Synopses & Reviews
The essays in this book critically examine the ways in which gendered subjects negotiate their life-worlds in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African urban landscapes. They raise issues surrounding the city as a representative site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for women and/or men.
Review
“Wide-reaching in its range of localities in the Global South, Rieker and Alis framing argument for this collection of essays interrogates the efficacy of immutable epistemologies of urban space in modernist discourse…this powerful volume reveals through the lens of everyday stories how social space becomes a mediation of radical politics—at the conjuncture, the crossroads of the micrological stories of the everyday and the macrological dimensions of power.”--Journal of Middle East Womens Studies
"The engaging essays in this book fill a major gap in our understanding of the dynamics of city space in the Global South-- its gender dimension. An instructive volume."--Asef Bayat, Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), and ISIM Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Synopsis
This collection explores the question of whether it is possible to reconceive the category of transcendence from a feminist perspective. The contributors use the concept of transcendence to approach questions relating to the body, desire, and subjectivity, while offering a response to secular relativism.
About the Author
Martina Rieker is Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Director, Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at American University in Cairo.Kamran Asdar Ali is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin
Table of Contents
Introduction--Kamran Asdar Ali & Martina Rieker * Colonial Urban and Marginalization: Prostitution in the
Quartier Reservé of Casablanca--Driss Maghraoui & Al-Akhwayn * Gendered Geographies in the Making of Modern Cairo--Martina Rieker * Morphology of Social Flows: Segregation and the Public Sphere in Aden--Susanne Dahlgren * Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity--Kamran Asdar Ali
* Practices of Convertibility in Inner-City Johannesburg and Douala--AbdouMaliq Simone * Thin Lines on the Pavement: The Racialization and Spatialization of Violence in Postcolonial (Sub)Urban France--Paul Silverstein* Practices of Convertibility in Inner City Johannesburg and Douala--AbdouMaliq Simone * Race, Security, and Spatial Anxieties in the Post-Apartheid City--Thomas Bloom Hansen * Cosmopolistan: Culture, Cosmopolitanism and Gender in Karachi, Pakistan--Oskaar Verkaaik