1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154296403321

Titolo

African Futures : Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility / / Juan Obarrio, Brian Goldstone

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2017]

©2017

ISBN

0-226-40238-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (274 pages)

Disciplina

306.096

Soggetti

Africa

crisis

emergence

futurity

temporality

SOCIAL SCIENCE / General

Africa Social conditions 21st century Congresses

Africa Forecasting Congresses

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Most contributions derive from an invited session on "African Futures in Crisis", held at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in 2010.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- One. Introduction: Untimely Africa? / Goldstone, Brian / Obarrio, Juan -- Part One. Rethinking Crisis -- Two. Africa Otherwise / Roitman, Janet -- Three. The Form of Crisis and the Affect of Modernization / Larkin, Brian -- Four. The Productivity of Crisis: Aid, Time, and Medicine in Mozambique / McKay, Ramah -- Part Two. Emergent Economies -- Five. Money in the Future of Africans / Guyer, Jane I. -- Six. Forensics of Capital / Ralph, Michael -- Seven. Brokering Revolution: Imagining Future War on the West African Borderlands / Hoffman, Danny -- Eight. Hedging the Future / Piot, Charles -- Nine. Entangled Postcolonial Futures: Malagasy Marriage Migrants and Provincial Frenchmen / Cole, Jennifer -- Part Three. Urban Spaces and Local Futures -- Ten. Rough Towns: Mobilizing Uncertainty in Kinshasa / Simone, Abdoumaliq -- Eleven. Local Futures, the Future



of the Local: Urban Living in a Central African Metropolis / Boeck, Filip de -- Twelve. Changing Mobilities, Shifting Futures / Geschiere, Peter / Socpa, Antoine -- Thirteen. Time and Again: Locality as Future Anterior in Mozambique / Obarrio, Juan -- Part Four. Possibilities -- Fourteen. Getting Ahead When We're Behind: Time, Potential, and Value in Urban Tanzania / Weiss, Brad -- Fifteen. Africa in Theory / Mbembe, Achille -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Contributors -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola-but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed?             The experts in this book address Africa's future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.