Abstract
Dire inequalities characterizing global cities are often described as resulting from structural or neoliberal violence and anthropological analyses typically depict disparate patterns of exclusion, dehumanization and violence—not least urban patterns of enclaving. Even though such analyses are crucial it is, we argue, a key concern for studies of Africa also to identify urban practices oriented around forms of care, mutuality and collectivity that we see as key forms of negotiating intimacy and detachment. Here we explore such practices in Maputo in the guise of texts adorning both crowded minibuses and privately-owned cars, as well as specific works of street art. While often leading to laughter, comments, or discussions among passengers as well as passersby, ambulating texts and pieces of art alike are also acknowledged to communicate aspirations for novel forms of sociality, to attack inter-human separation and lack of empathy, and, finally, to comprise expressions of desires to generate affective spaces for love, care and mutuality. By mapping art, texts and the ambulatory in Maputo, we make two arguments: First, we underline the usefulness of generating understandings of African urban spaces which evade emphasizing ever-increasing dynamics of atomization of collectives or which project necropolitics as comprising the end all and be all of African cities. Second, we show how temporality, including descriptions projecting the end of the future, is actively and critically engaged by this type of textual, artistic and interpretative practice.
Bio
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. He has conducted multiple fieldworks in Mozambique since 1998, researching political anthropology, violence, war and urban Africa. Recent publications include the monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique (2016) and the edited works Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval (with Bruce Kapferer, 2009); Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, ca. 1850 to 1950 (with Kirsten Kjerland, 2015); Violent Reverberations: Global Modalities of Trauma (with Vigdis Broch-Due, 2016). He publishes regularly in journals such as Social Anthropology, Ethnos, Journal of Southern African Studies, Urban Studies and Social Analysis.
