Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa [First Edition] 140397523X, 9781403975232, 9780230612471

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Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa

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Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa Edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali

GENDERING URBAN SPACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, SOUTH ASIA, AND AFRICA Copyright © Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7523-2 ISBN-10: 1-4039-7523-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gendering urban space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa / edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-7523-X 1. Sociology, Urban—Developing countries—Case studies. 2. Sex role— Developing countries—Case studies. 3. Political participation—Developing countries—Case studies. I. Rieker, Martina. II. Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961– HT149.5.G46 2008 307.7609172'4—dc22

2007047249

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First Edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: Gendering Urban Space Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker

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Gendering Urban Colonial Casablanca: The Case of the Quartier Réservé of Bousbir Driss Maghraoui

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Morphologies of Social Flows: Segregation, Time, and the Public Sphere Susanne Dahlgren

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Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity Kamran Asdar Ali

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Race, Security, and Spatial Anxieties in the Postapartheid City Thomas Blom Hansen

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Remaking Urban Socialities: The Intersection of the Virtual and the Vulnerable in Inner-city Johannesburg AbdouMaliq Simone

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Thin Lines on the Pavement: The Racialization and Spatialization of Violence in Postcolonial (Sub)Urban France Paul A. Silverstein

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Contents Cosmopolistan: Culture, Cosmopolitanism, and Gender in Karachi, Pakistan Oskar Verkaaik

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Author Biographies

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the educational institutions and funding agencies that made it possible for us to assemble groups of excellent scholars at various sites to share their work. These papers represent some of the intellectual outcomes of those workshops. We especially thank the Social Science Research Council (New York); SEPHIS (the SouthSouth Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development); the Population Council (Cairo); the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the American University in Cairo; the Institute for Women, Gender, and Development Studies at Ahfad University (Khartoum); Sabanci University (Istanbul); the University of Texas at Austin; and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) for their support and encouragement. We also thank all the participants in our workshops who, by their presence and enthusiasm for the project, made the effort worthwhile. The Shehr network that we both coordinate could not have moved forward without the initial and continuing encouragement of friends like Lisa Taraki, Ayse Oncu, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ann Lesch, Asef Bayat, and Maureen O’Malley; to them we owe our gratitude. The article, “Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity,” by Kamran Asdar Ali, first appeared in Social Text (2004, issue 78, pp.123–45). It is reprinted here with the kind permission of Duke University Press. We are indeed grateful to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their faith in this project from the very beginning and for helping us in seeing it through. Finally, both of us thank our respective families for their kindness and understanding.

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G E N D E R I N G U R B A N S PA C E Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker

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n his recent novel, Knots (2007), the Somali author Nuruddin Farah situates the story in contemporary Mogadishu, a city run by warlords and drug barons in an increasingly assertive Islamic cultural milieu. The female protagonist, Cambara, returns from exile and through her ability to move around in the city, finds possibilities of connecting with other women activists to work toward reconciliation and peace. A tale of hope and female strength, the novel depicts the emergence of new kinds of urban spaces in the global south where, despite frictions, violence, and conflict, varied actors—male and female—create opportunities to coexist and prosper. Farah’s portrayal reminds us of Elizabeth Wilson’s (1991) discussion of the emergence of the modern Western city and its relationship with women. Wilson too, as subtly hinted by Farah for an African city, characterizes the urban as a space of opportunity and abandon for women. Notwithstanding its difficulties, Wilson argues, the city emancipates women far more than rural life or suburban domesticity (10). However, despite promises of egalitarian freedoms, the disciplinary nature of “liberal”1 modernity has seldom allowed the urban to be a space of such complete abandon for the working poor. Modern urban representational tropes like mobility, speed, and rationalized spatiality also foreclose critical questions that examine ways in which, for example,

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the multitude of poor women negotiate urban space in conditions of declining public transportation infrastructure. The control of urban crowds, the management of the working poor, the harnessing of female sexuality, and the issues of vagrancy and unattached children have been the historical dilemma faced by those—administrators and academics alike—who seek to control the city and make it “safe.”2 This said, it still needs to be emphasized that although women, the poor, children, and minorities in most cities have not been granted full and free access to the streets—they are not complete citizens—industrial life has brought them into public life. Women (and men) may use the urban space for mobility, transgression, and different pleasures that they seek, in the process navigating the everyday in favorable and unfavorable terms (Ali n.d.). Hence they survive and flourish in the interstices of the city and “negotiate” its contradictions in their own particular way (Wilson 1991, 8). How people survive in their private and work life in expanding cities in the global south are stories and histories that are yet to be told or written. The chapters in this book emerge out of a long-term dialogue initiated by the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network (http://www.shehr.org/), an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It examines the efficacy of the category of the city in modernist discourse and seeks to chart this spatial imagination and its effects through an exploration of the complex processes in which gendered, classed, and raced citizen-subjects have negotiated and been the object of urban projects in these regions. Attuned to both the legacy of modernist conceptual grammars and their inadequacy for understanding the remaking of space and place in the neoliberal present, the purpose of the network is to open up an arena in which to address the particular positioning(s) of contemporary urban landscapes and urban practices. Following this lead, the chapters in this volume discuss the life worlds of the men and women in multiple geographic spaces in the larger global south, focusing specifically on how they exist in multiethnic and economically uncertain urban milieus. The comparative framework builds partly on a shared history of the colonial encounter, modernity, nationalism, and urbanity and is deepened by the larger cultural framework that influences social life in these spaces. In doing this we remind ourselves of the complex history of the Western Indian

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Ocean in order to rethink traditional maps of trade and cultural exchange. This rethinking builds, as suggested earlier, on the historic and contemporary linkages between South Asia, East Africa, South Africa, the Saudi peninsula (Yemen in particular) and the Gulf region. Here, as is evident from this particular example, the South-South axis undermines the dominance of the West in our imagination of geographies of power. This focus, however, does not exclude those marginalized spaces in the West that are themselves shaped by the history of colonial encounters and social exclusions (hence the chapter by Paul Silverstein on banlieue life in Paris). The chapters as a group elaborate upon how the city represents a site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for women and/or men. They focus on how public discourse in distinct national urban spaces produce the city as both the site of modern citizen-making and of corruption/pollution and how different classes of men and women living in distinct temporalities/spatialities negotiate these tensions. These chapters are also sensitive to the precariousness of most regional economies where the issue of crime and delinquency may emerge as a result of the greed of the new elite versus the hopelessness and rage of the poor (Sassen 1996); intrinsically linked as this is to issues of conflict and violence present in public and domestic spaces. A major set of questions that animated the discussions in preparation for this volume, however, was how gendered practices map the city differently and what other identities and circumstances allow people to circumvent various boundaries within the urban. Within this spatial and thematic context, the contradictory phenomena embedded in the process of globalization with increasing economic uncertainty and general social instability on the one hand, and the concomitant emergent, at times globally mediated, politics of democracy, rights, and empowerment on the other constitutes the broader analysis of this work. The tensions, polarizations, and entanglements that accompany these processes across and within state boundaries shape new forms of historical categories, that MichelRolph Trouillot calls “fragmented globality” (Trouillot 2001, 13).

T HE G ENDERED C ITY The first set of contributions to the volume revisit some of these questions by way of a critical engagement with the late colonial period.

