Native, Worker, Owner: Theorizing African Embodiments in the City

Sponsored by the African Urban Dynamics CRG under the auspices of AEGIS, this workshop series features scholars and teachers who focus on African cities.

Our urban spaces are shaped by a multitude of histories, peoples, spirits, ecologies, economies and aspirations, even when particular narratives remain hegemonic in the formal archives, such as those that attend to the former “colonial capital” or current “world class” futures, for example. While acknowledging the longue duree of colonialism in our built environment, in this session we intentionally embrace other entangled embodiments that speak from African places. Here, we are attuned to the vernacular articulations of the city across different times, and that reference the trajectories of urban life when the African was conceived of primarily as the ‘native,’ then the ‘worker,’ and now the ‘owner.’ Through these porous categories, we signal other epistemics towards more expansive city intimacies. Drawing on music videos, superhero animations, adolescent drawings, grassroots environmental efforts, slang vernaculars, student protests, cultural proverbs and more, we seek to share tools and techniques to enable more situated encounters with diverse African cities. Our primary objective is to encourage co-learning about African urban spaces through articulations that are often not legitimated as critical tools, yet which register important and insurgent claims about the histories, presents and futures of our dynamic African cities.

Register for the session: https://mau-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/UnY5RUEJTuWhZq1DGCOURA

For more information, please click here. 

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal