AbdouMaliq Simone

Emergency Democracy and the “Governing Composite”

The Productive City Recent years have witnessed a substantial extension of thoughts and work on cities in Africa. Much of this work has tried to get out of the conceptual frameworks that usually render African cities as failed cities, cities always in need of something more — whether it be infrastructure, governance, or economic development. As David Satterthwaite so ably demonstrates, cities in the global South in general are caught in a series of powerful myths that represent them as more parasitic and more economically fragmented than cities elsewhere. 1 The prevailing notion is that of an urban fabric overrun, unable to accommodate all of the escalating demands made of it; of environmental degradation spawned by widespread impoverishment; and of increased social conflict among residents who find few institutional platforms to promote coherence and collaboration. In the following discussion, I emphasize the implications of trying to see the emerging fabric of urban Africa as the result of a productive deployment of sensibilities, practices, effort, and collective formations that are made possible by the very uncertainties incumbent within cities deeply punctuated by fragmented infrastructures, social contestation over the uses to be made of the city, and political regimes thoroughly made partial through their entanglement within diverse networks of exchange. 2 In particular, this essay deals with the often peculiar process through which actors come to make their mark on collective transactions and the way in which idiosyncratic constellations of such actors provide a workable balance between the provisional and incessantly mutating practices required to viably “make do” in most African cities and a sense of order, if only temporary.

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

The apartheid city is typically touted as a negative role model for urban planners in other parts of the world, largely because of the fragmentation that apartheid social engineering imposed on the lives of urban residents. Under apartheid, the lines of fragmentation were forcibly racialized. This institutionalised racialization has been demolished, while other sites of splintering remain. Yet the aspiration to a wholly unified and orderly city is not necessarily desirable, or attainable. This article argues, somewhat controversially, that the persistent legacy of fragmentation which marked the apartheid city offers unforeseen opportunities to those who live in the cities now and are engaged in daily struggles for survival and mobility. Ironically, such multiple and discrepant orders of urban life can be seen to characterize, increasingly, many cities around the world today.

A Town on its Knees? Economic Experimentations with Postcolonial Urban Politics in Africa and Southeast Asia

At best, Fanon had an ambivalent attitude toward the potentialities of African cities. As largely colonial creations, they were never viewed as the ‘real’ locus for an elaboration of a critical national consciousness or political project. Yet now that Africa is an ‘urban continent’, with cities moving in disparate directions through various broken infrastructures and temporalities, urbanization conveys both a desire for collective capacities that would seem to exceed both the terms of colonial residues and Fanon’s revolutionary projections, yet simultaneously to reiterate the fundamental tensions in their relationship. The very practices that would seem to waste political mobilization may be those which defer a definitive foreclosure of them. While African cities remain exemplars of the region’s captivation with redesigned imperialisms, they are generative of the potentials Fanon identified but assumed would never come from them.

City of Potentialities: An Introduction

This introduces a series of articles in a themed section entitled City of Potentialities: Race, Violence and Invention. The section concerns how we might think more specifically about how to act in domains where complexity is both a resource for the imagination and an impediment to action. What kinds of dilemmas do residents face and what kinds of practices do they engage in in order to continuously gather up the tools and possibilities to endure in volatile urban conditions, where volatility seems a critical force in the simultaneous undoing and remaking of life, as well as in providing assets and opportunities to inhabitants? How does violence obscure the various manoeuvres and practices that keep things together or apart?

The Ambivalence of the Arbitrary A Supplement to Ash Amin’s ‘The Remainders of Race’

In the multiplying uncertainties of urban life, entrenched, mediated positions are increasingly difficult to sustain — a dynamic which simultaneously intensifies and counters a racialized biopolitics. In such contexts, is it possible for racial significations to become ironic instruments in the everyday experimentations of residents trying to figure out new ways of both engaging and retreating from each other, of trying to figure out new calibrations of collectivity that enhance the value of differences, not only as markers of navigation, but as a means of curtailing the increased urban emphasis on individual competence and eligibility?

Deep into the Night the City Calls as the Blacks Come Home to Roost

In Jean Genet’s self-designated clown show, The Blacks, black actors in white masks play out the proceedings of a tribunal organized to pass judgment on the black perpetrator of the rape of a white woman. There are continuously oblique references to a scenario off-stage where a revolt by blacks which may be under way is side-tracked by having to deal with a traitor among them. In ‘reality’, the crime never took place, and the necessary detour of having to dispose of a traitor becomes the haunting mechanism that identifies the claustrophobic, circular game of reflections and inversions that keep black and white locked into a continuous reiteration of the normative grammars of power. The trajectories of desire, anger, freedom and subjection are held together by the very dissimulations, performances, role-playing, trade-offs and revolutions that take place. Clearly it is the way race is spatialized, and the way that the arbitrary elaboration of identities, so easily interchangeable among themselves, is put to work that holds together specific contexts of operation.

Drawing Lines: A Response to Adrian Parr’s ‘Urban Debt, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Commons’

Urbanization is the mechanism for the entanglement of things and experiences as commodities, an interminable restlessness of disorientation, a suspended state, where the capacity to maintain a hold on things and attain a sense of emplacement increasingly necessitates enforced resilience, of people embracing rather than warding off their imminent expendability. As such, what are the possibilities for the city to become a space of communing as an intersection of complex ecologies, common sensibilities and new forms of provision and care? This response to Adrian Parr’s reflections on these issues in her article, ‘Urban Debt, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Commons’, draws upon various African American practices for inhabiting the city as a vehicle of strategic indifference to efforts to render collective life expendable. This indifference has long been deployed to insulate experimental practices of care, economic and social collaboration, and to ‘honour the city differently’.

Debate on 'The Market as the New Emperor': Introductory Note

The article discusses various reports published within the issue that comment on a 2007 article by Anne Haila on the rights to use of land and urban land use in China, and Hailas response to these commentaries.