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Susanne Dahlgren and Driss Maghraoui’s chapters present two distinct analysis of colonial social and spatial segregation. The authors show how colonial architecture and urban forms frame the political conditions and power relations in Aden (Dahlgren) and in Casablanca (Maghraoui). As Zeynep Celik (1997) reminds us for colonial Algiers, urban policies of separation and segregation created the critical distance needed for surveillance of the other by the colonizing regime. The colonial project in most parts of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East was about seizing control of geographical areas to produce new spatial relations of boundaries and hierarchies. This extended to the classification of people into categories, the extraction of resources, and the production of new cultural imaginaries (Mbembe 2003). Marghraoui builds on this theme of racial, cultural, and gendered separation to show colonial preoccupation with concerns related to public hygiene linked to urban transformation. The increase in rural-urban migration in the 1930s and 1940s, Marghraoui argues, made Casablanca a volatile place with a large population of displaced impoverished peasants. This general increase in poverty also resulted in an increase in prostitution that, in turn, created public arguments for the colonial French government to institute intrusive policies of medical surveillance of poor women. The “disorder” created by these working women could only be addressed through a process of colonial “sovereignty” that included the delineating of specific urban spaces as “safe” and sanitary. Other spaces, Marghraoui describes, had to be made into walled-off prisons or brothels. Implicit in Marghraoui’s chapter is the process through which rural women maintaining their distinct grammars, aesthetics, and performance of the urban reconfigured the city for themselves. As these migrant women’s “freedoms” are read in terms of promiscuity and health crisis by the dominant moral/legal codes, Marghraoui sensitizes us to forms in which their interactions with various sites, routes, and spaces within the city are represented, commented upon, and restricted within the larger society. Marghraoui’s chapter, although situated in the colonial past, raises contemporary issues about the working poor in many cities. For example, the issue of female (and male) disorder, lack of control, and chaos, so often the concern of colonial states, reemerges in present discussions of national imaginaries (see chapters by Hansen, Simone, and especially Silverstein). Susanne Dahlgren’s work touches on similar themes of British colonial presence in Aden. The urban reconfiguration of colonial Aden along racial lines and the large presence of sex workers in the

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colonial period resonate with the Moroccan case. Dahlgren’s chapter historically situates the debate on gender segregation in the Indian Ocean port city of Aden during its colonial and postcolonial periods. Aden, situated at the historical nodal points of centuries-old Indian Ocean trade between Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, Dahlgren tells us, has experienced changing systems of governance and spatial organization in the past few decades. Starting from the racially segregated colonial city, to the more socially responsible and egalitarian socialist experiment of the 1970s and 1980s and ending in the unbridled neoliberalism of the present postunification state. Although a rapidly changing and dynamic city, Aden today, Dahlgren shows, is becoming a city where nonchaperoned women are becoming less visible in public spaces such as restaurants, cinemas, and beaches. Yet Dahlgren persuasively argues that issues of female mobility in contemporary Aden do not follow the extreme exclusionary patterns of the colonial times. Dahlgren’s depiction of women’s visibility and/or absence from the public space continues to be informed by one of the major representational trope for urban/public spaces in Muslim societies. One is reminded of the filmmaker Sabiha Sumar, who, in an important scene from her recent documentary For A Place Under the Heavens (2003) about women in Pakistan, contrasts the present public arena where urban women are increasingly donning veils to that of an era when Pakistan was newly formed. In a voice-over during an autobiographical moment in the film (while showing a home movie of her family), Sumar asserts that her mother told her as a child that we are now in Pakistan and we do not need to be veiled, we are all Muslims and we are all the same. The implicit argument being that one veils for strangers. Such remembering of an “unveiled” Karachi of peaceful coexistence remains a class-specific memory mostly shared by an elite that had investment in the politics of Muslim nationalism linked to a modernist state during the early years of Pakistan’s existence (Ali n.d.). Dahlgren herself is involved in a similar kind of historical memory where different female actors based on their own history of spatial and social knowledge approach the city in varied ways and also how “segregation” has to be understood within these contextualized processes. Hence, streets filled with the “unknown” and “unrelated” call for modalities of “mobility” (some access the public sphere through sitting and others through the pleasure of walking) that necessitate negotiating new moral codes, ethnic differences, cultural politics,

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gendered discrimination, and economic hierarchies intertwined in the everyday experience of women’s life in Aden. Echoing the previously discussed attention to female presence in public spaces, Kamran Asdar Ali’s contribution looks at women’s domestic and public life in Pakistan through the lens of women’s popular fiction. The chapter analyzes two stories that reflect women’s anxieties around the issue of male betrayal and violence. The female protagonists in both stories were married to men who, in their terms, were not real men, one impotent and the other more interested in other men. Within a hyper masculine and dominant heterosexual social milieu, such fantasies about “inefficient men” (the impotent, the homosexual), he argues, resonate with women’s anxieties about the sexually threatening public spaces in which the readers of these stories would find themselves in their every day life. As women increasingly become the victims of male violence, such stories permitted for fantasies, he argues, about the reversal of the status quo. It may be argued urban public life in Karachi, Cairo, or Aden for lower class women is restricted. The “pleasures” of the “modern,” such as cinemas, movies, cafes, parks, concert halls, beaches, or the promenade remain difficult for them to access at their own volition. Rather, for poor women, this offers harassment in the narrow alleys of industrial townships, long waits at bus stops of the unpredictable public transportation system, and a discriminating work culture that needs to be negotiated due to the compulsion of earning a living (see Ali). This rendition is not to argue for an “insufficient modernity” or a lag in some teleological sense, but to explore the context of urban social politics that is enmeshed in multiplicity of discourses and struggles of the every day that working-class and poor women have to encounter.3 Perhaps other representational forms than those found in the social sciences are more suited to render meaningful the range of women’s social experience. One may need Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, about Bangladeshi garment workers in Dhaka and London, to truly appreciate the affective dimension of these experiences.

“OTHER M EN ( AND W OMEN )”

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The negotiation of the conceptual-spatial boundaries of the urban modern, the city as the space of the production of the modern citizensubject, constitutes a major preoccupation of much twentieth century

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social thought (Rabinow 1989). The concomitant problem bodies and problem categories (e.g. rural migrants, ethnic others, tradition) that such discussion has produced critically inform our contemporary conceptual grammars. For example, the politics of ethnic and racial differences linked to state politics (the history of apartheid, colonization), urbanization, and rural-urban migration lead to social heterogeneity in most urban spaces of the global south. If we take social engineering of the apartheid regime and its lingering effects on contemporary South Africa (a theme underlying Thomas Blom Hansen’s and AbdouMaliq Simone’s contribution to this volume), we see a reworking of spatial segregation in different and complex ways. The township and the homelands during the apartheid era, as Belinda Bozzoli (2000, 2004) has shown, were used to control the access of black South Africans to white areas, markets, employment, and citizenship (Mbembe 2003, 26). The postapartheid era allowed the movement of people into areas that were earlier forbidden and resulted in the influx of thousands of Africans into informal settlements. The anxiety caused by this proximity within South African Indian communities, Thomas Hansen argues in his chapter on Durban, invokes in them a nostalgia for the colonial era when things were “ordered” and “safe.” This sense of panic in various nonblack communities played on older racial stereotypes of the black body and masculinity—uncontrolled sexual desires and criminality—to resegregate public spaces. The loss of social certainty, intimacy, and control of over space in the postapartheid period by Indians determines the irony of the process. In cities that have finally become places of potential freedoms and mobility for all South Africans, the Indians experience it as restrictive due to the presence of social and racial heterogeneity. Postapartheid did away with a “protected” economy that provided benefits to the Indian community. It is experienced now as a vanishing moment of the modernist ideal where each generation would do better than its predecessor. The Indian community’s fear of the black body and sexuality is also being materialized as free market capitalism in South Africa, and in other parts of the world, manifests itself in contradictory forces of hope and despair, constitutionalism (democracy) and deregulation, hyperrationalization and avant-garde experimentation, controlled markets and speculative exuberance, antimodern nostalgia and progressive narratives. These harsh socioeconomic and “demasculinization” processes, among other things, destabilize social relations and undermine social harmony

