Questions of cityness at the extensions: Law, discrimination and Cairo’s desert from the lens of Frantz Fanon’s urban passant

Abstract

This commentary engages with the rich conundrum outlined in Simone et al.'s ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’ by extending its prose with the polemics of discrimination, justice, agency and refusal at Cairo's desert extensions. As people fail to redress injustices inherited from the colonial past, haunting their future becoming, questions of cityness prevail as to how extensions re-produce hegemonic experiments albeit in new orientations. In quest of the good life, I posit the urban passant as a politics of agency and postcolonial subjectivity drawn from Frantz Fanon, which elucidates people's tactics, spirals and maneuvers when confronting traditions of the oppressed. The purpose here is to develop a situated liberatory politics from within the middle of things.