Postcolonial City Research Articles

Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music by Alexandra T. Vázquez

Reviewed by: Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music by Alexandra T. Vázquez Melisa Rivière Alexandra T. Vázquez. 2013. Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Durham: Duke University Press. 352 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5458-1. Opening with the question “what do musicians sound like?” (12), Alexandra Vázquez’s book Listening in Detail is itself a literary performance. At times using prose-like sentences, Vázquez relates the intimate experiences by which she gives meaning to music. Using a handful of recorded performances by Cuban musicians for analysis, she unravels unique particulars of their sounds and life histories, which in turn offers an innovative method towards audiovisual observation. [End Page 292] Vázquez builds upon Naomi Schor’s Reading in Detail (1987) in which Schor traces “the detail” from a theological concept to a post modern aesthetic category. Vázquez insists that the elaborated approach is not meant to translate Schor’s work on literature to musical repertoire, but rather to “retell the story from the perspective of the detail” (29). A detail is vaguely defined as anything that does not constitute the dominant narrative. As such, Vázquez places the specific sounds she has selected for analysis into their respective historical contexts and outlines the set of circumstances from which they were derived. Her best example of such is the attention she gives to the mambo-legend Pérez Prado’s grunt. It is the inflections, ambiances, refrains, pauses, non-lexical noises, grunts, or breaths, which provide Vázquez catalysts for inquiry. Treated as minutiae data these details can reveal as much, if not more, than the technical descriptions of rhythmic patterns, lyrics, or melodies, which tend to be the leading narratives of musical scholarship. In this manner, Vázquez presents readers to “an experience with,” rather than “an account of,” Cuban music (38). The book’s first chapter, “Performing Anthology,” offers a detailed listening of Alfredo Rodríguez’s 1996 compilation album titled Cuba Linda. Vázquez argues that the anthology by Rodríguez defies the racial profiling of many musical compilations that try to make Cuba exotic, Buena Vista Social Club being the more famous and most “fatigued example” (10). In her engagement of Rodríguez’s Cuba Linda, Vázquez offers an analysis of Cuban and American jazz as an intertwined trend between the post-colonial cities of Havana and New Orleans. Within this geographical musical framework, she situates African American and Afro-Cuban cultural production as a result of their shared aesthetics, providing ample examples in literature and musical repertoires. By describing and observing each song in Rodríguez’s anthology she exemplifies the technique of listening in detail and illustrates what such particulars can be, what they offer for analysis, and the possible ways to extrapolate narratives from them. The second chapter, “Una Escuela Rara: The Graciela School,” jumps from an analysis of Rodríguez’s anthology to Vázquez’s examination of oral history interviews with “the first lady of Latin jazz,” Graciela Pérez. A few of the interviews with Graciela are her own, but the center piece of her analysis is derived from an audio recording conducted by René López and Raúl Fernández obtained at the National Museum of American History. Vázquez listens, and subsequently writes, in detail, about Pérez’s nuances, her tones, her treatment of the interviewers, all of which she extrapolates to tell a larger narrative about Pérez’s character and biography. Vázquez additionally shares a few glimpses into her own engagements with Graciela which serve to add biographical perspective [End Page 293] and convince us of the conclusions she draws from her detailed listening. This chapter also includes a historical overview of the all-female Cuban Anacaona Orchestra, regarded as a pioneering entity for women in Cuban music during the 1930s, of which Graciela Pérez was a member (93-102). The unequivocal grunt of mambo musician Pérez Prado becomes the center point of the third chapter, “Itinerant Outbursts.” Vázquez’s emphasis is not on what the grunt is saying, but rather what it is doing. In Vázquez’s own words...

Turning hustlers into entrepreneurs, and social needs into market demands: Corporate–community encounters in Nairobi, Kenya

This article contributes an empirically rich account of a social enterprise project embedded in local urban economies of Nairobi, Kenya. The confluence of rapid, unplanned urbanisation and economic liberalisation has led to growing formations of informal settlements and a vibrant informal sector across post-colonial cities. These “slum” neighbourhoods, housing the majority of the urban population on a fraction of the city’s land, are often ignored and marginalized by the state and municipal authorities, particularly with regards to basic service provision. At the same time, slum economies provide entry-points for various enterprise-led development schemes seeking to commercially engage both entrepreneurial individuals and their existing customer base in order to scale access to unmet needs. The discussion is based on an ethnographic study in one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, which focused on the everyday practices of a local micro-franchise called “Community Cleaning Services”. The article illustrates how waste workers and self-proclaimed “hustlers” were turned into micro-franchisee entrepreneurs providing a sanitation service to residential customers, through their engagement with Community Cleaning Services. This ethnographic account raises two potentially contradictory but inter-related debates that are rarely considered alongside one another in the existing literature on corporate involvement in low-income markets. First, it reframes the critiques of enterprise-led initiatives to “poverty alleviation” by focusing on the implications of commercialising “basic” services and on the logistical and cultural challenges of turning social needs into market demands. Second, it emphasises the often-invisible role of grassroots informal economies in enabling access to vital services in the absence of an adequately resourced and responsive municipality. The article concludes with a broader reflection on the effects and limitations of corporate-led development schemes targeting the urban poor and points to the contrasting logics of grassroots entrepreneurial urbanism and corporate—albeit “socially responsible”—parameters of success.

