African Urbanisms and Their Hinterlands

This volume revisits contemporary cultural and artistic imaginaries of African cities through a focus on their manifold connections with rural hinterlands. Tracing the multidimensional movements and flows between six African cities—Nairobi, Accra, Kampala, Pretoria/Tshwane, Johannesburg, and Lagos—and their respective hinterlands, the book maps similarities between contemporary city–hinterland interactions across the continent.

The book brings together contributions by scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including literary studies, urban sociology, media studies, medical anthropology, cultural studies, visual arts, and ethnomusicology. It conceives of the relationship between the urban and the hinterland as non-dichotomous and makes an argument for the complex entanglements between African rural and urban cultural imaginaries. It also engages the historical specificities and complex afterlives of different colonial contexts that shape contemporary renegotiations of the rural–urban nexus. Here, the hinterland is offered as a concept with diverse uses and appropriations across a range of African cultural forms, from screen media and poetry to music, visual arts, and everyday cultural practices.

This interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in African studies, urban sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, and human geography. It offers fresh perspectives on African urbanism and challenges conventional approaches to studying African cities by foregrounding cultural and artistic practices.

The essays in this volume were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics.