Casting a long shadow: Colonial categories, cultural identities, and cosmopolitan spaces in globalizing Africa
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Abstract
- This article explores the continuing hold that colonial categories still exercise in
contemporary constructions of African urbanism—even in the context of a city
being profoundly transformed by globalizing forces and processes. Since the mid-
1980s, urban plans and programmes have advocated conserving Mji Mkongwe,
Zanzibar as cultural property—a historic ‘asset’ or national ‘treasure’. Pressured
by structural adjustment and external donors, the state has pursued a restoration
strategy that entails opening the city to new flows of capital, selling off its stock of
properties and promoting a new tourist economy. Paradoxically, the
reconfiguration of property as private has been made possible by asserting its
collective origins, as buildings have been classified as the material expressions of
particular cultural groups, constructed as the heritage of bounded and essentialized
wholes: Arab, Indian, African. In this transnational and cosmopolitan urban
milieu, past discourses of anthropological culture and classification have strikingly
come to the fore, perversely fusing ‘housing stock’ to ‘racial stock’, architecture
and archetype. Past and present combine in contradictory ways, as outmoded
anthropological concepts and practices have been resurrected in development
discourse, cropping up in the most unexpected (and problematic) ways.
| Title | Casting a long shadow: Colonial categories, cultural identities, and cosmopolitan spaces in globalizing Africa |
|---|---|
| Creator | Bissell, William Cunningham |
| Publisher | African Identities |
| Academic Department | Anthropology & Sociology |
| Division | Social Sciences |
| Organization | Lafayette College |
| Date Issued | 2007 |
| Date Available | 2013-08-01T14:03:36Z |
| Type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Keyword | Zanzibar |
| African urbanism | |
| cosmopolitan space | |
| Bibliographic Citation | Bissell, W. C. (2007) "Casting a long shadow: Colonial categories, cultural identities, and cosmopolitan spaces in globalizing Africa." African Identities 5 (2): 181-197. |
| Standard Identifier | DOI 10.1080/14725840701403416 |
| Handle 10385/1265 | |
| Permalink | http://hdl.handle.net/10385/1265 |
| Rights Statement |
In Copyright
|
| Rights Holders | Taylor & Francis |
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| File | Bissell-AfricanIdentities-vol5-no2-2007.pdf | Uploaded 2019-10-20 | Public | Download |
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