The Postcolonial City and its Displaced Poor: Rethinking ‘Political Society’ in Delhi

AbstractPartha Chatterjee has produced a compelling analysis of political modernity in India. This article evaluates the significance of his conceptualization of ‘political society’ for understanding political practices in Delhi by looking at three issues: the relevance of proof of identification documents and various enumeration‐related practices for proving citizenship; a court case concerning the resettlement of a particular population in Delhi; and the role of popular intermediaries from the community in channeling the political energies of poor people. I argue that Chatterjee's theoretical contribution allows for a contextual analysis of the specificity of political experience in India if we treat his schematic formulation heuristically, by focusing on its analytical strengths rather than ideal prescriptive standpoints. His ideas about the enforcement of bourgeois norms, subaltern collective practices, and hegemonic liberal state institutions allow us to go beyond a culturalist analysis of political society. In particular, they help us understand how the experience of democracy reflects the locational disadvantages of various groups. Further, while state institutions, including the judiciary system, protect the interests of dominant groups, they also respond to various forms of exclusion. My empirical findings corroborate Chatterjee's arguments concerning political society while also raising critical points for rethinking his theoretical framework.

The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification

AbstractThis paper examines how queer practices of transformation enable the preservation and perversion of the logics, aspirations, and violences that animated Imelda Marcos's “war of urban beautification”. It traces conceptual overlaps between the notions of truth and beauty that underpinned Imelda's faith in architectural modernism and which operate in the sex/gender tradition of kabaklaan. Using the case study of the Manila Film Center, a formerly abandoned and famously haunted Marcos‐era building that has been transformed into the host site of a “transgender” revue, the paper demonstrates how queerness, necropower, architecture, and dreams of urban and global modernity come together through the spatial effects of authoritarian power.

New Jerusalems: Derek Walcott’s poetics of the Caribbean city

Abstract In his poetry of Castries, Saint Lucia and Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Derek Walcott both interrogates and appropriates colonialist and modernist utopian discourses. By appropriating these discourses, Walcott defines the Caribbean city as an inherently modern space, and in doing so redefines Eurocentric conceptions of modernity and cultural prejudices. Although he utilizes utopian discourses, and argues that the cities’ smallness, incorporation of rurality, cultural mixity, and technological innovation are ideal aspects of the modern city, Walcott is also perceptive regarding issues of spatial power relations and inequality. Walcott portrays town squares, parks and other enclosed areas as zones of exclusion, and reads these from the peripheralized perspective of shantytowns. Furthermore, Walcott criticizes the spatial coloniality and political corruption of the postcolonial city. Ultimately, Walcott’s concern is the everyday and embodied place(s) of the city, and it is from such a phenomenological perspective that the poet can draw artistic inspiration and sustain a poetic vision.

Planning Kampala: histories of sanitary intervention and in/formal spaces

For rapidly growing cities of the global South, infrastructure is often presented as being in a state of crisis by virtue of its absence or deficiency. There is an imperative for infrastructural projects to manage and hide the defecation of urban inhabitants in order that the post-colonial city is to be thought of as modern, ordered, and worldly. Yet the urban landscape of many cities of the global South also bear the vestiges of colonial attempts to construct sanitation infrastructures that were, and remain, limited to elite spaces of the city. Kampala is one example of such a city where the stamp of colonial heritage is felt and experienced in the material reality of starkly divided sanitation infrastructures. This article takes a historical look at Kampala's sanitary planning and finds patterns that elucidate the contemporary city's absence of sanitation infrastructure. A historical approach that highlights the sanitary aspects of the production of Kampala goes some way to explaining why so few inhabitants of the contemporary city are connected to the municipal sewerage system. The article suggests that this historical absence of formal infrastructure has been constantly cultivated to perpetuate informality and abjectivity.

