Title & Author:

Urban margins : envisioning the contemporary global South / special issue editors, Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker.

Publication:

Durham, NC : Duke University Press, ©2008.

Description:

133 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Notes:
Cover title.
Issued as: Social text, 95 (summer 2008).
Includes bibliographical references.
Introduction: Urban Margins / Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker -- Emergency Democracy and the "Governing Composite"/ AbdouMaliq Simone -- "City of Whores": Nationalism, Development, and Global Garment Workers in Sri Lanka / Sandya Hewamanne -- Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City / Lisa Taraki -- In the Ruins of Bahla: Reconstructed Forts and Crumbling Walls in an Omani Town / Mandana E. Limbert -- "Mardi Gras Geishas (Batters)" / Nic Sammond -- The Gnat and the Sovereign / Allen Feldman -- With Ice in Their Ears / Allen Feldman -- Witchcraft / Rosalind Morris.

Summary:

Urban studies of the global South have paid particular attention to megacities, such as Mumbai or Johannesburg, while more peripheral urban landscapes - including small and medium-sized towns as well as the margins of megacities themselves - remain overlooked. Emerging from the work of the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network, an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices, this special issue of "Social Text" takes up the question of marginality in contemporary urban cartographies in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa."Urban Margins" explores the complex processes through which citizens produce and negotiate these marginalized landscapes and in turn are informed by them. Focusing on Douala in Cameroon and Dakar in Senegal, one essay discusses how the state's failure to provide for its citizens has led many to turn to informal networks and affiliations - whether kin-based, local, translocal, gendered, religious, or secular - for survival. Rendering the urban landscape of these cities in terms of these networks and the ways that they shape a citizen's interaction with the city, the essay considers the political possibilities for African cities where diverse multilingual and ethnic populations face the challenges, pitfalls, and compromises of coexistence

ISBN:

9780822366973 (paperback)
0822366975 (paperback)

Subject:

Marginality, Social.
Marginal productivity.
Neighborhoods.
Productivité marginale.

Added entries:

Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-
Rieker, Martina.
Social text. No. 95.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 258677
Call No.: BIB 189468
Status: Available