Blackness in the (Post)Colonial African City

Abstract

This chapter elaborates the Black Geographic in the African city. There, affirmations and contestations of a Blackness born of negation but not erasure vie among disrupted yet unbroken ancestral lineages and homemaking claims. The chapter begins by examining two iconic sites in the French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission): the colonial municipalities of the Four Communes in Senegal and the postcolonial regional hegemon of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. In doing so the chapter demonstrates how the mission civilisatrice deeply conflated the terms of race and culture to articulate the right to the city. It then engages AbdouMaliq Simone’s theorization of “black urbanism,” which disrupts imperial denouncements of Blackness to posit alternative, always, and already livelihood strategies, mobilities, and meaning-making practices to offer a vital contribution to the Black Geographic spatial imaginary.