Description
Book SynopsisThe Arts of Citizenship in African Cities pushes the frontiers of how we understand cities and citizenship and offers new perspectives on African urbanism. Nuanced ethnographic analyses of life in an array of African cities illuminate the emergent infrastructures and spaces of belonging through which urban lives and politics are being forged.
Trade Review“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)
Table of ContentsIntroduction; Rosalind Fredericks and Mamadou Diouf 1. Too Many Things to Do: Social Dimensions of City Making in Africa; AbdouMaliq Simone 2. The Funeral in the Village: An Ultimate Test for African Urbanites? Shifting Imaginations of Belonging, Mobility and Community; Peter Geschiere 3. Citizenship and Civility in Peri-Urban Mozambique; Juan Obarrio 4. Dealing with the Prince over Lagos': Pentecostal Arts of Citizenship; Ruth Marshall 5. The Road to Redemption: Performing Pentecostal Citizenship in Lagos; Adedamola Osinulu 6. The Old Man is Dead': Hip Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth; Rosalind Fredericks 7. Beautifying Brazzaville: Arts of Citizenship in the Congo; Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga 8. Representing an African City and Urban Elite: The Nightclubs, Dance Halls, and Red Light District of Interwar Accra; Jinny Prais 9. Seeing Dirt in Dar es Salaam: Sanitation, Waste and Citizenship in the Post-Colonial City; Emily Brownell 10. 'Ambivalent Cosmopolitans'? Senegalese and Malian Migrants in Johannesburg; Christine Ludl 11. Walls and White Elephants: Oil, Infrastructure, and the Materiality of Citizenship in Urban Equatorial Guinea; Hannah Appel 12. Nigerian Modernity and the City: Lagos 1960 – 1980; Giles Omezi
