How do Africans conceive space? How are places constructed and imagined? How do the conceptions, constructions, imaginings of spaces and places affect, and in turn are affected by, social, economic and political change. These are some of the questions answered in this, the first book of its kind to address systematically the themes of of space and spatiality.

“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

Imagining Vernacular Histories is centered on the idea of engaging with indigenous African cosmologies that signal at pluriversality. In conversation with Toyin Falola’s reading of the African pluriverse and his exploration of the idea of “ritual archives,” the contributors to this volume rethink the historical archive in search of vernacular histories. Simultaneously, they recognize the contributions from various other disciplines in pluralizing the term vernacular. The book brings together a wide range of topics, such as reflections on African historiography; the relationship between memory, history and literature; gender relations; and the construction of historical archives. While appropriating Falola’s conception of vernacular histories, the contributors collectively argue that pluriversality and ritual archives can potentially rescue African historical and creative scholarship from the sustained practices of epistemicide. Simultaneously, Imagining Vernacular Histories focuses on the emerging interdisciplinary conversations on constructing the pluriverse as well as on the geopolitics of knowledge production. Through a critical appreciation of Falola’s engagement with the ideas of postcoloniality, decolonizing epistemologies, and pluriversality, this book locates his scholarship in relation to postcolonial theory emerging from the Global South.

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.

Richard Werbner assesses the role of the Kalanga minority in Botswana. Since independence the Kalanga have dominated government and business, yet their strong values and stable social order has allowed them to forge effective alliances with other ethnic groups and to contribute to significant social improvements.

The book contains 17 chapters with material from 13 African countries, from Egypt to Swaziland and from Senegal to Kenya. Most of the authors are young African academics. The focus of the volume is the multitude of voluntary associations that has emerged in African cities in recent years. In many cases, they are a response to mounting poverty, failing infrastructure and services, and more generally, weak or abdicating urban governments. Some associations are new, in other cases, existing organizations are taking on new tasks. Associations may be neighbourhood-based, others may be city-wide and based on professional groupings or a shared ideology or religion. Still others have an ethnic base. Some of these organizations are engaged in both day-to-day matters of urban management and more long-term urban development. Urban associations challenge the monopoly of local and central government institutions.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.