The colonial city in the postcolonial era

The Black Hole of Calcutta was once known throughout the English-speaking world as a dark dungeon in which many European prisoners were suffocated to death by an Indian ruler. A monument was built in Calcutta in 1760 to commemorate this event, but it was pulled down in 1821. It was rebuilt by the viceroy Curzon in 1902 in the era of high imperialism. But Indian nationalists had the monument removed in 1940. This essay looks at the ideological history of empire in the last 250 years by tracing the travels of this monument in a postcolonial city. It shows that academic history and popular memory have a strong influence on each other.

(Un)Covering the Face of Dhaka: Gender Politics and Public Space in the Post-Colonial City

Socio-spatial conditions for women in Dhaka are very specifi c and highly contradictory. Th is article traces some of these contradictions by looking at the multilayered presence of women in public space—where public space is defi ned as both the space of politics and public discourse, and the physical space of streets, parks and squares. By analyzing the presence of women in public space, it is argued that one can observe a continuous tension within these spaces between ‘offi cial’ discourses and often repeated ideas that stress equal rights for women on the one hand and a whole series of everyday practices on the other that rather tend to make women’s presence in public space marginal.

Archiving the Postcolonial City

The archive has emerged as a critical tool to conceptualise the heuristic value of history, heritage, and memory in debates on postcolonial futures. In this special issue, we take stock of the possibilities for the colonial and postcolonial archive to provide frameworks for the imagination of postcolonial futures.2 We posit that archival work in the postcolonial city may help retrace the past in order to reconfigure the future. In the current climate of postcolonial malaise, the archival imagination may constitute a significant component in the reconfiguration of postcolonial futures. However, such claims can only be made if we are indeed allowed to imagine the city as an archive, to be read in an archival way. How can such a concept of the city be defended?

The postcolonial city in South Asia

As a colonial invention, Karachi embodies the dynamics of postcolonial movement, diasporic populations, class inequality, new aspirations and abrasions, and a radical assortment of ethnicities and cultures. While Karachi remains a space where relations of power established during British colonial rule linger, it is also a site where new structures of power and a politics of identity have been negotiated and autochthonous claims contested. In the 1980s the rise of Muhajir militant nationalism inscribed within Karachi's landscape punctured dreams of a cosmopolitan city aligned with the visions of its postcolonial elite. Karachi's brutal ethnic riots and subsequent army operations brought to light the violent, anarchic side of the city. For many Karachi was never the same again. Engaging with history, anthropology, and postcolonial theory and geography, I reflect in this essay on the changing nature of the Pakistani metropolis in the context of its ethnic marking and various national projects. I consider how new formations are intertwined with Karachi's reconstruction, especially current missions that endeavour to transform the insurgent metropolis into a space symbolic of a progressive and secular Pakistan.

Jinnealogy

In this article I explore what I call jinnealogy, a theological orientation that emerges when the genealogies of human memory are confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape. In stories told in contemporary Delhi, long-lived jinn act as transmitters connecting human beings centuries apart in time. In petitions deposited to jinn-saints in a ruined medieval palace, medieval ideas of justice come together with modern bureaucratic techniques. Both stories and rituals attest to a theological newness intricately entwined with the transformations of the postcolonial city's spiritual and physical landscapes. Jinn are present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary, and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state coincide to attempt vast erasures of the city's Muslim landscapes. Jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by bringing up other temporalities, political theologies, and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of a bureaucratically constituted present.

New media and new politics with old cemeteries and disused railways: advocacy goes digital in Singapore

This article seeks to demonstrate the significance of new media in reconfiguring and expanding the politics of conservation in the rapidly urbanizing postcolonial city state of Singapore. The critical role of new media is examined, in providing new access and connectivity to the efforts of non-governmental organizations, particularly heritage groups in the republic in advocating for the conservation of lands around the former Malayan Railway line and Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore. In two case studies, activists and enthusiasts of all ages are seen to quickly build up and share an organic knowledge and memory base in cyberspace, through postings on Facebook and sharing of digital photographs and videos, recorded with digital cameras and smartphones. These actions are significant as collectively staking cultural ownerships of heritage sites about to be lost. As new media are promptly adopted as tools for social mobilization with the ability to circulate events, news and debates through Google+ to Twitter, new publics, new community leaders and new alliances begin to emerge in a scene once dominated by traditional and formal organizations. Like any other medium, new media possess affordances of its own and impact the meanings that are conserved and interpreted through heritage. With Singaporeans ranked in the world as the most frequent users of new media portals like Facebook, the authors explore the cultivation of a new form of citizenry via new media in pushing for the politics of memory, nature and heritage in the highly modernized cityscape.

