Representing postcolonial urban change: Recursive infrastructures and forms of liveability in Tram 83

Abstract

My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.