Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya

The urban planners of colonial Nairobi foretold the time when their blueprints would become "The Plan of the Citizen of Nairobi." The grammatical work of "of"—signifying a relation of ambiguous subordinate possession and a design for civil subjectivity—emblematizes British debates on the eve of independence about whether the legacy of colonial civil institutions could produce the citizens expected to animate them, or whether institutions are necessarily cultural expressions of collective "modernization." In Marjorie Macgoye's Coming to Birth, questions about the capacity of urban structures and administrative infrastructures to "canalize" a modern civil subjectivity seem to beg Jameson's interpretive schema of the national allegory, where the nation precedes the individual capable of standing in for it. Both the national allegory and the plan for a citizen evince a "first world" desire for a "third world" subjectivity effected through the normative force of spatial form, infrastructural system, and literary genre.