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leading to, at times, violent effects within the domestic and the public realms (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, 307). The modernist dream of infrastructural investment leading to an urban-based, technologically informed, and progressive culture has become illusionary in many parts of the world. African states have not been able to fully meet their modern responsibility to provide basic services and consequently leave their citizens to fend for themselves within configurations of unstable micro services and petty trade (Humphrey 2003, 106). Take the case of Lagos, which has grown from a city of 300,000 in the 1960s to one of 10 million today, where during the oil boom of the 1970s, international planners and the Nigerian government redesigned the city and put in a extensive network of roadways, bridges, intersecting cloverleaf highways, and huge housing projects. In the aftermath of the plundering of the country’s and the city’s wealth by a succession of dictatorships and the abandonment of Lagos as the capital for Abuja, Lagos today has two hundred distinct slum settlements where along with the local poor reside refugees from the wars in West Africa—Liberia and Sierra Leone. In a context of inadequate access to a modern urban infrastructure (e.g., only one in twenty households are connected to the municipal water supply; waste water is disposed of through open drains; in many instances, buckets or pits are the only latrines; and private generators are main sources of most reliable electric supply) and an increase in ethnonationalism, xenophobia, and poor-on-poor violence, the poor are dependent on the tender mercies of petty trade and micro services with an absence of the state in any form (Koolhass 2002, Gandy 2005). These themes are adequately brought forward in AbdouMaliq Simone’s chapter on Johannesburg. The crisis metaphor (see Mbembe and Roitman 1996) that invades the description of African cities is, however, rethought in Simone’s work in creative and innovative forms. In response to the total abandonment of the state to provide for its own citizens and the nonexistence of welfare regimes, many turn in African cities on informal forms of “getting by” through kin networks and by manipulating social capital. In an earlier work, Simone argues that there is a production of a micropolitics of alignment, interdependence, and exuberance linked to a particular emotional field that connects people in the emergent urban fabric (Simone 2004, 12). Similarly, in the chapter for this volume (in contrast to Hansen’s argument on blacks and Indians), he shows that while immigrants from other parts of Africa invoke hostility and xenophobia

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among the locals, at the same time the close proximity of living in extremely dense neighborhoods also entails relationships of reciprocity and exchange. Simone’s chapter in rethinking the unfolding of the promised postapartheid future undermines its premise of a “rainbow nation.” A nation, he argues, where the locals are running away from the “explosive” sociality of the townships, while immigrants are already running from what is or was home. Yet, he maintains, there is mutual learning of skills and social etiquette. For example, South Africans, Simone argues, know little about trade and moving goods, while Congolese know very little about civic culture, community organizing, and local activism. There is a giving and sharing along with hostility and suspicion. This depiction helps him to show how in African cities that he studies (large or midsize), people collaborate, without sometimes knowing about it, through a wide range of affiliations that may be kin based, local, translocal, gendered, religious, or secular. His rendering of the contemporary urban landscape may enable us to rethink political possibilities for African cities where a diverse, multilingual and ethnic population considers the challenges, pitfalls, and compromises of coexistence. In a South Africa that struggled to achieve racial and social equality, Hansen and Simone both show the present is far more complex and multifaceted. Hansen’s chapter ends with a discussion of how the urban landscape is secured through a proliferation of private security firms that pick up and abuse defenseless young and poor black men, leading to an intensifying cycle of public violence. The same kind of scrutiny is not afforded to the Indians, as their violence is presumed to be largely in the domestic realm—inside the home and inside the community—hence preserving and accepting patriarchal norms. Hansen thus gives us a sense of other fears among the larger populace, beyond the narrowly focused fears of the Indians who speak of suffering violence from poor black South Africans. The state and social elite invariably react under “popular pressure” by increased surveillance and its own violence on black bodies. A vicious cycle is created where the state responds to the demand for security with increased repression of civic life, for example, with searches, unauthorized arrests, beatings, and general harassment by law enforcement agencies and private security firms of particularly poor urban black men, creating still other kinds of fears and anxieties. Here fear, in a different register, aids in creating a more dominated (if not disciplined) populace that is compelled to act within the double binds of the insecurities of

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endemic unemployment and the anxieties of sustained and unexplainable violence that defines their life worlds. This state-sponsored violence that produce fear of the “other” and that, in the process, marks certain bodies as chaotic, unreliable, and criminal, is central to Paul Silverstein’s work on Arab immigrants who live in Paris suburbs. Paul Silverstein’s work historically connects the French colonial policy of reappropriating space for surveillance and management purposes (see Marghraoui) to the present day production of contained spaces in French cities. Writing about contemporary Paris and its marginalized spaces—the banalieue—Silverstein details the every day life of people that live and commute from there. The unreliable and complicated transport system remains a major form in which these communities of mostly Franco-Arab underemployed immigrants are brought into the system of “urban apartheid” (as Silverstein names it), through which compartmentalized spaces is produced. As high walls, open spaces, and the colonial army maintained the distance between the native and the settler population in the colonies, today this divide is sustained through ring roads, complicated transportation schedules, and an ever-increasing security force of national, municipal, riot, military, and private police. As Paris is racially mapped by the authorities and certain bodies bear the burden of criminality due to their physicality and their “look,” the constantly surveyed and harassed young Arab men, Silverstein argues, have found ways to reclaim space by avoiding “detection,” either through creative means of graffiti and other forms of appropriation or through elaborate methods of fare dodging. Silverstein shows how European anxieties focus on the control of Arab and Muslim bodies through spatial segregation, legislations, and specific codes of conduct and behavior. As in the United States, the September 11 attacks have led to increased surveillance of Muslim populations and the powers provided by the Patriot Act have allowed for wire tapping, increased profiling of Muslims and people of Arab descent, and other erasures of civil rights. Similarly, in the aftermath of the bombings in Madrid and London, the Danish cartoon controversy, riots in Paris suburbs, and the murder of Theo Van Gogh, Europe is straining hard to retain its façade of tolerance and liberal values. Arab/Muslim migrants as the “others” within an imagined European space have exposed the fracture lines in the rhetoric of civility and civic rights. The “Jewish Question,” as Marx put it succinctly a century and a half ago, in its reformulated form, still haunts

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European secular thought. This time around, we can only hope the solution is not so final. The chapters by Hansen, Simone, and Silverstein show how the promise of urban cosmopolitanism and freedoms has been eclipsed by processes of resegregation and marginalization. Newly emergent discussions on social hierarchies are creating new forms of urban apartheid as they are reinstituted into the social space. These kinds of discussions of selective hierarchy and superiority situated in a process of construction of difference and masculinized ethnic identity are also found in Oskar Verkaaik’s chapter on Karachi, Pakistan. Discussing the rise of Mohajir nationalism in Karachi, Verkaaik mentions how the politics of ethnic difference linked to urbanization and rural-urban migration has led to ethnic and social heterogeneity in most urban spaces of Pakistan. In Karachi, as a microcosm of Pakistani social life, in the last three decades we glimpse the nation’s history unfold with all its social and political tensions. Karachi remains the industrial, commercial, and trade-center of Pakistan along with its major port. It houses approximately 8 percent of its overall population and 24 percent of its urban population (Zaidi 1999). On the one hand, spatially, the city today is segregated into privileged neighbourhoods with private security arrangements (a phenomenon that we see in cities like Durban and Paris as well) and independently managed social services. On the other hand, the phenomenal growth has resulted in the maldistribution of civic resources to the poorest of its population. These social and spatial processes are partly reflected in the increase in politics linked to ethnic identification and religious groupings (Ali n.d.). Verkaaik, through this urban history of volatility, intra and interethnic conflict, and also state-sponsored violence, shows the interplay of gender, culture, and ethnic identity linked to claims of cosmopolitanism. There have been several waves of immigration that have reconfigured Karachi’s spatial and social politics (See Haris Gazdar 2004 for detailed analysis). The first massive population increase was in the aftermath of the partition of British India when Muslim refugees from various regions of India settled in the city. These Muhajirs, Verkaaik shows, came from a variety of educational background and social standing. Their numerical domination soon eclipsed the local population’s grip on the cultural, economic, and political life of the city. Yet, Karachi faced an explosion in its population in the 1960s when the city started receiving large numbers of working-class migrants from other parts of Pakistan. This clearly threatened Mujajir

