1st Edition
Africa and Urban Anthropology Theoretical and Methodological Contributions from Contemporary Fieldwork
This volume offers valuable anthropological insight into urban Africa, covering a range of cities across a continent that has become one of the fastest urbanizing geographic areas of the globe.
Consideration is given to the structures, social formations, and rhythms that constitute the definition of an African city, town, or urban space, and to current concepts for thinking about African cities in the twenty-first century. The contributors examine topics including notions of belonging, the effects of globalization, colonialism, and transnationalism on African urban life, the cultural dimensions of infrastructure and public resources, mobility, labor issues, spatial organization, language, and popular culture trends, among other themes.
The book reflects on how the ethnography of urban Africa fits within anthropology and urban studies, and on new theoretical concepts and methodologies that can be created through anthropological fieldwork in African cities. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students from anthropology, African studies and urban studies, as well as sociology and geography.
Part I: Introduction
1 Introduction
Deborah Pellow and Suzanne Scheld
Part II. Knowing the City and Urban Imaginaries
2 Kafanchan: A Nigerian Town and its Global Horizons
Ulf Hannerz
3 Beyond the Rhodes Livingstone-Institute. Anthropological Research in Urban Africa from the 1930s to the 2000s
Katja Werthmann
4 Seeing the African Urban: Toward a Visual Anthropology of African Cities
Danny Hoffman
5 Mediated Ethnography: Images, Infrastructure, and New Imaginaries in Urban Africa
William Bissell
6 Class, Cities, and the Multiple-Disposition Habitus: Theoretical Insights from an African City
Anne Lewinson
Part III. Urban Spaces
7 South Sudan, Politics of Liberation and Contest Over Juba
Jok Madut Jok
8 Manantali, Mali: Urbanization in and around a Small Town in the West Africa Savanna
Dolores Koenig
9 Place-Making, Regulatory Politics, and the Roots of Informality in Colonial Accra
Jennifer Hart
10 Schubart Park: Spatializing Opportunity in Colonial and Postcolonial South Africa
William Suk
11 On ‘Worlding’ Urban Ethnography: Conceptualizing Scalar Reconfigurations in an Ethiopian Frontier City
Daniel K. Thompson, Jemal Yusuf Mahamed, and Kader Mohamoud
Part IV. Urban Infrastructure and Mobility
12 The Infrastructure of Submarine Urbanism: Zanzibar in a Black and Blue World
Garth Myers
13 Temporalities of Absence: Infrastructural Politics and Time in Cape Town’s Informal Settlements
Angela Storey
14 Sorting ‘Wire Spaghetti’ in Zanzibar Stone Town
Rose Marie Beck
15 Modernity and the Art of Motorcycle Citizenship: Getting to Work in Nigeria’s Planned Capital
Rudolf Gaudio
Part V. Power of Urban Belongingness
16 We Were Running and Running: Rural-Urban Imaginaries and Strategic Mobility During the Liberian Civil War
Mary H. Moran
17 Reclaiming Citizenship: The Performance and Contestation of the Rural-Urban Distinction in Northern Ghana
Saida Hodžić
18 Religious Relevance Capital; the Urban Anthropology of Religious Diversity and the Significance of Social Support. The Case of Urban Religion in Botswana
Rijk van Dijk
19 Property, Mobility, and Belonging in an African Metropolis
Matthew Nesvet
Part VI. Language and the City
20 Urban Surfaces and Linguistic Landscape: Writing, Power and Ideology in Dakar’s Public Space
Fiona McLaughlin
21 Naming the Future in Urban Niger: The Scriptural Economy of the Fadas
Adeline Masquelier
22 Igboro ni mo wa: Popular Linguistic Innovation in Urban Yoruba Lives
Augustine Agwuele
Part VII. Conclusion
23 Conclusion
Afterword
Abdoumaliq Simone
Biography
Deborah Pellow is a Professor Emerita in the Anthropology Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, New York, USA.
Suzanne Scheld is a Professor in the Anthropology Department at California State University, Northridge, USA.
