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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.
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Designing a ‘vibrant, attractive and sustainable city’: feminist approaches to beautification in Kampala, Uganda
Beauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colo- nial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our arti- cle, we approach urban beautification campaigns in down- town Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the expe- riences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautifi- cation and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial pro- grams as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disci- plining and displacing practice and as mentally and physi- cally violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1951585
- PAR ID:
- 10554896
- Publisher / Repository:
- Routledge
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Gender, Place & Culture
- Volume:
- x
- Issue:
- x
- ISSN:
- 0966-369X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 22
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2024.2352118
