Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City by Caroline Melly

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City by Caroline Melly Michael Degani Caroline Melly, Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224 pp. In this lucid and well-written ethnography, Caroline Melly asks us to consider the problems of mobility that arise in mid-2000s Dakar and in African urban life more broadly. This is an extended post-structural adjustment period in which high levels of GDP growth, splashy foreign investment, and massive state-sponsored construction projects offset the ordinary and long-running malaise of urban life for the majority poor. Bottleneck thus contributes to a rich literature on Africa "afterwards"—after the Cold War (Piot 2010) and after development (Ferguson 2006)—where socioeconomic inequality and its spatial logic of borders and enclaves sort out the winners and losers, and render passage between the two ever more fraught and miraculous. Melly deftly evokes this pressurized suspension through the concept of embouteillage, or bottleneck, which is at once a writerly metaphor and a "scholarly device" (128). In this sense it is very much what Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe (2015) call a "portable analytic," a concept that can capture certain experiences and (somewhat ironically, in this case) move easily across different ethnographic domains. Yet the term, Melly suggests, is no mere contrivance, but is rooted in the ethnographic realities of endless traffic jams (Chapter 2); half-finished, remittance-financed, "inside-out houses" (Chapter 3); and clandestine migration to Europe (Chapter 5). She encountered these issues during her time as an intern at the downtown offices of APIX, Senegal's national investment promotion agency, quixotically tasked with courting the largely mythical figure of the entrepreneurial "migrant investor" (Chapter 4). Thinking about these various sites as bottlenecked gets at the sense that there are imaginable futures to aspire to, but getting to them is constricted and unpredictable. [End Page 259] For Dakarois, positioned at a longstanding "cosmopolitan crossroads" of global flow, mobility is as elusive as it is crucial (4). Given its concern with mobility and circulation, infrastructure is an important leitmotif of the book. The 2000s were indeed in many respects the infrastructure decade, with massive new investments soaking up foreign capital and contributing to the hype around "Africa Rising." But the often-spectacular poetics and promises of these mega-projects belie the cruddiness of aging public provisioning systems that were laid down during the post-independence era of the "salary man" (32). Hence, referencing the work of Julie Chu (2014), Melly demonstrates what it means to "[think] infrastructurally" (11)—to attend to the daily logistics that give Dakar its particular and often frustrating sense of collective experience. "Et les embouteillage?" (And how are the bottlenecks?). This question, Melly reports, was folded into the texture of daily life, a pleasantry with which to greet friends and fellow urbanites (6). In a certain sense, to "think infrastructurally" is to try and see what is in front of our eyes—the often taken-for-granted activities of "moving, building, and belonging" in an African city. On this count, Chapter 2 features a wonderful discussion of the cab driver, or "taksimann," as the workhorse of bottlenecked urban mobility in Dakar, a figure that one development worker smugly dismissed as a means to researching urban migration, but not an end—not a source of knowledge about migration itself. To the contrary, taxi drivers, who often rent vehicles owned by more successful migrants, both endure the narrow side of the bottleneck and make the best of it, boning up on English and French while stuck in traffic, and diversifying their services to include tours and other sorts of errands. This chapter also speaks to Melly's refreshing directness as an ethnographer. It is surely an open secret that taxi drivers, with their Muchona the Hornetesque liminality, have long been charismatic and irresistible interlocutors for anthropologists (Turner 1967). Melly thus shows the benefits of taking them seriously in a world of congested cities. It is in these descriptions of the creative arrangements that happen at the bottleneck, rather than of the bottleneck itself, that the book is perhaps strongest, bridging the seemingly divergent trajectories of rich...