Africa and Urban Anthropology

Deborah Pellow is a Professor Emerita in the Anthropology Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, New York, USA. Suzanne Scheld is a Professor in the Anthropology Department at California State University, Northridge, USA.

Part I: Introduction

1 Introduction

Deborah Pellow and Suzanne Scheld

Part II. Knowing the City and Urban Imaginaries

2 Kafanchan: A Nigerian Town and its Global Horizons

Ulf Hannerz

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

Katja Werthmann

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

Danny Hoffman

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

William Bissell

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

Anne Lewinson

Part III. Urban Spaces

7 South Sudan, Politics of Liberation and Contest Over Juba

Jok Madut Jok

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

Dolores Koenig

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

Jennifer Hart

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

William Suk

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

Daniel K. Thompson, Jemal Yusuf Mahamed, and Kader Mohamoud

Part IV. Urban Infrastructure and Mobility

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

Garth Myers

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

Angela Storey

14 Sorting ‘Wire Spaghetti’ in Zanzibar Stone Town

Rose Marie Beck

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

Rudolf Gaudio

Part V. Power of Urban Belongingness

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

Mary H. Moran

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

Saida Hodžić

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

Rijk van Dijk

19 Property, Mobility, and Belonging in an African Metropolis

Matthew Nesvet

Part VI. Language and the City

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

Fiona McLaughlin

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

Adeline Masquelier

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

Augustine Agwuele

Part VII. Conclusion

23 Conclusion

Afterword

Abdoumaliq Simone