Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels
Title | Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Tiyambe Zeleza |
Publisher | Africa World Press |
Pages | 388 |
Release | 1999 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 9780865437074 |
How do Africans conceive space? How are places constructed and imagined? How do the conceptions, constructions, imaginings of spaces and places affect, and in turn are affected by, social, economic and political change. These are some of the questions answered in this, the first book of its kind to address systematically the themes of of space and spatiality.
Landscapes of the Secular
Title | Landscapes of the Secular PDF eBook |
Author | Nicolas Howe |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 250 |
Release | 2016-09-05 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 022637680X |
“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.
The Postcolonial City and its Subjects
Title | The Postcolonial City and its Subjects PDF eBook |
Author | Rashmi Varma |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 277 |
Release | 2011-08-05 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1136804021 |
This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.
Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana
Title | Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana PDF eBook |
Author | Richard P. Werbner |
Publisher | Indiana University Press |
Pages | 268 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780253344021 |
Richard Werbner assesses the role of the Kalanga minority in Botswana. Since independence the Kalanga have dominated government and business, yet their strong values and stable social order has allowed them to forge effective alliances with other ethnic groups and to contribute to significant social improvements.
Associational Life in African Cities
Title | Associational Life in African Cities PDF eBook |
Author | Arne Tostensen |
Publisher | Nordic Africa Institute |
Pages | 336 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9789171064653 |
The book contains 17 chapters with material from 13 African countries, from Egypt to Swaziland and from Senegal to Kenya. Most of the authors are young African academics. The focus of the volume is the multitude of voluntary associations that has emerged in African cities in recent years. In many cases, they are a response to mounting poverty, failing infrastructure and services, and more generally, weak or abdicating urban governments. Some associations are new, in other cases, existing organizations are taking on new tasks. Associations may be neighbourhood-based, others may be city-wide and based on professional groupings or a shared ideology or religion. Still others have an ethnic base. Some of these organizations are engaged in both day-to-day matters of urban management and more long-term urban development. Urban associations challenge the monopoly of local and central government institutions.
Encyclopedia of Life Writing
Title | Encyclopedia of Life Writing PDF eBook |
Author | Margaretta Jolly |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 1141 |
Release | 2013-12-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1136787445 |
First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Reconsidering Informality
Title | Reconsidering Informality PDF eBook |
Author | Karen Tranberg Hansen |
Publisher | Nordic Africa Institute |
Pages | 240 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 9789171065186 |
This book brings together two bodies of research on urban Africa that have tended to be separate, studies of urban land use and housing and studies of work and livelihoods. Africa's future will be increasingly urban, and the inherited legal, institutional and financial arrangements for managing urban development are inadequate. Access to employment, shelter and services is precarious for most urban residents. The result is the phenomenal growth of the informal city. Extra-legal housing and unregistered economic activities proliferate and basic urban services are increasingly provided informally. Recent decades of neo-liberal political and economic reforms have increased social inequality across urban space. After an introductory chapter by the editors, the contributions are grouped into the following sections: - LOCALITY, PLACE, AND SPACE - ECONOMY, WORK, AND LIVELIHOODS - LAND, HOUSING, AND PLANNING The case studies are drawn from a diverse set of cities on the African continent. A central theme is how practices that from an official standpoint are illegal or extra-legal do not only work but are considered legitimate by the actors concerned. Another is how the informal city is not exclusively the domain of the poor, but also provides shelter and livelihoods for better-off segments of the urban population.