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

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2010. A Town on its Knees? Economic Experimentations with Postcolonial Urban Politics in Africa and Southeast Asia. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(7-8), pp. 130-154. ISSN 0263-2764 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

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.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410383708

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Sociology

Dates:

DateEvent
December 2010Published

Item ID:

9110

Date Deposited:

14 Oct 2013 12:26

Last Modified:

14 Oct 2013 12:26

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/9110

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