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hegemony of cultural and political life of the city. Invoking their claim of sacrifice for the Muslim nation in its incipient moment, these Muhajirs are now consolidated in a major political party (the Muhajir Quaumi Movement, or MQM). In their constant struggle for control, they bring up memories of a Karachi of peace and tranquility, with fluttering butterflies, blossoming bougainvilleas, and fruit bearing almond and tamarind trees all over. They call up a Karachi that Arif Hasan (1995), who has written on the city’s modern history, reminds us that, until 1965, had thirty-seven restaurants, nine bars, eleven billiard rooms, eighteen book shops, seven auditoriums, four discotheques, and thirteen cinemas within one square kilometer in Saddar, its commercial heart (Ali n.d.). Therefore, ethnic identity is linked with attributes of urban modern life inclusive of more reasoned masculinity that opposes the rural, chaotic, childlike, and irrational subjectivities of the recent migrants to the city from other parts of Pakistan. Of course, this nostalgic look of modern, cosmopolitan city becomes all the more poignant as it is being written and read in the mid-1990s, when Karachi was ridden by intraethnic violence, kidnappings, burglaries and carjacking. Pakistan’s history, in its postcolonial period, has been one of contestation and conflict around questions of national self-determination of various ethnic groups. Despite the claims by the Muhajirs,the promised or imagined religious (Muslim) cohesiveness and national belonging was never achieved. Verkaaik, while following some of the narrative tropes that represent Karachi’s recent politics of the rise of ethnic violence and MQM as a political phenomenon gives us a more cultural and nuanced reading of the process. His construction of ethnic identity echoes Hansen’s chapter on Indians in South Africa in terms of linking ethnic parochialism to larger discourses of being modern, urban, and cosmopolitan. Having discussed ethnic difference and violence (social and otherwise) let us suggest yet another point of view on gender and ethnic relations. In Ali’s article mentioned earlier, he discusses a story that depicts two men, one Muhajir and a Pashtun (two rival ethnicities) in Pakistan falling in love. In his reading of the story, ethnic boundaries are crossed, and class differences are overcome as the Muohajir man belongs to a middle-class family while the Pashtun has working-class origins. The story’s move toward depicting other cultural and ethnic realities may speak to people’s own experience and may implicitly contest/undermine the narrative of conflict between ethnicities. Ali

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argues that the story is not a moral saga, but a narrative that seeks to represent the changing social and cultural space of contemporary Pakistan. Where, as AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) argues for low income communities in Africa, people who live in poor neighborhoods of Karachi (for example) irrespective of the multiple sources of political and social frictions may recombine contingent relationships between bodies, spaces, signs, infrastructures, and continue to connect with varied ways of life and different social actors (Simone 2004, 22).

C ONCLUSION Are the poor in places like Durban, Aden, Casablanca, Johannesburg, Karachi, or Paris similar to the Victorian vision of the slums, a volcano waiting to erupt? Or are they part of, as Mike Davis rhetorically asks, involved in a ruthless competition of self-consuming communal violence, acting as explosive mobs in moments of crisis otherwise tamed and disciplined alternatively by state violence, clientelism, populism, or appeals to ethnic solidarity (Davis 2004, 14). Such imaginaries motivate us to think through some of the ways in which urban transformation is occurring in the global south. In doing so and sharing this body of work, we seek to fill a persistent gap in the existing literature on urban space in the regions under discussion. To further elaborate on this point, we argue there is a lack of social histories that provide an understanding of the process of globalization and its influence in decreasing employment opportunities in the formal sector, increasing the numbers of nonorganized female labor in entire sectors of the economy, increasing piece rate work, elevating the percentage of noncontractual industrial labor, and decreasing state sponsored employment in, for example, Amman or Mumbai affects people’s experiences. Within this context, recent global economic restructuring has provided arguments for free trade and open markets and acclaimed the emergence of difference, plurality, and tolerant coexistence. Yet it has also obscured how the forced integration of national markets into the world system has resulted in the disappearance of national subsistence and given rise to new forms of division of labor (Zhang 2002; Caldeira 2000; Holston and Appadurai 1996). Building on these sets of issues, our endeavor remains to bring together scholarship that seeks to highlight the changing social dynamics in Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian cities through new theoretical

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lenses. We argue that questions raised in the chapters that follow are essential to place the field of urban studies within the three regions in a comparative dialogue with each other and with similar efforts across the globe. To end, let us briefly go back to the beginning. Depictions of the modern city linked to tropes of mobility continue to inform local and global emancipatory imaginaries. The representation of female bodies freely moving through public space are powerful referents and icons and, recently, this phenomena has been strategically portrayed in cinematic explorations of gender in other Muslim societies, such as in Belkacem Hadjadj’s documentary A Female Cabby in Sidi Bel-Abbés (2000) or the cycling women in Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I became a Woman (2001). We submit that such experiences may be universal and the question for a range of scholars is about how we should create a politics through which women and men could challenge and overturn the circumstances they are forced to live under. The image of individualized freedoms, of women riding fearlessly through public spaces of course also motivates the interventionary politics of consciousness raising, economic development and a more general struggle for rights and equity in society; of empowerment (Rieker, n.d.). Before embracing such a politics, however, we may want to remain sensitive to Wendy Brown’s (1995) caution about the exclusionary and aspect of liberal thought and the atomizing process of rights discourse. She shows how, through the rights discourse bourgeois, social relations become reified. In the process, individualism leading to effective depoliticization of the social is produced, as solutions to social problems are pushed back on the ego, as well as “illusory politics of equality, liberty, and community is constructed, which is contradicted by the unequal, unfree and individualistic domain of civil society” (Brown 1995, 114). Perhaps a new politics of the space and gender is still to evolve that Joan Scott (1986) sensitized us to in her important article of more than twenty years ago; a vision of a future (utopian) politics where gender politics is restructured and redefined with a politics of social equality.

N OTES 1. It is clear that many postcolonial states in the Middle East, South Asia, or major parts of Africa have not been liberal polities in the classic sense of

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the term. But the pretensions of civic responsibility, progressive ideals, and modernist infrastructure have suffused these societies through nongovernmental organizations, media outlets, and by the state of globalization and civil society in the last two decades. 2. Underlying such an analysis is the present moment of late-capital and liberalism—intertwined and naturalized as they are now in the social imaginary—the haunting presence of violence in liberal thought continues to generate and produce state-sanctioned repression and socially varied experiences of the contemporary. Hence, casting itself as the bringer of peace and prosperity into a disorderly world, the “liberal” state plays the redemptive role in modern society partially through its control over “legitimate” means of coercion and force (Volger and Markell 2003, 2). 3. Of course the café, the concert hall, and the park bench cannot be imagined as objects of universal desire.

R EFERENCES Ali, Kamran Asdar. n.d. Women, work and public spaces: Some thoughts on Karachi’s poor. (unpublished manuscript.) Appadurai, Arjun. 2002. Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politic. Public Culture 14 (1): 21–47. Bozzoli, Belinda. 2000. Why were the 1980s “Millenarian”? Style, repertoire, space and authority in South Africa’s black cities, Journal of Historical Sociology 13 (2000): 79. ———. 2004. The taming of the illicit: Bounded rebellion in South Africa, 1986. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2): 326–54. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of injury. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of walls. Berkeley: University of California Press. Celik, Zaynep. 1997. Urban forms and colonial confrontations: Algiers Under the French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: Notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 26 (2):279–303. ———. 2000. Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12 (2):291–343 Davis, Mike. 2004. Planet of Slums. New Left Review, 26: 1–24. Farah, Nuruddin. 2007. Knots. New York: Riverhead Books New York City Gazdar, Haris. 2005. Migration policy and urban governance: The case of Karachi. Collective for Social Research, Karachi, unpublished report. Gandy, Matthew. 2005. Learning from Lagos. New Left Review 33: 37–52.

