[DEBATE] : AFRICAN CITIES READER Call for Papers

[Sean Jacobs]

  AFRICAN CITIES READER
[A creation of the African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga Magazine]



In many senses African cities are amongst the most generative and  
vibrant places on the planet. Yet, we know next to nothing about what  
goes on in the places. Not that there is any shortage of caricature,  
hyperbole or opinion about what makes African cities such  
quintessential spaces of dystopia and atrophy. We believe that a range  
of interventions that seek to engage the shape-shifting essence of  
African cities are long overdue and present this modest initiative as  
one contribution to a larger movement of imagination to redefine the  
practical workings of the African city.

For us it is self-evident that one has to take the youthful  
demographic, informality and a non-conventional insertion in global  
circuits by African urbanites as a starting point for a sustained  
engagement and retelling of the city in contemporary Africa. The  
cultural, livelihood, religious, stylistic, commercial, familial,  
knowledge producing and navigational capacities of African urbanites  
are typically overlooked, unappreciated and undervalued. We want to  
bring their stories and practices to the fore in the African Cities  
Reader. In other words, the African Cities Reader seeks to become a  
forum where Africans will tell their own stories, draw their own maps  
and represent their own spatial topographies as it continuous to  
evolve and adapt at the interstice of difference, complexity,  
opportunism, and irony.

In terms of focus, tone and sensibility, the Reader will be vibrant,  
unapologetic, free, accessible and open, provocative, fresh, not take  
itself too seriously, but also be rigorous and premised on the  
assumption that it will grow and evolve over time.

The launch issue (2008/9) will be organised around the theme: "Pan- 
African Practices". The back story to this theme is the recognition  
that all African cities are the product of multiple trajectories and  
origins, which implies that that the living, breathing, pulsating fact  
of African cities adds up to a form of 'pan-Africanism' that is more  
interesting than the tired tropes of pan-African Nationalism that  
remains the stock and trade of many official discourses about  
transnational and trans-local practices on the continent. We believe  
that 'pan-Africanism as a practice' despite the repeated deaths of pan- 
Africanism as a nationalist discourse opens up multiple explorations  
into the spatial specificity of cities crafted in the border zones  
between informal/formal, licit/illicit, chaotic/ordered, etc.  
Furthermore, in terms of over-arching knowledge projects, we perceive  
a productive space between: on the one hand, the imperative to respond  
to and engage with the dismissal of blackness/blackhood by a stream of  
postcolonial philosophy – a move we suspect may be too soon and too  
definitive – and, on the other, the insistence of dominant discourses  
and institutions that some essentialist African exceptionalism and  
solidarity is possible. However, the idea is not to dwell here but  
simply to use the idea of materially and symbolically grounded  
practices to explore the public and popular cultural dimensions of pan- 
African cityness. Throughout, the critical focus will invariably fall  
on practices, phenomenologies and spatialities and their intersections.

Naturally, flowing from this exploratory vantage point, the African  
Cities Reader will be open to multiple genres (literature, philosophy,  
faction, reportage, ethnographic narrative, etc), forms of  
representation (text, image, sound and possibly performance), and  
points of view. The African Cities Reader will seek to embody and  
reflect the rich pluralism, cosmopolitanism and diversity of emergent  
urbanisms across Africa. Thus, the Reader invites and undertake to  
commission writing and art by practitioners, academics, activists and  
artists from diverse fields across Africa in all of her expansiveness.

Submissions will be accepted until Friday 31st October 2008, and  
should be submitted electronically in Word format or low resolution  
JPGs to the email address below. Submissions may vary in subject  
matter and will be assessed on their relevance to publication’s theme.  
All work should accompany a short abstract, biography and relevant  
contact details.

For further information contact:

Greer Valley
africancitiesreader at chimurenga.co.za
T) +27(21)4224168
C) +27(0) 722395945
www.chimurenga.co.za