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Abstract Critical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital (GRC). This essay engages feminist postcolonial approaches, grounded in African continental feminist work, to theorize from the urban transformations, displacements, and resistances driven by GRC and emerging in urban East Africa. This framework engages an intersectional understanding of capitalism, and its work driving urban displacement, as always co‐produced through gender, racial, colonial, heteronormative, nationalist, and other power‐geometries. We assert that feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, within and beyond Africa: critical of colonial past‐presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights—intellectual and material—of African women.
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A Darling ® of the beauty trade: race, care, and the imperial debris of synthetic hair
This article pushes for a postcolonial geography of care, through hair. Working with the ‘imperial debris’ of care as a disciplinary racial logic, we show how it is renewed, remade, and resisted in the present through the travels, narratives, and practices of the African synthetic hair trade. Here we interrogate Lebanese business expansion, entrepreneurialism, manufacture, and styling, tracing in each case how contemporary narratives of care mirror, entrench, and rework colonial ideals and subjectivities of Whiteness. Disrupting these logics, we close by attending to the influences of Ugandan stylists and consumers who draw on Caribbean, US-American, and other diasporic circuits of Blackness, along with locally rooted innovations. Our work demonstrates how racial power travels through time and across space, asserting the important and sustained insights of a postcolonial geography of care.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1461686
- PAR ID:
- 10547614
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- cultural geographies
- Volume:
- 27
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1474-4740
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 85-99
- Size(s):
- p. 85-99
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Critical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital. In constructive tension with Marxist urban geographies of displacement, antiracist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer scholarship disrupts Anglo Euro-American and capitalo-centric intellectual modes of thought. It pushes for an intersectional understanding of capitalism, including its work driving urban displacement, as always co-produced through gender, racial, heteronormative, nationalist and other power-geometries. This essay reviews and connects these literatures, using feminist postcolonial work to theorize from the processes, drivers, impacts of and scholarship around global retail capital emerging in urban East Africa. With this we assert that feminist postcolonial interventions, engaging but other-than Marxist norms, and grounded in African continental critical feminist work, offers more complex and historicized understandings of those urban transformations, displacements and resistances driven by global retail capital. feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, with and beyond Africa, that are critical of colonial past-presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights, intellectual and material, of African women.more » « less
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