Short description:

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.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

Part I: Introduction

1 Introduction

Part II. Knowing the City and Urban Imaginaries

2 Kafanchan: A Nigerian Town and its Global Horizons

3 Beyond the Rhodes Livingstone-Institute. Anthropological Research in Urban Africa from the 1930s to the 2000s

4 Seeing the African Urban: Toward a Visual Anthropology of African Cities

5 Mediated Ethnography: Images, Infrastructure, and New Imaginaries in Urban Africa

6 Class, Cities, and the Multiple-Disposition Habitus: Theoretical Insights from an African City

7 South Sudan, Politics of Liberation and Contest Over Juba

8 Manantali, Mali: Urbanization in and around a Small Town in the West Africa Savanna

9 Place-Making, Regulatory Politics, and the Roots of Informality in Colonial Accra

10 Schubart Park: Spatializing Opportunity in Colonial and Postcolonial South Africa

11 On ?Worlding? Urban Ethnography: Conceptualizing Scalar Reconfigurations in an Ethiopian Frontier City

Part IV. Urban Infrastructure and Mobility

12 The Infrastructure of Submarine Urbanism: Zanzibar in a Black and Blue World

13 Temporalities of Absence: Infrastructural Politics and Time in Cape Town?s Informal Settlements

14 Sorting ?Wire Spaghetti? in Zanzibar Stone Town

15 Modernity and the Art of Motorcycle Citizenship: Getting to Work in Nigeria?s Planned Capital

Part V. Power of Urban Belongingness

16 We Were Running and Running: Rural-Urban Imaginaries and Strategic Mobility During the Liberian Civil War

17 Reclaiming Citizenship: The Performance and Contestation of the Rural-Urban Distinction in Northern Ghana

18 Religious Relevance Capital; the Urban Anthropology of Religious Diversity and the Significance of Social Support. The Case of Urban Religion in Botswana

19 Property, Mobility, and Belonging in an African Metropolis

20 Urban Surfaces and Linguistic Landscape: Writing, Power and Ideology in Dakar?s Public Space

21 Naming the Future in Urban Niger: The Scriptural Economy of the Fadas

22 Igboro ni mo wa: Popular Linguistic Innovation in Urban Yoruba Lives

Part VII. Conclusion

23 Conclusion

Afterword