The Rise of Enclaving and Its Reconfiguration of the Human in Urban Mozambique

2020-01-09

Date：2020.01.09 (Thu.)
Time：14:00-16:00
Venue：國立交通大學客家學院 207室/ Room 207, NCTU College of Hakka Studies
 
ABSTRACT:
The unequal distribution of urban resources based on the production of separated spaces—what I call enclaving—is a globally, rapidly spreading phenomenon and one that is, in both African and global metropole, producing radically new forms of differentiation. Its multiplicity, however, generates a form of meshwork of separations, fissures and detachments of which the sub-Saharan African urban enclave is merely a physical manifestation. For, while it is impossible to reduce the myriad segregated urban spaces which are being built in cities across the continent to a singular logic, they do nevertheless reflect a certain ‘aesthetics of imagination’, which can be examined empirically and submitted to historical analysis and cross-cultural comparison.
Rather than treat it as a walled structure—i.e. a form of template gated community of both shifting scales and a varying severity in relation to its enclosed and/or securitised nature—I will in this paper instead treat enclaving as an ‘aesthetics of imagination’. This entails an approach to urban spaces based on distinction and differentiation, stretching from subjective and collective forms of social differentiation to tangible material form. Enclaving the emerges as both the enactment of a desire for privilege, the physical or ideational representation of the privilege itself, as well as the tension that exists between the two.
Taking ethnographic material (collected between 2012 and 2019) reflecting the urban dynamics of two inner-city, high-density, low-income areas of Maputo as my point of departure, in this paper I will probe enclaving as an aesthetic of imagination to pose two questions: What does the proliferation of such an imaginary entail for notions of the human, life and sociality in plastic, non-permanent urban contexts? How does, in particular, the verticality of materializations of enclaving transmogrify notions of self, gaze and trajectories of urban temporalities and intensities? 
基於不同地區的產能差異，城市資源的分配也不平等，這是一個迅速蔓延的現象，在非洲和全球都市圈中，這種現象產生新的分化形式。然而，其多樣性產生了一種形式的分離，裂隙和分離的網狀結構，而撒哈拉以南非洲城市飛地僅僅是其物理表現。雖然不可能將整個非洲大陸城市中建立的無數隔離的城市空間縮減為單一的邏輯，但它們確實反映了某種「想像的美學」，憑經驗對其進行考察，並進行歷史分析和跨文化比較。
以馬普托的兩個內城區為基準，其高密度、低收入地區的人種學數據反映出的現象為研究核心，探討兩個以包容性作為一種想像的美學所構成問題: 在虛構、非永久性的城市環境中，這種假想的氾濫對人類、生活和社會觀念的影響是什麼？ 包容性的物化的垂直性如何特別體現出自我，注視以及城市時空和強度軌跡的概念？
 
Speaker：Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen現任挪威卑爾根大學(University of Bergen)社會人類學教授，也是ERC(European Research Council)的「平等主義」(Egalitarianism)之專任研究員。
他主要關注南非和莫三比克地區，並以當地的政治人類學中的平等主義、城市轉型、未來展望、暴力等等議題為主要研究領域。在「平等主義」計畫中，其研究主要探討政治、社會和文化秩序在城市轉變中影響。
 
主辦單位：交通大學暨台聯大文化研究國際中心、交通大學社會與文化研究所、亞際文化研究國際碩士學位學程
經費來源：交通大學暨台聯大文化研究國際中心、科技部、教育部高教深耕計畫 

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