The concept of “actually existing” urban worlds in Africa—considered in dialogue with the phrase’s history in accounts of neoliberalism, socialism, urbanism—insists that the cities we theorize are never the cities people actually inhabit. There is always a gap. Across the continent, cities are constructed and governed through powerful frameworks: the promissory logics of development discourse, the categorical inheritances of colonial administration, and the totalizing ambitions of digital futures backed by global capital. Each arrives with its own imagination of what urban life is, what is missing, and what it ought to be. Mbembe’s characterization of Africa as an ‘absent object’ names the epistemic conditions these frameworks reproduce. This panel explores the gap between these visions and the ‘actually existing’ African urban worlds we encounter.
Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and theoretically engaged research, our panelists interrogate the friction between imposed frameworks and the African urban worlds revealed through research, carefully attending to what those frictions produce in realms of technology, indigeneity, governance, and migration. Rather than asking what African cities lack or where they are headed, we follow Simone in redirecting attention to what people do—the improvisational practices, relational networks, and collective arrangements through which urban life is made and remade. Panelists ask how ideological projects are transformed, contested, or selectively appropriated in specific urban contexts. In doing so, the panel proposes that ‘actually existing’ African urbanism(s) offer a generative vantage point from which to observe ruptures and creatively remake the frameworks themselves.
Please submit abstracts to Arianna King (ariannaking@mtholyoke.edu) and Stephen Marr (stephen.marr@mau.se) by September 6.
