Public Lecture: Sino-African urbanism: Chinese architecture of capital and the mercantilist spirit in the city of Douala, Speaker: Basile Ndjio

MIASA Seminar room

Abstract

In more general, this paper which is based on field investigation conducted in the city of Douala in Cameroon between 2014 and 2021, aims to extend scholarly discussions on transnational urbanism and architectural innovations. It does so through a detailed empirical examination of newly emerged Chinese architectural imaginations, styles and practices in Douala, which is the home of most Chinese migrants  living in Cameroon. The analysis will particularly focus on  what can be described as two major Chinese building projects in this country, namely the “architecture of affect” and the “architecture of capital.” These two concepts offer useful theoretical frameworks enabling to reflect on the growing influence of China on the town planning and built environment in Cameroon’s economic capital and major city. The research interprets the current Sinonization of contemporary African architecture and urbanism as an attempt by some African governments and elites to de-colonize their urban space the western colonial power once saturated with an architecture of empire which dramatized its technological supremacy and domination.

Basile Ndjio is professor of anthropology at the University of Douala and currently a Senior Research Fellow at MIASA. He is a former FRIAS  Senior Research Fellow (2021-2022) and Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies(IAS), The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS). He is also affiliated with the Africa Centre for Transregional Research in Freiburg. Prof. Ndjio has been trained in both sociology and anthropology at the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon and the University of Amsterdam, and has published intensely on urban popular culture; urban fashion; gender and sexuality; Chinese sex labour migration; migration and diasporic conditions ; West and West African organized crime; urban African queer studies; urban citizenship, governance and the politics of belonging. His most recent works include: (with Kerstin Pinther and Kristin Kastner) Fashionscapes: Histories, Materialities and Aesthetic Practices in the Afropolis (Bloomsbury 2022), “ Garçons manqués and Femmes fortes: two ambivalent figures of  butch lesbianism in women’s football in Cameroon(African Studies Review 2022); “The Nation and its Racial Other: Blackness, Racism and Racial Capitalism in the Netherlands”(Berghahn Journals, 2022); “Death without mourning: homosexuality, homo sacer, and bearable loss in Cameroon”(Africa/ International African Institute, 2020); He has just completed a monograph on sexual politics in Central Africa( under review with the Cambridge University Press) and is currently writing a monograph on Chinese sex labour migration to Central and West Africa.