Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa最新文献

{"title":"On the mobility of ghosts: spectral journeys in the South African lowveld","authors":"I. Niehaus","doi":"10.1017/S0001972023000141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000141","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In studies of Southern Africa, ancestors and possessing spirits have received far greater attention than ghosts. It is only in recent years that fragmentary references to ghosts have begun to appear in the ethnographic record. In this article, I seek to redress this imbalance by documenting stories and accounts of encounters with ghosts in the South African lowveld. I turn to studies of ghosts in Asia and elsewhere as an analytical starting point for interpreting their social and cosmological significance. A widespread theory in this literature is that narratives of ghosts are a means of emplacement, connecting people to places. But the theory does not capture the way in which narratives in the South African lowveld depict ghosts as essentially mobile beings. This is most evident in accounts of vanishing hitchhikers on the highways and of a ghost called sauwe, which captures people’s minds and forces them to walk in the direction of graveyards. These narratives speak of displacement, of spectral journeys and of routes rather than stable locations. The apparitions serve as reminders of the failure to take care of the spirits of those who suffered violent deaths and bring them home. But we can also see them as traces of past injustices and of violence in a haunted landscape, and as mirrors of villagers’ own historical experiences of displacement, experiences that were a hallmark of forced removals and of the migrant labour system during the apartheid era.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"6 1","pages":"159 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86724933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: A Political Biography. Second Edition. London: I. B. Tauris (pb £14.99 – 978 0 7556 3821 5). 2021, xxi + 279 pp.","authors":"Christopher J. Lee","doi":"10.1017/s0001972023000013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972023000013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80450957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Building concrete futures: materiality and urban lives in West Africa","authors":"Armelle Choplin","doi":"10.1017/S0001972023000104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000104","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In West Africa, concrete is increasingly taking hold of physical landscapes, popular consciousness, and everyday conversations. Ubiquitous and pervasive, concrete is now an integral part of West African urban materiality and cultural identity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, I consider this material as both a product and a producer of urban space. By tracing flows of building materials across the West African urban corridor linking the cities of Abidjan, Accra, Lomé, Cotonou, Porto-Novo and Lagos, this article proposes to understand how cement and concrete (re)shape African built environments, human lives and urban futures. It examines three dimensions of this concrete urban materiality: its links with capital, its social meanings for inhabitants-builders and its ecological impacts. I conclude by highlighting the potentials, limits and contradictions raised by this now contested material, thus shedding light on the complexity of the production of urban spaces in West Africa.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"68 1","pages":"20 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81109465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AFR volume 93 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"Constance Smith, Katherine Dawson, Morten Nielsen, Trisha M. Phippard, I. Niehaus, J. Archambault, Maxim Bolt, K. Barber, T. Bassett, Heike Becker, J. Beuving, K. Breckenridge, Zoe Cormack, Filip De Boeck, Greg Dobler, H. Englund, R. Fardon, J. Fokwang, J. Fontein, Eric Gable, P. Geschiere, Euclides Gonçalves, Danny Hoffman, E. Hull, N. Hunt, Emma Hunter, F. N. Ikanda, Deborah James, M. Janson, F. D. Jong, H. N. Kringelbach, B. Larkin, Derek R. Peterson, D. Pratten, Katrien Pype, Noah Salomon, AbdouMaliq Simone, Benjamin Soares, J. Steinberg, S. Whyte, Alcinda Honwana, Odile Goerg, A. Cutolo, M. Diawara, Andreas Eckert, J. Gewald, Adam T. Jones, O. Kane, M. Lambek, Elísio Macamo, Birgit Meyer, Mauro Nobili, K. Barlow, Philip Burnham, Keren Weitzberg","doi":"10.1017/s0001972023000190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972023000190","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"10 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83670173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: the stuff of African cities","authors":"J. Fontein, Constance Smith","doi":"10.1017/S000197202300013X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S000197202300013X","url":null,"abstract":"What kind of stuff makes cities? What sorts of relations between humans, materials, infrastructures, animals, plans, substances, climates, machines, imaginaries, labours, foodstuffs – things – are mobilized to produce the dense, vibrant, provisional assemblage that we call a city? What happens when such relational flows become blocked, broken or otherwise constrained? What is distinctive, if anything, about the substance of African cities? These are a few of the questions that lie behind our preoccupation with urban materialities in Africa, and the promise of stuff for thinking through what makes African cities work – and, conversely, for unravelling what happens when things fall apart. This special issue brings together six articles examining the contested materialities of African cities, building on an emerging focus on the stuff and substance of urban Africa (e.g. Hoffman 2017; Melly 2017; Smith 2019; Archambault 2018). This recent work constitutes a turn away from prevailing themes in the scholarship of African cities. Such themes have, until recently, been dominated by the invisible, informal and ephemeral as defining features of African urbanism (De Boeck and Plissart 2004; Guyer 2004; Simone 2004a; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008). The longevity of such themes is in some ways surprising given the earlier ‘materiality turn’ in anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography and cognate disciplines, which generated a wealth of influential, materially minded research (Miller 2005; Brown 2001; Latour 2000; Pinney 1997; Tilley 1994; Appadurai 1986). Such studies have variously explored sensory, affective, experiential and material engagements with objects, technologies, substances, infrastructures