The City as Borderland: Migrancy and Frontier Life in Johannesburg

Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
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Abstract

What does it mean to ‘belong’ in an African city? And what does it mean to be ‘different’? How have contemporary South African – and wider global – discourses framed belonging and difference; and how is this framing encountered and altered by those who are positioned as ‘outsider’? Finally, how are notions of legality constructed by the state, and how are they contested by ordinary people? These are key questions for our imaginaries of citizenship in postcolonial Africa, where we deal with the legacies of colonialism and modernity through our somewhat arbitrarily constructed state boundaries, and these are the key concerns around which Caroline Wanjiku Kihato’s ethnography of migrant women in Johannesburg centres. This book is about Johannesburg’s in-between spaces, and the agency of the people who inhabit them and who, in so doing, change the face of the city. In South Africa’s current context of eversurfacing xenophobic sentiment, it is a book that matters to notions of the ‘local’ versus the ‘foreign’, and to our notions of the legal versus the illegal life in a city.
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作为边境之地的城市:约翰内斯堡的移民和边境生活
在非洲城市“归属”是什么意思?“不同”是什么意思?当代南非——以及更广泛的全球——的话语是如何构建归属感和差异的?那些被定位为“局外人”的人是如何遇到和改变这种框架的?最后,合法性的概念是如何由国家构建的,又是如何受到普通民众的质疑的?这些都是我们在后殖民时代的非洲想象公民身份的关键问题,在那里,我们通过某种程度上任意构建的国家边界来处理殖民主义和现代性的遗产,这些也是卡罗琳·万吉库·齐哈托关于约翰内斯堡移民妇女的民族志所关注的关键问题。这本书是关于约翰内斯堡的中间空间,以及居住在其中的人们的代理,他们这样做,改变了城市的面貌。在南非目前仇外情绪不断浮现的背景下,这本书对“本地人”与“外国人”的概念,以及我们对城市中合法生活与非法生活的概念都很重要。
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Africa Review of Books, Volume 8, n° 2, 2012 Africa Review of Books, Volume 11, n° 1, 2015 Africa Review of Books, volume 14, n° 1, 2018 Africa Review of Books, volume 14, n° 2, 2018 La CFAO et le commerce en Afrique
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