Overview

The 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.

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9781137516312

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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 be reduced 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

Author Information

AbdouMaliq Simone, Goldsmiths College, University of Londo, UK Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Ruth Marshall, University of Toronto, Canada David Simon, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Juan Obarrio, Johns Hopkins University, USA Remy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Universite de Lille, France Jinny Prais, Columbia University, USA Emily Brownell, University of Northern Colorado, USA Christine Ludl, University of Bayreuth, Germany Hannah Appel, University of California, Berkeley, USA Giles Omezi, University College London, UK Adedamola Osinulu, University of Michigan, US

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