and other tangible and material stuff, in the ongoing constitution of landscapes, cities and lives. The contributions brought together here are in conversation with such approaches, examining urban life in Africa through the diverse ways in which substances and materials, technologies and things, bodies and even animals are imbricated in the becoming and (re)making of urban geographies, socialities and subjectivities in contexts across East, West and Southern Africa, including Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mozambique and South Africa. The particular kinds of materials examined range from sand (Dawson) and concrete (Choplin) to foodstuffs, animals and bodies (Rahier and Fontein) and dangerous contaminants (Fontein), as well as buildings (Smith) and their plans, designs and regulations (Smith and Nielsen).","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"10 1","pages":"1 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90177828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique","authors":"Morten Nielsen","doi":"10.1017/S0001972023000153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000153","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social and material capacities. The question is, however, whether weak – and even absent – systems of urban management can be taken to signify a lack of coordination and planning of urban development. Might it not be, for instance, that cities organize and model themselves through means other than those afforded by formal urban planning schemes? Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the shifting material forms of what are locally described as ‘bedroom drawer blueprints’ as an acutely potent type of urban modelling. Current and prospective house builders in Maputo exchange and share blueprints and physical and virtual models of houses that they plan to eventually build. Considered by residents as valuable social and material assets, such blueprints and models also offer an opportunity for experimenting with new forms of aesthetic organization of the city. Comparing the ongoing transactions and sharing of bedroom drawer blueprints with the increasing global circulation of middle-class architectural urban models, in this article I argue that it is the capacity of the former to move between different material forms and modalities that gives them their particular aesthetic potency and drive.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"57 39 1","pages":"121 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78733331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A share in the sands: trips, pits and potholes in Accra, Ghana","authors":"Katherine Dawson","doi":"10.1017/S0001972023000116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000116","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article deploys sand as a potential way of engaging with contemporary livelihoods in the Ghanaian city of Accra – one of many metropolitan nodes in an urbanizing region of West Africa. Both as a very real material at the heart of concrete urbanization and as metaphorically indicative of the shifting landscapes of opportunity and income on which lives and livelihoods are marked out, sand is offered as a way of seeing and writing about the city. The article brings these two facets of urban sand together in more concrete ways, considering how the material production of the city becomes the uneven, uncertain ground of urban life-making. Drawing from fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, the article engages with the movements of sand across the city, as it travels from extraction zones (or pits) to lorries and then to places of consumption. By honing in on the material behaviours and temporal junctures of sand as it shifts its shape, form and directions, the article draws out the ways in which sand emerges as a platform for exchange, negotiation and ultimately income for different people across the city region. In turn, it offers a share in the sands as a tentative holding space for the kinds of claims made on and through sand, positioning them as indicative of a dweller-led, emergent politics that claims a share of an income, livelihood and urban future.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"28 1","pages":"40 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75890060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Goats, materials and uncertainty in Nairobi","authors":"J. Fontein","doi":"10.1017/s0001972023000128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972023000128","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi’s becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko’s goat meat industry, this article explores the material flows and blockages, and processes of containment and transformation, that entangle lives and livelihoods in Kiamaiko with those of the city as a whole. These flows and processes are marked by uncertainties and contingencies that can be both full of potentiality for (re)forging regimes of order, social relations, subjectivities, mobility and livelihood aspirations, and entrench inequalities, social hierarchies and exclusions, as well as undermine the safe containment of material forms essential for liveable lives. Since the mid-2000s, city authorities have repeatedly failed to impose planning and public health-related regulations and relocation on Kiamaiko’s goat industry. These efforts and their repeated failure reflect the emergent but productive excessivities of the material, corporeal and bodily flows that constitute cities, which both demand and yet often defy formal mechanisms of regulation, containment and order.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"31 1","pages":"60 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77093177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum: Spaces, Temporalities, and Identities from Separation to Revolution ed. by Alice Franck, Barbara Casciarri and Idris Salim El-Hassan (review)","authors":"Griet Steel","doi":"10.1017/S0001972023000074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000074","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"69 1","pages":"187 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73351329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Elleni Centime Zeleke, Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016. Leiden and Chicago IL: Brill and Haymarket Books (hb €139 – 978 90 04 41475 4; pb US$30 – 978 1 64259 341 9). 2019/2020, 281 pp.","authors":"N. Matshanda","doi":"10.1017/S0001972023000025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"40 1","pages":"178 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76826408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}