Museums and communities in Africa: facing the new challenges

Abstract

Established during the colonial era, the majority of museums in Africa were modeled on their European counterparts. The period of Africanization that followed the independence of many African nations witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of Africans receiving higher education and specialized training. Institutions such as museums began to come under the leadership of indigenous Africans but, in most cases, the exhibits and their condition(s) remained the same. Today, African museums face new challenges: how can they become more relevant, both to the local communities they serve and to foreign visitors? How can they attract more visitors, especially from local communities? This article discusses the notion of ‘indigenous’ in an African context. It looks at the development of museums in Africa and their current metamorphosis into dynamic cultural centres that address pertinent social, cultural and even economic issues-in the face of dwindling government funding and increased modernization and globalization. It discusses several museums and how they are meeting these challenges, and how organizations such as AFRICOM (International Council of African Museums) and programmes such as SAMP (African–Swedish Museum Network) are contributing to the positive changes currently taking place.     

The English Interpreters in Dahomey, 1843–1852

ABSTRACT

Commercial and diplomatic relations between Africans and Europeans in West Africa in the pre-colonial period depended on the existence of persons who had sufficient knowledge of both European and African languages to be able to act as interpreters between the parties, and such persons were more usually Africans than Europeans. This article collates biographical information on four persons who served as interpreters to successive British visitors to the kingdom of Dahomey between 1843 and 1852, including official government missions seeking to persuade the Dahomian king to cooperate in the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. The lives of such men may be thought of as involving the ‘transcending’ of ‘boundaries’, not only in acting as brokers in contacts between Africans and Europeans, but also in themselves occupying an ambiguous liminal position between the two. In their role as interpreters, they were subject to contradictory pressures, from the Dahomian state and the various European interests involved in the negotiations, and at the same time sought to advance their own personal interests. Beyond the intrinsic interest of these biographies, this article is conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from mainly European sources.     

Urban Unemployment and Migrants in Africa: Evidence from Harare 1985–1994

Unemployment is a major problem in urban centres in sub‐Saharan Africa. The impact of policies associated with structural adjustment programmes has frequently meant major formal job losses in both the public and private sectors. Although it is widely recognized that there has been a major (further) shift into the informal sector, it is also often claimed that ‘unemployment’ rates have greatly increased. When it is also assumed that net rural–urban migration has continued at a rapid pace, this is believed to be a significant contributor to the rise in unemployment. However, because ‘unemployment’ and ‘underemployment’ are hard to measure and to keep discrete when studying urban Africa, it is apparent that there is much confusion over current levels and trends in unemployment. This article discusses the problems of analysing African urban unemployment, drawing in particular on a recent ILO report, and presents evidence from long‐term research on migrants in Harare which casts doubt on the extent to which net in‐migration is a major factor contributing to unemployment in contemporary, economically adjusting sub‐Saharan Africa.     

The many shades of grey in urban governance: How illegality shapes urban planning,policy and development

Most research on urban planning, policy and development only considers legal practices and actors, and treats illegal ones as insignificant anomalies, unable to structurally affect the governance of urban space. However, this approach is inadequate for explaining urban governance in contexts (e.g. several countries in the Global South, the former Soviet bloc and Southern Europe) where illegal practices such as corruption and organized crime infiltration are widespread in many public and economic sectors. This paper addresses the role of illegal actors and practices in urban governance in the Italian context, using urban regime theory as the theoretical frame of reference. The research centres on the analysis of two case studies in the city of Rome (the In-between world investigation of a criminal network that had infiltrated the local administration and shaped several urban policies, and the investigation of episodes of corruption related to the project for the new A.S. Roma soccer stadium). It shows the existence of two shades of ‘grey urban governance’: firstly, the presence of a dark urban regime, centred on a criminal organisation and parallel to the ‘regular’ one; secondly, the use of corruption as a customary practice with which real estate entrepreneurs influence municipal decisions. Overall, this research contributes to moving away from a rhetoric of ‘gentlemanly’ urban capitalism and politics, and suggests the need to revise several aspects of urban regime theory – as well as other approaches to urban governance dynamics in general – in order to incorporate the role of illegal actors and practices.     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

The Civilisation Cards: US Army Style.