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Hasan, Arif. 1995. Karachi shehr, taghayurat ki zad me [The city of Karachi in the face of change]. In Karachi ki kahani [Karachi’s story]. Aaj (Karachi), Fall: 379–415. Holston, James, and Arjun Appadurai. 1996. Cities and citizenship. Public Culture 8 (2): 187–204. Humphrey, Caroline. 2003. Rethinking infrastructure: Siberian cities and the Great Freeze of January 2001. In Wounded cities, ed. Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, 91–110. New York: Berg. Koolhass, Rem. 2002. Fragments of a lecture on Lagos. In Under seige: Four African cities Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, Documenta 11, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Mbembe, Achile. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Mbembe, Achile, and Janet Roitman. 1996. Figures of the subject in times of crisis. In The geography of identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger, 153–87. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Najamabadi, Afsaneh. 1993. Veiled discourse-unveiled bodies. Feminist Studies 19 (3): 487–518. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French modern. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rieker, Martina. n.d. Gendering Urban Geographies. Unpublished manuscript. Sassen, Sasskia. 1996. Whose city is it? Globalization and the formation of new claims. Public Culture 8 (2): 205–24. Scott, Joan W. 1986. Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. American Historical Review 91: 1053–75. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the city yet to come. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. The anthropology of the state in the age of globalization: Close encounters of the deceptive kind. Current Anthropology 42 (1): 125–38. Volger, Candice, and Patchen Markell. 2003. Introduction: Violence, redemption, and the liberal imagination. Public Culture 15 (1): 1–10. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1991. Sphinx in the city. London: Virago. Zaidi, Akbar S. 1999. The new development paradigm. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Zang, Li. 2002. Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China Public Culture 14 (2): 311–34.

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GENDERING URBAN COLONIAL CASABLANCA THE CASE OF THE QUARTIER RÉSERVÉ OF BOUSBIR Driss Maghraoui

I NTRODUCTION

Studies of the socially marginal and the subaltern peoples are still

very scarce in the colonial and postcolonial period of North Africa. Sexuality, but more specifically prostitution and the world of the prostitute, have been and remain a taboo subject not only due to the fact that written sources remain rare but also as a result of cultural factors. While al-zina or al-bigha (prostitution) has always existed in the Arabo-Muslim world, to speak about it has remained prohibited. The religious condemnation of al-zina has, in one way, contributed to this silence and the repression of the subject because it is only al-nikah, or marriage, that is legally accepted and respected. However, like any other contexts in human history, the religious and moral grounds that prohibited prostitution in the Muslim world had never prevented it from existing. While excluded from public discourse in Morocco, prostitution and the prostitute (al-qahba in Moroccan dialect) had been tolerated throughout much of Moroccan history. As Abdelhak

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Serhane put it, “as a society which is used to manage its contradictions, Moroccan society had integrated the prostitutes who lived either in the quartiers réservés (regimented brothels) or with the honorable people of the city” (Serhane 1996, 178). Historians have, for the most part, left out women from their narratives of colonial North Africa, while at the same time concentrating mainly on the male elite world. Until very recently, the world of women in general and the prostitute in particular has remained absent form the historical work done on colonial Morocco. In a demeaning way, all that Jacques Berque could say about prostitution in Morocco is that “[each] town had its special district, set apart for the purpose, to which peasant women flocked in defiance of the rules. Sometimes such a district had architectural value, such as Bousbir at Casablanca, the first and for a long time the only Maghrebi attempt at housing for the native population! At Fez, Moulay Abdallah echoed with the screech of huge hydraulic wheels” (Berque 1962, 304). One of the few historical studies on female prostitution and gender studies is related to the work done by Julia-Clancy Smith (1996, 1998), Dalenda and Abdelhamid Largueches (1992), and very recently Christelle Taraud (2003). With the exception of Taraud’s excellent book, there is not yet much work done on prostitution and gender, especially in the colonial context of the Maghreb. To be fair to historians of colonial Morocco in particular, we can safely say that the interest in the phenomenon of prostitution is relatively recent. In general, prior to the 1980s, a very limited number of historians saw prostitution as an important topic for historical inquiry. As Timothy J. Gilfoyle put it, “Before 1980, the prostitute was ‘pornographic’ . . . and studies of the subject played to the sensational and salacious” (1999, 117). In this chapter, I attempt to examine interrelationship between colonialism, urban organization, subalternity, and gender in colonial Casablanca. Putting the prostitution in Bousbir in colonial Casablanca at the center of my argument, I attempt to explore the complexities of the colonial encounter and its effect on peasant women turned into prostitutes within a “modern” regimented colonial space. I would like to argue that the “colonial prostitute” (filles soumises) was not only created as a result of the economic realities of colonialism and colonial war, but as a “sex worker,” she became simultaneously an important component in the functioning of French colonial apparatus. The attempt to control and discipline the prostitute as a subaltern colonial subject made

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her also an integral part of how the colonial administrative machinery sought to control and organize the broader urban space in Morocco. An important question in the historiography of colonial Morocco remains: who has been excluded? Subaltern groups, whether part of the working class, slaves, peasants, women, or the marginalized segments of Moroccan society, are still significantly underrepresented in the annals of Moroccan history.1 This question remains the focus in which this chapter seeks to indirectly and modestly address via a detour of French colonial urbanism in Casablanca. But this chapter will attempt to take the discussion about Moroccan colonial history a step further by asking other questions: How can we locate colonial knowledge about prostitution and urban space with the broader question about gender and colonial politics? What were the socioeconomic and spatial conditions behind prostitution? What is the relationship between the regulationist project of prostitution and the urban space? What was the nature of the colonial prostitutional structures and how was the Moroccan prostitute regimented? An important aspect of the confinement and disciplining of prostitution in the quartier réservé was the ways in which the prostitutes were put under constant police and medical control of their bodies. I would therefore like to look at the underground world of prostitution as it applied to a specific place and time in the city of Casablanca in the confined space of the socalled quartier réservé de bousbir. By looking at this form of institutionalized prostitution, we get a different glimpse at the effects of colonialism in Morocco and of how the place of women raises new issues about urban space, social marginality. Based primarily on an analysis of a report by two French colonial medical officers in the quartier resérvé in Casablanca in the early 1950s, this chapter seeks also to unravel the complexities of the colonial encounter by focusing on this specific fragment of history as lived by a subaltern subject: the Moroccan prostitute. Lodged in this colonial record are fragments of the statements of a “mute” subject under surveillance. But these fragments are part of a narrative of a colonial medical doctor. What I am ultimately interested in is what Ranajit Guha (1996) may call the “small voice” of the subaltern subject. These are the voices of prostitutes in colonial Casablanca—among the many other small voices that most historians of colonial Morocco have so far ignored. The very nature of the sources that I am using imposes a number of important questions about colonialism, colonial representation, gender, and broader epistemological issues about colonial knowledge.

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T HE P ROSTITUTE , C OLONIAL K NOWLEDGE , AND THE U RBAN S PACE The issue of women was intricately related to the French colonial project in North Africa and as Julia Clancy-Smith writes, “The representations of empire owed much to the gaze of European men and women directed to Arab Muslim females” (1996, 202). The representation of North African women as hookers or “libertine Saharan beauties” (1996, 202) was very much part of this colonial gaze. But in addition to the orientalist vision of Moroccan women as sex object in their “exotic” costumes, there was another kind of interest in the prostitute as a medical object. The medical interest in the prostitute, I would argue, was different in some ways from the pernicious French colonial representation of women. In the early phase of French presence in Morocco, the private world of the prostitute was simultaneously part of an orientalist mode of expression and of a medical discourse. While the quartiers réservés figured in the work of poets, painters, and journalists who fantasized about the charms of veiled women, they were at the same time the object of serious and more realistic studies. From the Lyautey era to the early 1950s, colonial medical observers, although not completely detached from their colonial frame of mind, looked very closely at the medical phenomenon of syphilis, literally as a window into the ills of Moroccan society. Control of the prostitutional space and of the prostitute became entangled with the control of urban space and politics. Eventually, few medical doctors ventured into the world of the prostitute with a much more objective analysis. The problem of venereal disease and syphilis was a concern of colonial authorities from the early period of French involvement in Morocco. A number of doctors have written on what they viewed as an alarming problem of syphilis and prostitution. In his book on syphilis in North Africa published in 1923, and based on a research conducted between 1916 and 1917, Dr. G. Lacapère stated that “our estimation should be considered as a minimum but we can say that the proportion of the Muslim patients with syphilis in Fez has attained 70 to 75%.” In the same book, Lacapère quotes more alarming statistics from previous studies conducted between 1913 and 1917 by different doctors including Dr. Remingler, Dr. Blanc, Dr. de Campredon and Dr. Huguet. For our purpose here, it is important to point out that

