Unsettling the City, Sedimentations of Place

Building on an anthropology of the city, this special section aims to further pry open “the city” by tarrying with the material and sensorial relationships that accrue between cities and their residents even while hanging in suspension/motion. Through these concerns with the material and the sensorial, we contribute to the emergent anthropological conversation about the ways in which the felt textures of place matter to the city, atmospherically, temporally, affectively, and infrastructurally. In attending to city-as-relation, we wish also to interrogate “the city” for the ways it continues to be undergirded by modernity as a colonial, racialized project and how its contemporary formations are everyday saturated with the afterlives of this past. Papers in this special section foreground the practices through which residents relate to the city while living through interplays of fixity and flux, suffusions of toxicity and joy, dispersals of memory and sense, and accumulations of labor and infrastructure. The section draws together scholars experimenting with writing craft/form as well as with uncertain modes of ethnographic attunement. They call attention to the multiple ways in which the city unsettles and is unsettled physically and conceptually by sedimentations of place.