Abstract

The term ‘heritage crime’ has been recently brought into the spotlight by English Heritage — the organization tasked with protecting England’s heritage assets — and is attracting an increasing amount of attention from individuals and organizations from a range of disciplines. Heritage crime includes recognized crime types (such as arson, criminal damage, theft, and graffiti) but arguably has a greater impact on the country’s legacy for future generations because of the types of sites affected. This paper presents an initial examination of our understanding of heritage crime, and limitations to that knowledge. The paper contributes an initial typology to facilitate future interdisciplinary discussions of the problems facing heritage assets, and presents a possible route for expanding our ability to tackle this problem. Whilst this is an initial foray into the world of heritage crime, it is hoped that this paper will act as a stimulus for further discussion and action.     

Shifting meanings in changing contexts: the role of the creative city in Shanghai,Hong Kong and Taipei

Abstract

This paper probes the underlying motives behind the adoption of the ‘creative city’ policies in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei. It argues that while the global appeal of the creative city is commonly attributed to urban entrepreneurialism, this reason alone is insufficient in explaining the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in these three cities, because none of them ascribe to the conventional format of the post-industrial ‘entrepreneurial’ city. In order to identify other major forces driving the adoption of creative city initiatives in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, this work delves into the ways in which the idea of the creative city is reworked within the context of global city making. The study found that in addition to urban entrepreneurialism, the inherited cultural policy agenda, which largely stems from national interests, also plays a significant role in directing (and changing) the ‘global cultural city’ making process. By looking into different roles attached to the ‘imported’ policy discourse of the creative city in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, this study not only contributes to the understanding of urban cultural policies within the Chinese-speaking world and East Asia more generally, but also lends some insights to the developing field of cultural policy mobility.     

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

The Lusitania Riots in Pietermaritzburg 13–14 May 1915

During the Great War the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German submarine off the Irish coast on 7 May 1915, with the loss of 1198 lives, evoked a strong popular reaction throughout the English-peaking world, and included violent outbursts against Germans in many urban centres of the British Empire. In South Africa these riots resulted in great damage to property and pressure on the Union government to enforce harsh restrictions on enemy subjects and businesses. This is an account of the riots and their consequences in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, one of the most ‘British’ of South African cities.     

Different typologies of ‘co-working spaces’ and the contemporary dynamics of local economic development in Rome

ABSTRACT

Co-working spaces of different types are emerging as new economic and social intermediaries in the contemporary process of urban regeneration and urban economic growth. Despite their relevance, literature still fails to explore their role in the surrounding local economy. This paper intends to fill that gap, providing empirical evidence from the city of Rome and suggesting new policy perspectives. First, a taxonomy of the different spaces is provided, assessing their role in the related socio-economic ecosystem. Three main typologies have been identified: CWS1 acting as a ‘social incubator’ with an educational role and closer links to local authorities, CWS2 or ‘start-up incubator’ providing economic and technical support to the entrepreneurs-to-be, CWS3 or ‘real estate incubator’ which are mainly a commercial product. Their locational patterns are then discussed, highlighting the planning implication of their settlement in some in-between urban peripheral areas of Rome. Finally, suggestions for the creation of public/private partnerships or ‘social leases’ are proposed, foreseeing the integration of such spaces in the local offer of amenities. The current research paves the way for further discussion on the renewal of cities’ governance tools, processes of urban regeneration and policies tackling the new urban entrepreneurial class.     

The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

Abstract

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.     

Boekbesprekings/Book reviews

Abstract

The departure point of this article is the postmodern critique of my book, The Dead Will Arise. The object of the article is not however to defend either the book itself or the 'constructionist’ school of historiography to which it apparently belongs. The first part of the article seeks to clarify the epistemological basis on which constructionist historians claim the right to engage with and interpret the past. In the process of doing so, it establishes a conceptual framework capable of defining relevance in the context of post-democratic South African historiography. It argues that historians have a duty to prioritise the ‘scars’ and ‘pitfalls’ of South African history failing which they become mere lapdogs, decorative but irrelevant. It is further argued that, although historians have the right to study whatever they choose, there is something intrinsically wrong with institutional mechanisms which produce nothing but lapdogs, and that university history departments need to take more of a lead.     

Cities and climate change – examining advantages and challenges of urban climate change experiments

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to the literature on urban climate change experiments by analysing ascribed advantages and challenges of organizing climate change experiments at the urban scale, and by examining how local actions translate into effect. We here distinguish between effects of experiments in achieving actual sustainability gains (‘goal-oriented objectives’) and instigating broader institutional change (‘process-oriented objectives’). Empirically, we analyse efforts related to energy supply in two Danish urban climate change experiments: The ‘CPH 2025 Climate Plan’ in Copenhagen, and ‘ProjectZero’ in Sønderborg. Our analysis poses considerable question marks over the importance of the advantages ascribed to urban climate change experiments including ‘authority advantages’ and possibilities of ‘engaging and mobilizing stakeholders’.     

Population Affinities of the Jebel Sahaba Skeletal Sample: Limb Proportion Evidence

The Lower Nubian Epipaleolithic site of Jebel Sahaba (Sudan) was discovered in 1962. From 1962 to 1966, a total of 58 intentionally buried skeletons were uncovered at the site. Diagnostic microliths indicative of the Qadan industry as well as the site's geology suggest an age of 14–12 ka for these burials. In this study, the body proportions of the Jebel Sahaba sample are compared with those of a large (max N = 731) sample of recent human skeletons from Europe, Africa and circumpolar North America, as well as to terminal Pleistocene ‘Iberomaurusian’ skeletons from the Algerian sites of Afalou‐Bou‐Rhummel and the later Capsian‐associated Ain Dokhara specimen, as well as Natufian skeletons from the southern Levantine site of El Wad. Bivariate analyses distinguish Jebel Sahaba from European and circumpolar samples, but do not tend to segregate them from recent North or sub‐Saharan African samples. Multivariate analyses (principal components analysis, principal coordinates analysis with minimum spanning tree and neighbour‐joining cluster analyses) indicate that the body shape of the Jebel Sahaba humans is most similar to that of recent sub‐Saharan Africans and different from that of either the Levantine Natufians or the northwest African ‘Iberomaurusian’ samples. Importantly, these results corroborate those of both Irish and Franciscus, who, using dental, oral and nasal morphology, found that Jebel Sahaba was most similar to recent sub‐Saharan Africans and morphologically distinct from their penecontemporaries in other parts of North Africa or the groups that succeed them in Nubia. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Urban White Paper and The Churches

Abstract

Has the Church of England, post Faith in the City, become the ‘Marks and Spencer’ of the English urban scene? Many people lament the Church's absence from the high street but few wish to enter the ‘store’, let alone give it their ‘allegiance’ and ‘custom’. As an Anglican priest working in an urban parish, vicar of a large ancient and historically important town-centre Church, and being the first Social Responsibility Officer in the diocese of Peterborough, I fantasize that the Church is both M/S and S/M to want to persist with such an irrelevant parochial structure and outdated theological model of mission. The recently published Urban White Paper and other recent government reports have given an opportunity to consider possible new mission structures that take seriously the complex social layers of a post industrial urban landscape. Renaissance, regeneration and renewal are needed in the structures of the institutional Church and in our thinking of globalized city living.     

The Translation of the Scriptures and the Ecumenical Patriarchate: The Translation Efforts of Hilarion of Tirnovo

Abstract

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Constantinople continued to be the intellectual and religious centre of the Greeks despite rival flourishing educational and economic centres in such cities as Smyrna, Kydonies (Aivali), and Chios. Moreover, it was the ‘national’ centre of the Greek people. It was natural, therefore, that the subject of a new translation of the Scriptures, a project affecting all Greeks, should have arisen once more in the Ottoman capital.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.