processes shaping these cities. The arts of citizenship are caught as they emerge, for example, in the carefully crafted words, styles and material forms of hip-hop in Dakar, les sapeurs in Brazzaville, courthouses in small towns in Mozambique, spiritual warfare emanating from sprawling religious camps outside Lagos, or the production of political legitimacy in oil-industry funded enclaves in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. Far from simply reflecting cities in crisis, although they are surely that too, the authors show how powerful and disenfranchised alike recraft these cities and remake the terms of their inhabitation and rule, through recruiting widely varying idiomatic and global cultural repertoires and through specific reworkings of the material and built environment' - Jenifer Robinson, Professor, Department of Geography, University College London, UK"The African city in all of its complexity, vitality and abjection has been at the forefront of theorizing not just the post-colonial city but the urban world writ large. This terrific collection by a new generation of urban ethnographers and historians, unpacks the everyday negotiations and practices through which the continent's cities are undergoing processes of worlding, and through which city residents, of multiple stripe, grapple with everyday life. Rather than pathologize or celebrate African urban life in a monochrome way, the diverse and exciting contributions offer up something else: cities as sites of experimentation and emergent reconfigurations of citizen that cannot bereduced to the great clanking gears of globalization, neoliberalism or state authority. A masterful collection whose reach will extend far beyond the community of Africanists.' - Michael Watts, Professor of Geography, Class of 1963 Chair, University of California, Berkeley, USA
About the authors
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities
Book Subtitle: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging
Editors: Mamadou Diouf, Rosalind Fredericks
Series Title: Africa Connects
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481887
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave History Collection, History (R0)
Copyright Information: Mamadou Diouf and Rosalind Fredericks 2014
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-48187-0Published: 18 December 2014
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-48188-7Published: 16 December 2014
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 310
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations
Topics: African Culture, Urban Studies/Sociology, Development Studies, Anthropology