Contemporary Africa–India circulations have brought a growing number of African migrants to India for trade, education, asylum, medical travel. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with West African migrants in Delhi who describe “doing business” as central to their mobility regardless of visa category, this talk explores how “doing business,” exceeds economic exchange; it is not only a livelihood strategy, but also a set of spatial practices, a social identity, and a negotiation of risk. The talk shows how “doing business” gives rise to “new” urban constellations, such as African hair salons and grocery stores, that are located largely in mixed-demographic, unplanned settlements, and argues that such sites are analytically significant for understanding contemporary processes of urbanism in Delhi.
Dr Bani Gill is a Junior Professor at the Institute for Sociology, University of Tübingen and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. She is a qualitative sociologist grounded in ethnographic sensibilities and a regional focus on South Asia and contemporary Africa- India encounters.
Contested Sovereignty: Chinese-led urban development, city making, and urban futures in Nairobi, Kenya
Elisa Tamburo (Harvard & Oxford)
The paper examines city-making and its stakeholders to show how sovereignty is negotiated beyond the polity of the nation-state. Since the early 2000s, the rise of Chinese private construction firms in Nairobi, Kenya, has transformed how the city is planned, built, and inhabited. Chinese-led urban development not only fragments the Kenyan urban middle class but also reveals divergent and sometimes conflicting interests among Chinese actors themselves. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi, I analyse the effects of private Chinese financial engagement in Kenya and probe which contested visions of the city may emerge, tracing how these are entangled with notions of citizenship, governance, and sovereignty in Nairobi.
Elisa Tamburo is a social anthropologist and Skłodowska Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow jointly in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard and the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford. Her second main research project Negotiating the City, focuses on urban planning and dwelling amidst China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya.
Speaker(s): Bani Gill (University of Tuebingen), Elisa Tamburo (Oxford)
Series: MSAS
Venue: St Antony's College - Pavilion Room - Pavilion Room St Antony's College 62 Woodstock Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX2 6JF United Kingdom
Department: Asian Studies Centre (St Antony's)
Organiser: Janaki Srinivasan & Rebekah Lee
Host: Asian Studies Centre
