Paper short abstract:

In this paper we look at how coloniality deeply permeates the governance of African urban spaces. The objective, prompted by the increase in research on large-scale urban infrastructures in Africa, is to contribute to a more radical analysis of these architectures and, broadly, African urban spaces.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we look at how coloniality deeply permeates the governance of African urban spaces. The objective, prompted by the increase in research on large-scale urban infrastructures in Africa, is to contribute to a more radical analysis of these architectures and African urban spaces more broadly. Our entry point is contemporary infrastructure projects developed in "collaboration" with "new partners," such as China and Brazil, which when planned, financed and implemented in African urban regions are only possible, we argue, because of the inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period. Infrastructure projects in East Africa, in particular, are drawn on to show how situated imperial relationships become manifest in space. Theoretically we argue for approaches that center racialized disposability to articulate how imperial projects undergird and shape these urban spaces. This in turn allows us to better understand contemporary resistance to these projects as part of a longer genealogy of struggles against domination in and of Africa. Connecting across disciplines and black radical traditions, we explore the genius of marginalized people to be fugitive: to resist, avoid, challenge, trick and make evident the endurance of empire in their urban spaces. To do this two main metaphors are employed: "imperial remains" and "imperial invitations." These help to, first, emphasize spatio-geographical continuity from colony to postcolony and, second, interrogate head-on the spatialized and racialized eliminatory logics of present-day infrastructural arrangements, while highlighting the fugitive movements of those caught up in these reinstantiating dynamics of empire.