Project MUSE®: Social Text - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Social Text.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 17, no. 3 (1999);
Vol. 18 (2000) - vol. 22 (2004)Latest Articles: Social TextTWOProject MUSE®Social Text1527-19510164-2472Latest articles in Social Text. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177068
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The great colonial empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, brutal engines for the extraction of rents, crops, and minerals from tropical countrysides. Colonial cities and entrepôts, although often vast, sprawling, and dynamic, were demographically rather insignificant.
The urban populations of the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch empires at their Edwardian zenith probably didn't exceed 3 to 5 percent of colonized humanity. The same ratios generally prevailed in the cases of the decayed Spanish and Portuguese empires, as well as in the conquests of nouveaux riches like Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Although there were some important exceptions—for example
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallThe Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos2005-01-18text/htmlen-USThe Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®199582026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18Introduction: Global Cities of the South
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177069
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At the dawn of the new millennium, humanity is rapidly approaching a significant but insufficiently acknowledged milestone: by 2007, UN demographers say, more than half the world's population will live in cities.1 On a scale that dwarfs previous experience, urban spaces have become cosmopolitan entrepôts through which vast quantities of capital, goods, information, and people flow daily. Contemporary cities, it should be noted, are also the primary sites for natural resource consumption and environmental pollution. The cradles of civilization, cities now lie at the core of a potential ecological crisis.
In her scholarship on the "global city" (initially focused on New York, London, and Tokyo), Saskia Sassen has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallIntroduction: Global Cities of the South2005-01-18text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Global Cities of the South2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®366892026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177070
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City air makes you free. This medieval German maxim referring to the city as a haven from the harsh laws of feudal vassalage might serve as an ironic epigraph for Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Texaco. Near the beginning of Chamoiseau's third novel, his narrator, the so-called Word Scratcher, writes that "to escape the night of slavery and colonialism, Martinique's black slaves and mulattoes will, one generation after another, abandon the plantations, the fields, and the hills to throw themselves into the conquest of the cities."1 In Texaco the powerful matriarch of a squatter camp, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, recounts the epic battles she and her ancestors fought to gain a home in the city. This struggle has helped
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallSquatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City2005-01-18text/htmlen-USSquatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®894532026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177071
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Beside Kofar Nassarawa, a gate to the mud wall that once ringed the Muslim heart of Kano, a city in northern Nigeria, there is a mai gyara, a mechanic who repairs scooters and motorbikes. On this atrophying wall in the 1990s there was a poster of Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, a radical Islamic leader, and next to him one of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shia leader Zakzaky championed. No doubt the mechanic or one of his assistants was a fan of Zakzaky, a figure of some charisma among the Muslim youth of the North, but the fact that someone else had tried to tear off the poster of Khomeini registered the wider suspicion that Hausa Sunnis have for Shia worship. Once, while my Vespa was in a line waiting to be repaired, one of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallBandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria2005-01-18text/htmlen-USBandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®1088512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18The Oracle in the City: Beliefs, Practices, and Symbolic Geographies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177072
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A migratory or metaphorical city is thus insinuated into the living text of the planned and legible city.
Today, the category of the other has become confused.
Along with the process of cultural globalization, there have emerged various tribalisms, through which many social actors are rediscovering their sense of life and activating mechanisms of identity and memory. At the moment when the idea of the national is diminishing because of the new political and economic order of the free market, violent manifestations of racism have increased, and so has the defense of the "proper." Advances in technology are making unsuspected things possible: time and space—long thought to be irreducible—are bending to human
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallThe Oracle in the City: Beliefs, Practices, and Symbolic Geographies2005-01-18text/htmlen-USThe Oracle in the City: Beliefs, Practices, and Symbolic Geographies2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®516982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18Harlem
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177073
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In the acknowledgments to Alice Attie, Harlem on the Verge (New York: Quantuck Lane, 2003), 119, Attie has noted some of the places I took her photos but has missed these three. All of her photographs in this article are included in that book. In the acknowledgments to
Attie
Alice
Harlem on the Verge
New York
Quantuck Lane
2003
119
Attie has noted some of the places I took her photos but has missed these three. All of her photographs in this article are included in that book.
Kar Wai Wong’s film Chungking Express (1994) stages this by robbing well-established cinematic idiom—French New Wave, American noir, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallHarlem2005-01-18text/htmlen-USHarlem2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®428392026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18Provincializing the Global City: From Bombay to Mumbai
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177074
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Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1989); hereafter cited by page number in the text.
Rushdie
Salman
The Satanic Verses
New York
Viking
1989
hereafter cited by page number in the text.
Rushdie contrasts migration from “one great city . . . to another” to the experience of “a villager, traveling a hundred miles to town.” The latter, Rushdie suggests, “traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space,” as “the distance between cities is always small” (Satanic Verses, 41). Neither villager nor metropolitan, Raju is traversing the path from provincialism to cosmopolitanism in the film, even though
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallProvincializing the Global City: From Bombay to Mumbai2005-01-18text/htmlen-USProvincializing the Global City: From Bombay to Mumbai2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®621572026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18Popular Capitalism and Subalternity: Street Comedians in Lima
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177075
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The street was one of the great economic scenes of the 1980s in Peru. Popular sectors of society responded with great vitality to the generalized economic crisis, the inequality of opportunities, the lack of employment, and the clear aspiration to be "independent" not only because of their expanding economic strength but also because of the cultural meanings interwoven by new practices. Beyond economic explanations, few studies have attempted to integrate the phenomenon of the informal market into a cultural perspective that would also give an account of the complexity of the symbolic variables it brings together and the range of social relations promoted among its actors.
In general terms, the economic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/186/image/coversmallPopular Capitalism and Subalternity: Street Comedians in Lima2005-01-18text/htmlen-USPopular Capitalism and Subalternity: Street Comedians in Lima2005-01-182005TWOProject MUSE®707962026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002005-01-18