Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa (review)

In a special issue of Public Culture on "Johannesburg—The Elusive Metropolis" (2004 [16:3]), Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall critique accounts of mobility in the European city that presuppose a "spatial and temporal openness" that determines what they refer to as "the engineering of certainty" (361). A significant body of work that privileges itineraries of wandering by cultural theorists has opened up the urban landscape to its recuperative social mobilities, such as the landscape of de Certeau's rhetorics of walking and Lefebvre's rhythm analysis. However, these writings on European cities neglect the manner in which "striating openness and flow depend on a whole series of rules, conventions, and institutions of regulation and control" (361). In the postcolony's urban topographies of war, conflict, segregation, neocolonization, and "terror," how are bodies managed so as to engineer certainty for the multiple interests at work? Its production of discourses of war, peace, security, and governance produces discordant topographies that create specific positionalities for certain bodies—in the sense that those unequal, uneven topographies engineer (im)mobility, obstruction, or dead ends for certain positioned bodies. The mutually constitutive relationship between discordant topographies and the practices of gendering space is examined in the framework of the Global South in Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali's edited volume, Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, a product of the emergent dialogues on urban studies from the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network.

Wide-reaching in its range of localities in the Global South, Rieker and Ali's framing argument for this collection of essays interrogates the efficacy of immutable epistemologies of urban space in modernist discourse. The effect of "liberal" modernity's disciplinary nature has precluded urban space from being one of carefree and unrestrained emancipation for women, minorities, and the working class; thus the modernist discourse in the genealogy of urban studies proves incommensurate to the reconstruction of space and place in the neoliberal present. As Mbembe and Nuttall critique accounts of mobility in the European city that presuppose an engineered certainty, the essays in Gendering Urban Space question the efficacy of tropes associated with the modern city such as mobility, technology, speed, and autonomy, in the context of the Global South's multi-ethnic and economically uncertain urban environment.

The legacy of modernist discourses that categorize the city as open and emancipatory across topographical, identitarian, and affiliational boundaries has its place in official governmental ideology in France, as demonstrated by Paul Silverstein's contribution, "Thin Lines on the Pavement." He reveals not only the discrepancy between the national ideology of openness and equality and the reality of exclusionary practices that produce a racialized and ethnicized space, but that transnational concepts of openness such as "Enlightenment" and "civilization" have become gendered in the national imagination. The hyper-racialized space of the French banlieue (the housing project sites on the outskirts of the bourgeois metropolitan areas) reveals the way its residents are conceived as a hyper-masculinized threat to French republicanism (defined by the individuality of citizens rather than by communities as constituting the nation) and thus recalcitrant to its liberal humanist values. Silverstein explains that this hyper-masculinization applies to both male and female banlieue subject-positions constructed through a "masculinized" violence that organizes the suburban space. He situates this violence within the long and violent historical process of North African colonization and decolonization that segregated settler and native, and traces it to contemporary beur (North African youth) mobilizations obeur or movements against violent racist attacks legitimized or unpenalized by the French state. Cognitively mapping the banlieue as a site of beur disorder and chaos has produced a subjectivity therein (male, female, beur, racist attacker, the banlieue resident in general) through "masculinized" violence represented by male beur visibility in antipolice riots and demonstrations and by their publicized discourse on community protection, i.e., vengence...