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Building on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, the volume elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space. It moves from practice-based and collaborative research with young Mapuche and mestizo artists and activists in Santiago (Chile), drawing together a range of different materials: from artworks to theatre and performance; from graphics to audio and visual materials. An edited collection, the book is constructed by shifting between different authorships and changing perspectives from the individual to the collective. This approach, while to a certain extent within the classical structure of editors/authors, plays with the roles of researcher/research participant, highlighting the ambiguities, frictions and exchanges involved in this relationship. Elaborating on indigenous knowledge production, the book thus addresses the possibility of disrupting the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city by articulating meanings through artistic and performative representations. As such, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations constructed through an aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed’): a particular way of knowing and engaging with reality, and ultimately an active process of home- and self-making beyond the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. Actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship and knowledge production.
laid claim. The ancient British trams and buses were picturesque but from another age. Much to my surprise, and for all its evident contrasts, Lisbon reminded me of London – with its historic facades still in place, possessing too a certain decorum, but essentially a post-colonial city on the skids. As the chapters of this volume attest with impressive verve, to map the colonial traces still present and visible in contemporary post-colonial cities requires all the skills, and more, of the conventional historian. To those
cities across the world, especially in the USA and the UK. The socio-political landscapes of (post)colonial cities have been questioned and disrupted through interventions in the materiality of urban space, putting forward alternative inconographies and imaginations. Colonised bodies and subjects have entered the public debate in the contexts of the COVID-19 crisis and the protests following the murder of the African American George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis. During the months of these mobilisations, Mapuche
research must build. There is also clear scope to expand understandings of the working lives of women and girls in southern Africa’s post-colonial cities. This is especially true for girls, who remain marginal figures in extant labour and broader histories of the region. By exploring the working lives of girls in domestic service and demonstrating the importance of girls to household and broader economies
The Proscenium introduces the site-specific theatre play Santiago Waria, addressing the interdisciplinary methodology adopted and lingering on its development, particularly from the perspective of scenic arts. The Proscenium introduces site-specific theatre and performance as it has been developed in Latin America and in Chile. It then illustrates the specific urban spatialities constituting the main nodes of the theatre piece as an interactive city tour, describing the concrete process of construction and rehearsal of the play, as a shared creative process engaging with the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city.
Home economics offers an innovative, comparative history of domestic service in southern Africa’s post-colonial cities. Focusing on Lusaka and drawing wider comparisons, it provides the first in-depth study of domestic service in Black households in the region. Drawing on rich oral histories and diverse documentary sources, it develops a new theoretical approach which, for the first time, brings wage and kin-based domestic labour and child and adult workers into a single frame of analysis. In so doing, it challenges the narrow focus of existing scholarship and policymaking and breaks new ground in the theorisation of work. The book traces how Black employers and workers adapted existing models of domestic service rooted in colonial labour relations and African kinship structures, revealing how waged domestic service was gradually undermined by increased reliance on extended family networks and the labour of young female kin. It demonstrates how women and girls pursued employment in and came to dominate both kin-based and waged domestic service. It also explores efforts to regulate and organise these largely informal and intimate forms of work, and the gendered and generational impacts of such interventions. This rich and timely study provides essential insights into the nature of gender, work, and urban economies across southern Africa. It reveals the strategies that children, women, and men have pursued to support themselves and their dependants in the face of economic decline, precarious employment, and stark inequalities, and shows how gender, age, class, and kinship have shaped work within and beyond the home.
Chapter 4 takes place in the Santa Lucía/Welen Hill, whose double name in Spanish and Mapudungun already speaks of the tension embedded in it. Supposedly the place where the capital city was symbolically founded, the hill is the site for the materialisation of many national symbols and landmarks, yet in pre-Hispanic times the hill was an indigenous territorial reference both politically and spiritually. Still today it is one of the key sites for indigenous cultural and political mobilisation within the city. Fitting to both the display and the contestation of national ideologies and processes of racialisation, situated in the heart of Santiago’s city centre, the hill provides an almost 360-degree view of the city from above. In its ambivalence, this site stands as the location for a hybrid, mixed-up (champurria) and contradictory urban indigeneity, one able to ‘stain’, with bodily presence, the simulated ‘whiteness’ of the (post)colonial city. From the heights of the hill, multiple identities and belongings are claimed through fiction, re-enactment and poetry. In the last scene of the play Santiago Waria, the Comandante Boliviano leads utopian re-imaginations of the future, moving from which the chapter discusses the possibility of multiple modernities and broader decolonial and anticolonial stances.
, she continued to employ two domestic workers. Mercy worked inside her home, cleaning, washing clothes, and helping with cooking, and a gardener came to her property three times per week. 2 Life stories such as those of Mercy and Priscilla provide key insights into the issue at the heart of this book: the history of domestic service in southern Africa’s post-colonial cities
pervasive tone. What has happened to London space in the early twenty-first century seems to confirm this view. The reshaping of cursed London As early in the new millennium as 2004, Stuart Hall had already noted the trends that were undermining the promise of racially diverse, post- colonial cities like London to offer more equitable multicultural futures. London, he argued, was being ‘reshaped’ by the forces of globalisation, deindustrialisation and migration that were fragmenting city space, dividing it between the gilded but increasingly empty enclaves of the ‘ultra
relation between music, race and space and the history of the post-colonial city. There is plenty of academic discussion of popular music cultures of the 1970s through to the 1990s, punk and post-punk (Savage 1991; Reynolds 2006; Cabut and Gallix 2017), Brit pop (Gilbert 1997; Stratton 2010) and hip hop (Turner 2017), but very little on the London club cultures of rare groove or jungle, and what there is about acid house is in my view partial (as I argue in chapter 3). One of the reasons Paul Gilroy’s work (1987, 1993, 2000, 2003, 2010) is so important to this