The Magicians’ Ghetto: Moving Slums and Everyday Life in a Postcolonial City

This essay elaborates a magical realist reading of urban dispossession and the displacement of slum dwellers in contemporary New Delhi. More generally it argues that realist descriptions of the magical and magical descriptions of the real can help us sense and engage the multiple, fractured temporalities of the postcolonial city. The essay foregrounds an impending slum demolition in postcolonial Delhi’s (in)famous magicians’ ghetto in the heart of the city, excavating a concept of ‘moving slums’ from Salman Rushdie’s classic magical realist text Midnight’s Children. The interpretive concept of ‘moving slums’ describes the precarious temporality of slum demolition and re-settlement in postcolonial Delhi, juxtaposing dominant urbanist ideologies with everyday experiences and narratives of urban change. In societies deeply marked by the historical violence of uneven development, moving slums index the haunted morphology of the postcolonial city.

The postcolonial city symphony film and the ‘ruins’ of Suite Habana

This paper situates the recent Cuban film Suite Habana (Pérez, 2003) in relation to the city symphony film tradition. I argue that Pérez's preoccupation with the question of individual self-realization within a socialist society constitutes an elaboration of García Espinosa's main theoretical contribution to the aesthetics and politics debate. That Pérez turns to the tradition of the city symphony film – the first film genre to systematically treat the nature of labor and leisure in capitalist modernity – underscores the film's engagement with another premise of García Espinosa's manifesto – namely, that authentically socialist art cannot exist unless work and leisure are reorganized. In Suite Habana, the questions of work, leisure, and technology come together in the film's style and narrative, but this time with a difference from the first city symphony films. If the early city symphony films tried to mimic for the spectator the sensorial experience of capitalist modernity, Suite Habana goes after the experience of an alternative modernity – one in which work, leisure, and technology have been configured along the lines of García Espinosa's utopian vision.

The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay by Rashmi Varma (review)

The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay by Rashmi Varma (review)

Cultural struggles in the lusofonia arena: Portuguese-speaking migrant musicians in Lisbon

Approaching music as a point of social connection in the post-colonial city of Lisbon, where cultural entrepreneurs deploy the political concept of lusofonia, this study examines the ways in which local migrant musicians from Portuguese-speaking African countries (PALOPJ, as well as Brazil and East Timor, position themselves in this context. In general, the study shows that there is a lack of recognition of the contribution they make to the expressive culture of the Portuguese capital, and this is related to national preconceptions. Surprisingly, despite several existing counter- discourses regarding lusofonia, all interviewed musicians do see some future relevance in this concept. They appeal to both supranational institutions and national governments, asking for structural support in order to promote and disseminate all the expressive culture of Portuguese-speaking African countries, indicating that the contribution of migrant musicians from these countries should be considered as an integral part of Portugal's cultural expression and heritage.

Tastes of the 'Mongrel' City: Geographies of Memory, Spice, Hospitality and Forgiveness

This article examines cultural fragments – local places, people’s gestures, stories, tastes, affective landscapes – to map geographies of ‘Africa’ in a historically ‘mixed’ urban Australian neighbourhood. Focusing on a small Ethiopian business, Addis Ababa Café, the article develops an analysis framed by economies of nostalgic flavours and intimations of transnational belonging. Conceptually, the article approaches the question of how different people manage the task of living together in ‘our mongrel cities’ from two directions. Firstly, it reworks Giard’s celebrations of ‘doing-cooking’ as embedded knowledge to argue that, in the postcolonial city, memories and spices together constitutes significant cultural capital for identity-based trading. Secondly, it worries at Derrida’s arguments that hospitality and forgiveness are paradoxical. Do their contradictions actually preclude productive analytical connections, even when connections are haunted by ambivalence? Commensality based on alliances of ‘others’ might question at least ethnocentric assumptions of who offers hospitality, who forgives.