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early colonial interest in the prostitute was, from the start, linked to the alarming statistics that were related to syphilis. But we need, however, to put this concern also in relation to the anxiety over public hygiene in the métropole. The outbreak of World War I led to a significant increase in the number of the maisons de tolérance in France. By the end of the war, the number of admissions to hospital from venereal diseases reached approximately one million (Harrison 1995, 142). Whether in metropolitan France or in the colonial empire, the spread of venereal disease was very much perceived as part of a threat primarily to the urban environment. In Morocco, the academic interest in the urban space was intricately related to the politics of colonialism. From the very beginning of the protectorate in 1912, the country was a site of experimentation for French urban planning. Urbanism, architecture, and “urban ethnography” were an important part of the colonial production of knowledge (Jole n.d.). The study of urban development was closely associated with the discipline of sociology. As opposed to the French orientalist tradition that was mainly concerned with philology and language studies, the colonial urban sociology was inspired by the more “objective” science of Emile Durkheim. Colonial politics remained, however, intertwined with the production of knowledge about urban space. As early as 1920, the Direction des Affaires Indigenes (DAI) established its section socilogique, which was responsible for the accumulation of information and production of knowledge about Moroccan society initially in rural areas, but more gradually in urban space. As more rural areas became under the effective control of French colonial authorities in the 1930s, there was a growing concern about the cities that started to witness a rapid increase in industrial activities and population growth as a result of the high wave of immigration from the countryside in the 1940s. The section socilogique of the DAI was made up mainly of the so-called Officiers des Affaires Indigenes (OAI), who were essentially military officers trained to be ethnographers and sociologists. If earlier work on the Moroccan cities concentrated on their socioeconomic relationships with the countryside, from the 1940s onward a series of articles and monographs started to deal with new themes about the working class, poverty, and slums in the cities. The best example of the new kind of sociological studies was represented by the work of Robert Montagne (1951), who in 1950, set out to do a major work about the working class in different Moroccan cities.

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Outside of the colonial institutions of control, interest in the urban environment came from within more academic circles. The majority of academicians who wrote about Moroccan cities were not trained as sociologists and included such major scholars as Roger le Tourneau (1949), who wrote about Fez, and Andre Adam (1968) who wrote his major work on Casablanca. But for the academic circle as well, the production of an urban sociology went hand in hand with the concern of the colonial state, namely the rise of slums and an urban proletariat that was prone to adhering to emerging syndicalism or nationalist sentiment in the cities. One of the main concerns of colonial authorities between 1933 and 1955 was how to deal with the rise of more urban centers in Morocco and the subsequent social, economic, and cultural problems that were associated with “modern” forms of problems related to slums, urban poverty, hygiene, rural exodus, and prostitution. As will be clarified in the following paragraphs, the politics of hygiene had an important gender dimension to them. The colonial urban sociology started to speak in the 1950s about a new phenomenon that they called the “indigene urban.” In this context, the prostitute in the quartier réservé was part of this indigene urban that became part of an “urban crisis” that the French colonial authorities were faced with. Urban research was often financed by and conducted upon requests from colonial authorities. As noted by Abdelmajid Arrif (2003, 20–21), often the studies were done in the form of the so-called enquêtes that blurred the distinctions between the intellectual research and the policing aspects that are associated with the French word enquêtes. In fact, the distinction between the academic researcher and the colonial officer was equally blurred (we will see later how, in the context of the quartier réservé, the distinction between the policeman and the doctor became blurred as well). By the middle of the 1950s, French colonial authorities were faced with a major political crisis that seriously threatened and ultimately removed the colonial state. Between 1950 and 1956, this crisis manifested itself in a predominantly urban context. Robert Montagne captured very precisely the relationship between the political and the urban in colonial Morocco when he stated that “the political crisis hides the existence of three other social and institutional crises. The first one is related to the urban proletariat that resulted from the progressive dislocation of tribes. The second one is related the urban youth who are unable to adapt to the modern state. The third crisis is the crisis of [colonial] state” (Jole n.d., 167). So concern for prostitution in

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colonial Casablanca and the attempt to regulate and confine the prostitute within a regimented space has to be seen in this broader context of colonial rule in which the discipline, control, and policing of the prostitute can be interpreted as part of the control of the city of Casablanca at large.

C ASABLANCA

IN THE

C OLONIAL C ONTEXT

The period between 1912 and 1933 in Morocco is known in the annals of French military colonial history as the “pacification du Maroc,” which for historians it is also known as an era of violent assault upon Moroccan peasant society throughout much of the atlas, the Chaouia, Tadla Region, and the West Atlantic Plains. The military conquest of Morocco came hand in hand with a systematic policy of land expropriations. Between 1907 and 1912, there were already about thirty thousand hectares of land that were taken from the peasants in the Region of Oujda and Casablanca. Under colonial administration, the “legal” acquisition of land by French settlers was made possible by a dahir in August 1913. The dahir of May 1919 further limited the space of collective lands. In the Tadla area, sixty-two thousand hectares of communal holdings were expropriated in 1927. By 1932, the colonial confiscation of land had reached approximately 837,000 hectares (Laroui 1970, 306–8). More than two decades of colonial expansion in the countryside, combined with land expropriations and the disruption of traditional forms of existence, had contributed to a major economic and social dislocation of Moroccan peasant society. If the year 1933 marked the end of an era of violent military assaults on the Moroccan peasantry and its livelihood, the following years were a period of economic deterioration as far as Moroccan peasants were concerned. Increase in taxes and the commercialization of land reduced their competitive power and the weakening of the tribal system gradually gave way to either the proletarianization of the peasants or to increasing levels of unemployment. The result was a gradual decline of the peasant population in the countryside and the subsequent rural exodus to cities such as Casablanca. Since the beginning of the protectorate in 1912, Casablanca was the prototype of colonial urban transformation. Between 1907 and the late 1950s, the city went from twenty thousand to 1,300,000 inhabitants. The gradual industrialization of the city brought a new

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marginal class that was immigrating to the city. It is estimated that that Casablanca absorbed about three-fifths of internal migrants between 1936 and 1952 (Adam 1972, 325). As stated earlier, colonial control of the countryside and the subsequent socioeconomic changes that resulted from that control contributed to a significant breakup of the tribal and patriarchal system that was at the heart of the family unit. The expropriation of land from landowners and heavy taxation disrupted the fabric of tribal society and led to a gradual pauperization of the peasantry. Large numbers of families were faced with harsh economic conditions. This had a particular effect on women. With the double effect of job scarcity and unemployment, migration to major cities like Casablanca provided an alternative source of revenue. For some women, prostitution was their main source of income, and the quartier réservé of Casablanca represented the largest space in which prostitution was organized and regularized under French colonial authorities. As one observer of colonial Casablanca, André Adam, later put it, “The way of life of these bachelors (ruwwasa), or young men living as bachelors, inevitably created sexual problems, for which continence could only exceptionally provide a solution. Of course, the city’s many prostitutes, professional or occasional, offered the easiest way out; but it was an expensive way” (Adam 1972, 334). As rural immigration to Casablanca increased, so did the demand for prostitutes and the necessity on the part of the colonial authorities to control prostitution. But demand for prostitution was not limited to the ruwwasa. Prostitution was intricately tied with the French colonial military establishment as it provided sexual services for its soldiers.

F ROM THE C OLONIAL A RMY TO THE QUARTIER RESÉRVÉ The colonial military administration paid particular attention to public hygiene and was especially concerned about the control of prostitution for the sexual needs of its soldiers. What was often referred to as bordels militaires or maisons de tolerance had a clientele made up mostly of soldiers. From the early history of French military conquest, it was common that prostitutes accompany the soldiers to the battlefield. For that purpose, French military authorities officially created the so-called Bordels Militaires de Campagne known also as the BMC. This was part of what Roger Salardenne called lupanards ambulants.

