CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Araújo, Caio Simões |
|---|---|
| Title | City of Flesh: Urbanism, Colonialism and Bodily Intervention in Luanda |
| Summary | This thesis is a historical ethnography of colonial urbanism in the city of Luanda, capital of Angola, Portuguese colony is West Africa, in the last decades of the Empire (i.e., from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s). I argue that urbanism is a modern form of spatial intervention whose effects are not restricted to transformations in the built environment and material structures of the city. Rather, I will explore how urbanism is also articulated with culture, social relations, images of order, systems of meaning, fields of knowledge and, finally, bodies and bodily experiences. In this endeavor, I suggest colonial urbanism was deeply embedded on the biopower of colonialism, tout court. It performed, simultaneously, the colonization of space and the intervention over the colonial body. Moreover, I will re-situate urbanism in the historical trajectory of Portuguese colonial situation and its modalities of discourse on race, law, culture, and citizenship. In this regard, I look at particularly two constructs pervading the making of colonial rule in Angola: the Luso-tropical theory of cultural change and acculturation, in Anthropology, and the Estatuto do Indigenato, in Law. I claim these elements reveal a central contradiction in colonial urbanism: the competing projects of cultural integration and legal differentiation. I analyze how this contradiction is played in two moments of colonial urbanism; first, the segregation of indigenous populations in neighborhoods; second, with the rise of anti-colonial insurgency in the city, attempts to erase the race as a meaningful signifier of colonial difference through a idiom of class and projects of pacifying the musseques (slums). Urbanization as a historical teleology is dislodged and presented instead as a “spatial drama”, as an ongoing, unsolved, struggle over space. |
| Supervisor | Andreas, Dafinger |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/araujo_caio.pdf |
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