Cultural struggles in the lusofonia arena: Portuguese-speaking migrant musicians in Lisbon

Approaching music as a point of social connection in the post-colonial city of Lisbon, where cultural entrepreneurs deploy the political concept of lusofonia, this study examines the ways in which local migrant musicians from Portuguese-speaking African countries (PALOP), as well as Brazil and East Timor, position themselves in this context. In general, the study shows that there is a lack of recognition of the contribution they make to the expressive culture of the Portuguese capital, and this is related to national preconceptions. Surprisingly, despite several existing coun- ter-discourses regarding lusofonia, all interviewed musicians do see some future relevance in this concept. They appeal to both supranational institutions and national governments, asking for structural support in order to promote and disseminate all the expressive culture of Portuguese-speaking African countries, indicating that the contribution of migrant musicians from these countries should be considered as an integral part of Portugal’s cultural expression and heritage. Key words: Lusofonia, Portugal, migrant musicians, cultural policy, postcolonialism

Editorial

To conclude, I want to refer briefly to the content of our next issue. Ray Bush’s article for example can be read with Žižek’s notion of objective violence hovering in the background. We also have three other interesting articles on a diverse range of topics: urbanization and its comparative elements, music as a point of social connection in the post-colonial city of Lisbon, and the Equality Guarantee under the Ethiopian Constitution. Also, we publish three reports based on recently completed doctoral research. Finally, AF is now also active on some of the main social media networks, Facebook, Twitter, and Academia.Edu, an academic social media networ

Yoruba Video Comedies: You Don’t Know Lagos

Yoruba Video Comedies: You Don’t Know Lagos Connor Ryan Femi Adebayo. Jelili. Parts 1 and 2. 2012. Nigeria. In Yoruba with English subtitles. Epsalum Productions. 272 mins. No price reported. Tope Daramola. Ipaja si Idumota ninu BRT (Impaja to Idumota on the BRT). Parts 1 and 2. 2012. Nigeria. In Yoruba with English subtitles. Gemini Films and Marketing. 209 mins. No price reported. Muyhdeen S. Ayinde. O o M’Eko (You Don’t Know Lagos). Parts 1 and 2. 2012. Nigeria. In Yoruba with English subtitles. Headmaster Films. 197 mins. No price reported. It is surprising how little writing one finds on comedy in African cinema. If we recall that African cinema has historically defined itself by its “seriousness” of political, cultural, or artistic intent, we might understand why, for that tradition, comedy is viewed as indulgent or undignified. But for Nollywood, comedy has been standard fare for some time. In fact, one of the highest grossing video films, Kingsley Ogoro’s Osuofia in London (2004), a farce about a bush hunter who travels to London, is considered a classic Nollywood blockbuster. The film is a variation on the perennial story of the village fool who travels to the city only to find himself comically bewildered by urban life. In the films under review here, London is replaced by Lagos—no less a global metropolis—but the humor is much the same. In Femi Adebayo’s Jelili, the town trickster is banished to Lagos, where ironically he finds himself the victim of big city tricksters. In Tope Daramola’s Ipaja si Idumota ninu BRT (Impaja to Idumota on the BRT), a pair of scoundrels are run out of town, and though one finds work as a ticket collector on the Lagos bus (Bus Rapid Transit), his antics remain unchanged. The protagonist of Muyideen Ayinde’s O o M’Eko (You Don’t Know Lagos) is not a trickster, but a naive [End Page 215] fool who is framed for murder and flees to Lagos where he falls in with a gang of Area boys. Each of these films turns on the scene of the protagonist’s arrival in Lagos, which opens onto all manner of slapstick humor. These scenes work to cast the country bumpkin as an illiterate, unable to decipher the city’s incoherent spaces, inscrutable social networks, and unspoken laws. The protagonist’s estrangement reflects the general alienation one never ceases to feel in a city like Lagos, where uncertainty has become a generalized condition of everyday life. The village fool is humorously tormented for not being “in the know,” and yet his clowning around defamiliarizes what the urban viewer already knows all too well. That is to say that comedies of this sort are as revealing as they are distracting. Of course, as a genre, comedy produces its levity by distracting viewers from the potential gravity of its subject matter. And yet it is perhaps precisely for this reason that comedies are able to probe the most controversial fault lines of Nigerian society. In the postcolonial African city, innumerable lifeways converge and diverge in the “incessant provisionality and innovation” that Abdou Maliq Simone says is characteristic of urban Africa (1998:76). Improvisation is necessary in all dimensions of daily life where no condition is permanent. In Lagos one provides for one’s own water, electricity, and security, a fact that led the geographer Matthew Gandy to quip that Lagos, a city characterized by political and economic instability, petro-capitalist development, and a severe contraction of the public sphere is a “self-service city” (2006:388). For those living in Lagos, this translates into a shared sense of personal vulnerability and apprehension about the uncertainty of what is to come. Onookome Okome calls Lagos “the anxious city,” noting that the metropolis “is anxious about its own status in the global tide of goods and services and other kinds of exchange, and its citizens are insecure and anxious of their place within it” (2004:71). This all makes Lagos a rich site within the popular Nigerian imagination. The comedies in question play on this popular vision of the city. Jelili opens in a small town that is quickly...