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Made up mostly of female peasants from the atlas, the prostitutes would follow the soldiers wherever they went for battle. According to Salardenne, these women “have the same difficult life as that of the soldier and their fate is not to be envied” (Salardenne 1930, 97). While it is not clearly stated, these women were “casualties” of colonial warfare with a double meaning of the word “casualty”: a social meaning as a result of their uprooting from their family unit and tribal environment, and a literal meaning that makes the prostitute part of the combat zone and a real casualty of war that had never been accounted for. Many of these women were in fact forced into what I call a military-sexual recruitment into the colonial army. “C’est un veritable concert de lamentations et de désespoir parmi ses fidèles,” one male nurse in the regiments de tirailleurs informed Salardenne (1930, 98). As Alain Corbin put it in the context of nineteenth-century France, “Registration [of the prostitutes] indicated the adoption not of a profession, for prostitution could not be viewed as such, but of the state of being, which certain regulationists were not afraid to compare with being in the military” (Corbin 1990, 30). In the colonial context of Morocco, the “state of being” of the prostitutes was not compared to being in the military; it was part of the military. During their forced recruitment into military-sexual labor, the prostitutes had medical visits every two days. The women voluntarily went to these visits, but when they realized that they had contracted a sexual disease, they refused to go most likely because that would have reduced their chances of earning more money. They were then forced to go to the hospital. It is important to note that some soldiers did not care very much about contracting venereal disease; on the contrary, they welcomed it. During heated battles of colonial conquest against resisting tribes, some Moroccan colonial soldiers found out that contracting a venereal disease resulted in a momentary discharge from service and hence retreat from the combat zone. As the colonial war geographically expanded into new areas, the chances of recruiting more women from within the subdued tribes expanded as well. As resistance collapsed and the tribal population was displaced, each new geographical context created an ideal social pool for French colonial military authorities to recruit more sexual labor. Salardenne reminds us again that “the inmates of the B.M.C are not recruited only in the houses of the quartiers resérvés of Fez, Meknes and elsewhere . . . but also in the regions insoumis” (1930, 100, italics added). It is clear from this snapshot at the use of sexual labor in the context of conquest that

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the colonial military authorities were introducing to Morocco a military system of regulated prostitution that was in fact going to be modeled on state regulated prostitution in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 The issue of prostitution became gradually a growing concern for French public authorities, especially in a city such as Casablanca that was believed to have about thirty thousand clandestine prostitutes in the late 1940s (Mathieu and Maury 1950, 1). As opposed to the highly debated Contagious Diseases Acts which pitted the British officers of the old school against the more reform-minded medical officers in India, the issue of prostitution and control of venereal diseases in Morocco proceeded along a much smoother lines. In the case of India, some officers viewed “the control of venereal disease as a ‘moral’ as much as a ‘medical’ problem, and moral considerations loomed large in traditional notions of discipline and military honor” (Harrison 1995, 135). In colonial Morocco, the support for regimented prostitution in urban areas was also based on moral and medical ground, but it did not lead to any significant debate about its legitimacy from a military ethos. In his sarcastic ways, Jacques Berque (1962, 170) reminds us that on September 26, 1925, “the inauguration of an enormous brothel [in Fez] was celebrated with a public reception; it was a municipal event!” Later he states, “For obvious requirements of law and order, the police allotted certain days to legionaries, others to the tirailleurs etc . . . for any infringement of the rule soon degenerated into a free fight. Prostitution, far from being anarchical, thus provided an illustration of the civic order” (1962, 305). The French colonial military and civil administrators generally supported a policy of public hygiene and were especially concerned about the control of the sexual needs and health of their soldiers. This was typical of what Corbin called “neoregulationism” which is “the supreme attempt to exert selection, normalization, and power over those involved in prostitution, in the name of hygiene” (Corbin 1990, 332). It is to the colonial politics of hygiene that I would like to turn now.

F RENCH U RBANISM AND THE G ENDERED C OLONIAL P OLITICS OF H YGIENE The French resident General Lyautey once stated, “I no longer work for any other cause than that of rationality and history” (Rabinow

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1989, 286). In his own colonial and paternalist discourse, Lyautey wanted otherwise to “rationalize” Morocco at different levels of society including the urban space. But Lyautey did not mean to radically transform Morocco. He was instead interested in modernizing the country without destroying its “traditional” structures. But “modernizing” Morocco was a very selective process in which the public facilities of Moroccans were often neglected, while the French enjoyed much of the modernizing project that Lyautey was talking about. In terms of the organization of space, the inequality of this system led to more segregation of the populations along religious and ethnic lines. It is true that this segregation had traditionally existed in the Moroccan urban make up, but the colonial system it had further intensified the social disparities. As Paul Rabinow argued, Lyautey wanted to introduce Morocco into a “technical modernity” but it was a selective process. As elaborated by Lyautey, colonial urban policy was the outcome of different factors. First, it was part of a major effort to prepare the city for a more advanced capitalist mode of production by the establishment of new infrastructures and the creation of new industrial zones of development and roads. The commercial growth of the city was the result of a significant investment. During the period of 1914 to 1920, colonial administration spent the equivalent of 73 billion francs. The most important investment related to the building of the Casablanca port that was intended for the export of phosphate from the city of Khouribga. The traffic of the port, as a result, went from 242 tons in 1914 to 2,596 tons in 1928.3 The second factor behind urban colonial policy in Casablanca was the rise of European immigration and rural exodus to the city. Up to 1914, there were no major constructions done specifically for Europeans. The number of European immigrants went from one thousand in 1907 to thirty-five thousand in 1918. During this period, we see the emergence of a “European” city constructed by and for Europeans around the port. The creation of this city was part of a policy of urban segregation between Moroccans and Europeans. The Moroccan population went from twenty-four thousand to fifty-one thousand during the same period (1907–18). Up until 1920, Moroccans were limited in space to the old medina, but the medina started to be seriously overcrowded. As Janet Abu-Lughod argued, the ville Européenne became a dominant structure to which the preexisting cities started to be gradually subordinate, a situation that reduced Moroccans “to the

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status of a submissive partner from whom resources, both natural and human, were to be extracted” (Abu-Lughod 1980, 168). The most important characteristic in colonial urban policy under Lyautey was the principle of spatial/ethnic segregation between the European and the Moroccan populations. The architect, literally, of this policy was Henri Prost. In this policy, there was a distinction between first the so-called “hard urbanism” (urbanisme dur), which symbolized the “glory” and “triumph” of French colonial domination. The construction of the ville Européenne was a symbol of the colonial equation (colonization equals modernity). This was also commonly known as espace de jouissance. Second, the other form of urbanism was the so-called “soft urbanism” (urbanisme mou), which was conceived of as an “espace d’assistance” for the Moroccan masses. This was the opposite of the ville Européenne in terms of infrastructure and quality of life. It was part of a peripheral space characterized by a lack of infrastructures, by hazardous forms of construction and poverty. Around these two major forms of spatial distinction, Casablanca saw the emergence of other urban forms that included shanty towns, habous (which was established as a new space for a more upper-class Moroccans, and the nouvelle medina, which was constructed south of the ville Européenne. The nouvelle medina was mainly for Moroccans and did not have much coherent urban policy. Casablanca also witnessed the emergence of new working-class neighborhoods around industrial centers in the eastern parts of the city. So as an urban colonial space, Casablanca was therefore divided along ethnic and class distinction. Concern for public hygiene and for the medical components of urban space was an important part of colonial politics since the early phases of French protectorate in Morocco. Since 1900, there was a systematic attempt to deal with the problem of the “santé publique” in urban areas whether through the creation of commission d’hygiène, the role that medical doctors played in the military conquest or through the creation in 1912 of the Bureaux Municipaux d’Hygiène (BMD). As put succinctly by Lyautey, “We arrived to Morocco not as conquerors but as civilizers; we must create a hygienic organization and a medical assistance . . . there is nothing more solidly factual than the efficiency and role of the doctor as an agent of conquest, attraction and pacification” (Jole n.d., 111). As one colonial observer also put in 1931, “One of the first concern of the protectorate government was hygiene and the salubrity of cities. It was important to fight the filth in the cities and to bring in some hygiene and to get rid of some diseases such as syphilis . . . we need to make the North African cities livable

