South Asia-Africa Seminar Series: Southern Urbanisms, Migration and Belonging
Speakers: Bani Gill (Tubingen) and Elisa Tamburo (Havard & Oxford)
Contested Sovereignty: Chinese-led urban development, city-making, and urban futures in Nairobi, Kenya
Elisa Tamburo (Harvard University & 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. I argue for the need to distinguish carefully among different stakeholders – builders, residents, and municipal authorities – and propose that we venture beyond a nation-centered analysis of sovereignty. Focusing on the scale of the city offers new vistas on the forces that shape visions of the future, which often diverge from those that urban dwellers imagine and aspire to.
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. Her work appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as the JRAI, Focaal, and the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. Elisa is currently revising her first book manuscript, Exiled in the City, for Cornell University Press.
Business as (un)usual: Migration and Urban Life in Afro-Asian Delhi
Bani Gill (University of Tubingen)
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. For migrants with precarious legal status, “doing business” involves navigating India’s legal regime, where discretionary state authority and bureaucratic logics foreclose and open opportunities for entrepreneurial aspiration. Migrants cultivate shared vocabularies and practices of licitness—socially permissible yet legally ambivalent forms of work—through which they negotiate regulatory grey zones. Yet the fluidity of licitness generates both possibility and anxiety, offering opportunity yet also exposing migrants to uncertainty. By tracing how opportunity and friction converge in this daily labor, the talk traces how “doing business” becomes a relational and affective site through which contemporary Afro-Asian encounters are produced, contested, and transformed.
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. Her research interests include urbanisms, migration, race and racialization, gender, and the sociology of law, bureaucracy, and the state. Her current project explores practices of deportation and policing in urban India.
All are welcome
Enquiries: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk or 01865-274559
