This book provides insight into the experiences of mobility and migration in contemporary South Africa, contributing to a field of literature about multiculturalism and urban public space in globalizing cities. It takes into consideration the greater international political and local socio-economic factors that drive migration, relationships and conviviality, and how they are intertwined in the everyday narrative of insiders and outsiders. The Bellville central business district demonstrates the realities of interconnected local and global hierarchies of citizenship and belonging and how they emerge in a world of accelerated mobility. The book further demonstrates how the emergence of conviviality in everyday public life represents a critical field for contemplating contemporary notions of human rights, citizenship and belonging.
Central to the Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 is an invitation to take incompleteness seriously in how we imagine, relate to and seek to understand a world in perpetual motion. Despite our instinct for and obsession with completeness, we are constantly reminded that the sooner one recognises and provides for incompleteness and the conviviality it inspires as the normal way of being, the better we are for it. Fluidity, compositeness and the capacity to be present in multiple places and forms simultaneously in whole or in fragments are core characteristics of reality and ontology of incompleteness. How would we frame our curiosities and conversations about processes, relationships and phenomena with an understanding of the universality of incompleteness and mobility? West and Central Africa, for example, are regions where it is commonplace to embrace and celebrate incompleteness in nature, the suprasensory, human beings, human actions, human inventions and human achievements. The lectures indicate how we could draw inspiration in this regard to inform current clamours for decolonisation and the growing ambivalence about rapid advances in digital technologies (artificial intelligence (AI) in particular), as well as with twenty-first century concerns about migrants and strangers knocking at the doors of opportunities we feel more entitled to as bona fide citizens and insiders. The lectures draw on the writings of Amos Tutuola as well as from popular ideas of personhood and agency in Africa, to make a case for sidestepped and silenced traditions of knowledge. They highlight Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with the continent’s creativity and imagination. They speak to the nimble-footed flexible-minded frontier African at the crossroads and junctions of myriad encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary claims and articulation of identities and achievements. The traditions of knowledge discussed in these lectures do not only speak to Africans, but to the world, as the philosophies explored have universal application. “The crucial anthropological question of relationality and othering is at the heart of this original and enlightening book. Nyamnjoh cautions the missionaries of decoloniality against the risk of substituting one illusion of completeness with another. For him, incompleteness is the basis of any healthy exchange. He therefore recommends embracing the universality of incompleteness in motion and taking seriously an ancestral tradition of self-extension through creative imagination in this anxious age of artificial intelligence. Forcefully argued and abundantly substantiated – with finesse and laughter that run through it – this book will be a milestone by making us rediscover the demands and the magic of fieldwork.” Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt/Main Point Sud, Bamako, Mali
African societies have rich histories, cultural heritages, knowledge systems, philosophies, and institutions that they have shaped and reshaped through history. However, the continent has been repeatedly portrayed negatively as plagued by multitudinous troubles: famine, conflict, coup, massacres, corruption, disease, illiteracy, refugees, failed state, etc. Even worse, Africans are often viewed as incapable of addressing their problems on their own. Based on such erroneous perspectives and paternalism, exogenous solutions are prescribed, out of context, for African problems. This book sheds light on the positive aspects of African reality under the key concept of African potentials. It is the product of sustained consultation over a five-year period between seasoned African and Japanese anthropologists, sociologists and scholars in other areas of African studies.
The last two decades have been an exciting and richly productive period for debate and academic research on the city. The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies offers comprehensive coverage of this modern re-thinking of urban theory, both gathering together the best of what has been achieved so far, and signalling the way to future theoretical insights and empirically grounded research. Featuring many of the top international names in the field, the handbook is divided into nine key sections: SECTION 1: THE GLOBALIZED CITY SECTION 2: URBAN ENTREPRENEURIALISM, BRANDING, GOVERNANCE SECTION 3: MARGINALITY, RISK AND RESILIENCE SECTION 4: SUBURBS AND SUBURBANIZATION: STRATIFICATION, SPRAWL, SUSTAINABILITY SECTION 5: DISTINCTIVE AND VISIBLE CITIES SECTION 6: CREATIVE CITIES SECTION 7: URBANIZATION, URBANITY AND URBAN LIFESTYLES SECTION 8: NEW DIRECTIONS IN URBAN THEORY SECTION 9: URBAN FUTURES This is a central resource for researchers and students of Sociology, Cultural Geography and Urban Studies.
Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The urgency of today’s global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to bring them into dialogue. Ivan Illich envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of ‘autonomous individuals and primary groups’ (Illich 1973), which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. Paul Gilroy refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity (Gilroy 2004). Rather than replacing one concept with the other, the fourteen contributors to this book seek to explore the interconnections – commonalities and differences – between them, suggesting that creolisation is a necessary complement to the already-intertwined concepts of conviviality and cosmopolitanism. Although this volume takes northern Europe as its focus, the contributors take care to put each situation in historical and global contexts in the interests of moving beyond the binary thinking that prevails in terms of methodologies, analytical concepts, and political implementations.
This book examines 21st-century South African autobiographical writing that addresses the nation’s socio-political realities, both past and present. The texts in focus represent and depict a South Africa caught in the midst of contradictory and competing images of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. Arguing that recent memoirs question and criticize the illusion of a united nation, the study shows how these texts reveal the flaws and shortcomings not only of the apartheid past but of contemporary South Africa. It encompasses a broad range of autobiographical works, largely published since 2009, that engage with South Africa’s past, present and future. At its centre is the quest for space and belonging, and this book investigates who can comfortably ‘belong’ in South Africa in its post-apartheid, post-Truth and Reconciliation, post-Mbkei and post-Zuma state.
Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives on conviviality, this book considers the ways in which Latin America, a continent marked by deep inequalities, has managed to afford, create, sustain, and contest forms of living together with difference across time and space. Interdisciplinary in approach and presenting studies from various nations across the continent – from the medieval period to the present day – it considers the ways in which Latin America might contribute to our understanding of the relationship between inequality, difference, diversity, and sociability. As such, it will appeal to scholars of history, sociology, geography, anthropology, development studies, postcolonial and social theory with interests in Latin American studies, and in the contingencies and contradictions of living together in profoundly unequal societies.
Africa’s urban population is growing rapidly, raising numerous environmental concerns. Urban areas are often linked to poverty as well as power and wealth, and hazardous and unhealthy environments as the pace of change stretches local resources. Yet there are a wide range of perspectives and possibilities for political analysis of these rapidly changing environments. Written by a widely respected author, this important book will mark a major new step forward in the study of Africa’s urban environments. Using innovative research including fieldwork data, map analysis, place-name study, interviewing and fiction, the book explores environmentalism from a variety of perspectives, acknowledging the clash between Western planning mind-sets pursuing the goal of sustainable development, and the lived realities of residents of often poor, informal settlements. The book will be valuable to advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in geography, urban studies, development studies, environmental studies and African studies.
"Voluntary and involuntary human mobility in the form of migration is a natural human phenomenon which has been a central feature from the ancient times into the modern times. While the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary migrants are blurred, voluntary migrants in the context of this book refer to those who migrate out of their own free choice based on socioeconomic considerations while involuntary migrants are forced to leave their country out of fear of persecution or insecurity caused by political violence or civil and military strife. In this book, the terms, 'newcomer', 'foreign born' and 'migrant' and 'immigrant' are used interchangeably and refer to those who were born in another country and later emigrated to another country as permanent residents (later becoming citizens), asylum seekers and refugees. Migration is an increasing challenge faced by countries, institutions and individuals in both sending and receiving countries. In countries where there is a large inflow of immigrants, migration has created a multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified demographic landscape which lends itself to a description of superdiverse societies (Jensen & Gidley, 2014; Vertovec, 2007). Most industrialized countries - mostly in the Global North - are experiencing low birth rates and are dependent on immigrants to satisfy their job market and population growth while less developed nations - mostly in the Global South - are experiencing low economic growth, inadequate socioeconomic opportunities. These social and economic challenges are presently the cornerstone of migration, transnationalism and transnationality"--
The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine: Affective, Postcolonial Histories Postcolonial Desires Religious Imaginings Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.
