Paper short abstract:

African contexts are infused with citizenship paradoxes. The third space concept is utilised to document negotiated ways of belonging as counter-hegemonic emancipatory practices. The paper also analyses the emergence of a fourth space premised on agency and staging utopia beyond conventional ‘sensibilities.’

Paper long abstract:

The congruence of ideals stemming from the enlightenment period, colonialism, hegemonic neoliberal logic, modernisation/ urbanisation have produced seemingly core and periphery zones in relation to rural and urban spaces within African contexts. This has produced ambivalences and contradictions to citizenship, modes of belonging and the right to the city where the 'rural' as a metaphor for origin, culture, tradition, ancestors/the occult, past, socialism exists as excess to the 'urban' and thus modernity, the city, rights, present, capitalism, Christianity/Islam. However, rather than advancing a clash of epistemologies, this paper uses Bhabha's concept of the third space to document negotiated citizenship, identities and ways of belonging as counter-hegemonic and performed emancipatory practices. Within a critical theory framework, this paper contextualises the impasse of modernity within the African context via lived experiences where complicity and subversion are two sides of the same coin. Yet beyond the third space, the paper deliberates on the emergence of a 'fourth space' premised on agency, self-making, ingenuity and relevant practice of the everyday with African contexts. In this sense, the 'fourth space' speaks to sensibilities and practices that have 'no name' in relation to what 'we know'; possibly in the realm of what is perceived as illegitimate space. I intend to advance a 'fourth space' narrative that exists in African contexts beyond rural and urban binaries but within José Muñoz's logic of staging utopia situated and grounded in emancipatory lived experiences; experiences imbued with political agency.