Courses

Postcolonial African Cities

Postcolonial African Cities: Development and Citizenship in the Era of Globalization

Though common representations often presume the continued domination of the rural sphere, Africa is host to the fastest rates of urban growth in the world. The continent is quickly becoming urban, with massive implications for African economies, societies, and politics. In contrast with much of the rest of the world, urbanization in Africa is driven not by economic growth, but, rather, is taking place amidst widespread economic stagnation, poverty, and social dislocation. African urban economies are often centered, for the most part, in the so-called informal sector, raising key questions for how we understand livelihood strategies and development prospects. Diverse trajectories of urbanization also signal profound transformations under way in African social structures, cultural and religious identities, as well as political systems.

The images that are generally conjured of African cities are often replete with chaos, decay, and an insistence on their isolation from the globalizing rest of the world. This course rejects a notion that African cities lie "off the map" of global interconnection but, rather, seeks to emphasize the terms of global connection and to illuminate the flows of people, ideas, cultures, and imaginaries that are constantly shaping and being shaped by African urbanisms. Insight on the profound transformations taking place in African cities with globalization has driven some of the most innovative and provocative recent scholarly debates considering nature of citizenship and the postcolonial urban condition. We will draw heavily from this scholarship and its engagement with recalibrating understandings of development, globalization, and urbanism, amongst other subjects.

Though the course will focus mainly on the contemporary era, our explorations will consider African cities in historical perspective. This will entail attention to the legacies of colonialism and the strategic role that African cities have played in globalization and empire, past and present. We will begin the course with a brief exploration of the colonial history of African cities as we set up the key lines of inquiry. This will help us to locate urban Africans in today's most recent era of globalization. Then, considering a wide-range of contexts across the continent from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, we will delve into some crosscutting themes in the study of African cities related to:

• the space and environment of African cities: urban geographies and practices;
• the institutions and representations of the city;
• citizenship, civility and sociability in relation to ethnicity, gender and religion and how they are shaped and shaping political and social practices and,
• the insertion of African cities into a global imperial frame (colonial and postcolonial).