[URBANTH-L]CFP: Urban Africa panel for AAA 08

[Deborah Pellow]

The Inclusive City: African Imaginaries

African cities are notable for their historically constituted
multiplicity: spatially, a legacy of the colonial order in the urban
plan, divisions that incorporate the stranger quarter packed onto and
the old villages with the European business district nearby; socially,
the village character of neighborhoods, the Western imprint on suburbs,
and the reconstitution of ethnic identities and village structures.
 
These cities have always been contact zones; cutting across and bringing
together completely different spaces, fields of intercultural production
take form - in the arts, the tourism and music industries, markets,
ngo's or local-global partnerships around health, governance, etc.  
 
These spheres of activity bring together foreign, migrant, and local
ideologies, workers, goals, and desires.  In these different arenas,
Africans (local and migrant) and non-Africans come together and through
their exchanges "create" the African city: site of differently-centered
cosmopolitanisms, nexus within different transnational imaginaries.
 
This panel  looks at urban intercultural spheres  as a means toward new
mappings of the African city.  We seek papers that explore such
intercultural spheres from a variety of perspectives.  Papers with a
historical or spatial lens are particularly welcome.

Contact Ruti Talmor ruti.talmor at nyu.edu or Deborah Pellow
dpellow at maxwell.syr.edu.





Deborah Pellow
Professor of Anthropology
The Maxwell School
Syracuse University
209 Maxwell Hall
Syracuse NY  13244
(315) 443-4216