Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema

This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.

Addamms Mututa is a postdoctoral research fellow at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. He practices interdisciplinary research on cinema and global south cities and holds a joint PhD from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

1. Crisis Urbanism in Context 2. Crisis of Nonentity - 'Unknowing' Johannesburg's Postapartheid Townships 3. Laissez Faire Urbanism: Economies of Dystopia in Postcolonial Kinshasa 4. Urbanism of the Commons: Inhabiting Trash and a Crisis of Communing in Nairobi 5. Rarray Urbanism: The Superficies of Monrovia's Hustlers in Postwar Urban Crisis 6. Revolt Urbanism: Cairo's Crisis Citizenship Under Construction 7. Outlier Urbanism: Inside Luanda's Postwar Cantonments 8. Crisis Urbanism and the Future of African Cities