African City Textualities
The stereotype of Africa as a predominantly natural space ignores the existence of vibrant and cosmopolitan urban environments on the continent. Far from merely embodying backwardness and lack, African cities are sites of complex and diverse cultural productions which participate in modernity and its dynamics of global flows and exchanges. This volume merges the concerns of urban, literary and cultural studies by focusing on the flows and exchanges of texts and textual elements. By analysing how texts such as popular and canonical fiction, popular music, self-help pamphlets, graffiti, films, journalistic writing, rumours and urban legends engage with the problems of citizenship, self-organisation and survival, this collection shows that despite all the problems of Africa, its cities continue to engender forward-looking creativity and hope. The texts collected here belong to several different genres themselves, and they are authored by both distinguished and younger scholars, based in and outside of Africa. This volume explores the textualities emerging from cities in Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Above all, it calls for an end to disabling hierarchical categorisations of both texts and cities.
This book is based on a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Ranka Primorac is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton. Previously, she has taught Africa-related courses in several institutions of higher learning, including Cambridge and the London branch of New York University, and has authored The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe (2006) and co-edited Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture (2005) and Zimbabwe in Crisis: The International Response and the Space of Silence (2007) .
Lady in Car, 1952 (photo by Nkosilathi Ngulube, courtesy of Zimbabwe National Gallery in Bulawayo)
First published 2010 by Routledge
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ISBN10: 0-415-48155-4
ISBN13: 978-0-415-48155-7
James Graham has worked at the University of Warwick, Birkbeck, University of London and now teaches at Middlesex University. He has published articles on postcolonial urbanism, Zimbabwean fiction and black British history. A monograph, Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa , was published by Routledge in 2009.
Joel Isabirye is programme director of Beat FM radio station in Kampala, Uganda. He also undertakes research for the Centre for African Music, and Music Uganda Ltd. He has written articles on popular culture, media, music and economics. He is interested in development communication, popular culture, popular music history, industry and media, literary theory, criticism, genre and sociology.
Grace A. Musila recently finished her PhD thesis on narratives about the 1988 death of British tourist Julie Ward in Kenya. Her other research interests include Zimbabwean literature and East African popular culture, with a keen focus on gender and micronarratives of resistance.
Stephanie Newell lectures in postcolonial literature in the Department of English, University of Sussex. She has published widely on African popular literatures and readerships, including Ghanaian Popular Fiction (2000) and Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana (2002) . Her recent monographs include The Forgers Tale: The Search for Odeziaku (2006) and West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (2006) . She is currently working on a study of West African newspaper culture in the colonial period.
Rita Nnodim holds an MA in African Languages & Literatures from Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany and a PhD in West African Studies from the University of Birmingham, UK. Her most recent publication is Configuring Audiences in Yorb Novels, Print and Media Poetry in Creative Writing in African Languages , Spec. issue, Research in African Literatures 37.3 (2006, 154175) . She is currently a visiting lecturer at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, MA, USA.
Donal B. Cruise OBrien is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He taught African politics at SOAS for nearly 40 years, until his retirement in 2006. His research has been principally on Senegalese subjects, always with an eye to the comparative dimension, in Africa or beyond. His most recent work, co-edited with Julia C. Strauss, is Staging Politics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa (2007) .
Terence Ranger is Emeritus Professor at St Antonys College, Oxford. He has written on Zimbabwes political, social and religious history and is currently writing a social history of Bulawayo between 1893 and 1960.
Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Urban Geography at the Open University in the UK and has also worked at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and the LSE in London. She has published widely on South African cities, especially on the spatiality and politics of apartheid and post-apartheid cities. Her most recent book, Ordinary Cities (2006) , offers a postcolonial critique of urban studies.
Meg Samuelson teaches in the English Department, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She has published a number of articles on South (ern) African literature and culture, the monograph Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (2007) and the co-edited collection Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Poems and Stories from Southern Africa (2004) .