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for the new European comers and show to the Moroccan populations the material benefits of our civilization” (109). Concern for hygiene in urban centers had often had a gender dimension to it, especially when the problem of syphilis was evoked. Women and prostitutes in particular were among the first social categories to be associated with “urban diseases.” In the colonial discourse of urbanism, the prostitute was a “porteuse de germe,” which could threaten the stability of the “collective well-being” of the city and the “ordre urbain.” The connection between urbanism and hygiene was in fact part of a scientific discourse since the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe. As noted by some urban observers, “The discourse on public hygiene was associated with a discourse about the city in the 19th century. Our understanding of the city between 1850 and 1930 is hygienic not urban. This discourse is based in the idea of contamination not social communication . . . Danger comes from physical and moral contamination” (Jole n.d., 111). It became clear that this “physical” and “moral” contamination had a major gender dimension and that the prostitutes were specifically seen as the harbingers of urban ills and diseases. The attempt to control and contain prostitution converged therefore within a well-established “scientific” discourse about public hygiene. The hygiene doctors’ interest in prostitution was closely related with the concerns about controlling venereal diseases. Syphilis was a common medical problem in Morocco and the prostitute in particular was perceived as the root cause of this affliction. It is this hygienic argument that gave the scientific basis and legitimacy for the colonial state to regulate prostitution. As previously noted, Morocco was the site of experimentation in urban planning. The hygienic conception of urbanism in France in the nineteenth century was going to be an important factor in attempting to organize urban space in Casablanca. As part of a social control, a system of surveillance with a technical and policing approach was being established in major cities such as Casablanca. A whole panoply of institutions and practices were instrumentalized to deal with urban public hygiene. These included the creation of medical stations for disinfection, dispensaries, public showers, and municipal cleaning. As we will see, the police and medical surveillance of the prostitute was an important aspect of these practices. It is important to note at this stage that from its inception, the colonial policy of hygiene did not make any distinction between the medical field and the police as a coercive institution. Hence, the BMD included the ubiquitous function of the “maire-sanitaire,” who was responsible for the “police sanitaire.”

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Colonial hygienics were also the key argument for the creation of the so-called “frontiers sanitaires” around the most strategic urban areas. A special hygiene police was established to identify and track down women who were suspected of being a prostitute. This led to a system of arbitrary arrests of many peasant women. Part of how Morocco was entering into the colonial frame of administrative “modernity” was the creation of the system of the état civil especially in the urban centers. Each individual who was registered in the état civil had to carry an identity card. In the new urban context of a city like Casablanca, a large segment of the Moroccan peasant society was not yet part of this system and many women did not have any form of personal identification. The new urban environment made an obligation the act of carrying an identification on the part of the Moroccan subject. Not carrying or owning an identity card became an illegal act that could lead to an arrest. As a result, a woman who was caught without identification was automatically perceived as illegal and hence her situation was a justification for arrest by the police. No proof of prostitution had to be presented about a woman to be arrested and brought to Bousbir. It was therefore usual to bring in very young women not exceeding the age of twelve and who end up as prostitute at a minor age. In fact, young women were sought after by the patronesses who were keen on pleasing the demands of their customers for “fresh women” (Taraud 2003). It is also worthwhile mentioning that the problem of prostitution in the urban environment of Casablanca was not perceived, at least in the dominant colonial discourse up to the late 1940s, as part of a broader question of social marginality. Prostitution was not viewed in relation to the subaltern conditions of peasant women that had to migrate to the city as a result of extreme forms of poverty that the colonial context was significantly responsible for and that women were the first to be affected by. It is also important to stress that the colonial officers and the system of surveillance and police did not seriously consider the role of men in prostitution. The purchase of sex was not denounced or brought to justice. Men of different social status and different nationalities and religions visited Bousbir without bearing any responsibility. If we take into consideration the prostitutional space as part of the colonial policy of urbanization, we notice that the ville Européenne had to be preserved from social and racial contamination as perceived by colonial authorities. The creation of the quartier réservé was part of

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this policy. Colonial urban policy in North Africa was very much inspired by the regulationist theory as it was articulated in the work of Parent-Duchatelet about prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris. Duchatelet’s ideas constituted a major change with regards to urban prostitution. He viewed prostitution as mal nécessaire (necessary evil) because it is an integral part of the emerging modern city. With Duchatelet, we move from la prostitution as a phenomenon of social disorder to l’espace de la prostitution as a regulated and controlled space. Bousbir in Casablanca became such a space.

T HE QUARTIER RÉSERVÉ What was referred to earlier as the “bordels militaries de campagne” was limited to the countryside and had a clientele made up mostly of soldiers. The quartier resérvé in Casablanca represented, on the other hand, the prototype of a system of a neoregulationist and regimented prostitution in an urban space open not only to soldiers but to a wide range of clientele from mixed ethnic and social backgrounds. A kind of fortress of some twenty-four thousand square meters, the quartier réservé, surrounded by high walls with one main door guarded by both the military and the police, had about six hundred prostitutes. The history of the quartier goes back to 1914 when French local authorities decided to group the prostitutes into a controlled space. The decision was clearly made not simply out of hygienic reasons, but also for political control. The original name of the quartier was Rue Prosper, which was rendered as Derb Bousbir in Moroccan dialect. Prosper Ferrieu, who was born in Casablanca in 1866 and held several key positions including the consul of France in Casablanca and the political consultant of General d’Amade, was clearly not delighted to have the quartier named after him and had been initially opposed to it. In 1923, the quartier was bought by a French real estate firm known as La Cressioniere. There were clearly financial incentives for both the firm and the local French authorities who made the deal possible. While the firm received the monthly rents of the houses, the municipality was responsible for policing, administrative functioning, and medical control. After having been bought by the French firm, Derb Bousbir was relocated away from the old medina. Called now the quartier resérvé de Bousbir, it became part of the “modern” quarters (or ville nouvelle) of the city in 1923. In colonial Casablanca, this space was read also in

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cultural terms. As opposed to the ville Européenne, which was inhabited predominantly by the French, the ville nouvelle had a vast majority of Moroccans who came to the city as part of the growing waves of immigration. This “modern city” was therefore the result of an urban extension of Casablanca. Neither part of the ville Européenne nor the ville nouvelle, the quartier resérvé was very much part of a marginalized urban space. The quartier had 175 houses, eight cafes, and a movie theater that were all under permanent surveillance. As part of the public sphere in the form of a ghetto, Bousbir became a prostitutional space that brought together marginalized women within a constructed marginalized space. While precolonial prostitution was on the margin of Moroccan society, it was nevertheless dispersed and blurred within the traditional urban make-up of the old medina. In the new urban context of the ville nouvelle, prostitution became marginalized on a much larger scale. Poverty on a massive scale led to an urban prostitution on a massive scale. The prostitutional space in the ville nouvelle became more specifically demarcated and less integrated in the urban environment. Faced with the reality that prostitution is a social phenomenon that could not be eradicated, French colonial authorities decided to contain it within a controlled and regimented space away from the European city. From the perspective of colonial politics, the European city, as the new center of urban life, had to be guarded from any contamination both in the biological, ethnic, and cultural senses.

W HO W ERE T HESE W OMEN

UNDER

S URVEILLANCE ?

The majority of the prostitutes who were in the quartier réservé came from shantytown populations of women who migrated to Casablanca from the region of Chaouia, Marrakech, and Tadla. Most of these women had previously been part of the new urban class who held different jobs before they were drawn into prostitution. By the 1940s and 1950s, the number of women who worked as domestics or in factories and petty jobs had increased drastically in the ville nouvelle and ville Européenne as a result of their abrupt and difficult integration into a new and challenging environment. The rate of urban growth after the confiscation of rural land increased markedly. Women moved to Casablanca in large numbers, for the first time trying to cope with the difficulties of the urban environment outside the network of the extended family context that had marked most tribal women’s lives.

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Prostitution at Bousbir was therefore intricately related to a series of urban factors that were associated with poverty, marginalization, and the continuous flow of peasants from the countryside. Most women who were at Bousbir migrated to Casablanca when they were in their twenties, at an age when they started looking for jobs. In this case, the quartier became part of a sexual factory that provided labor for many peasant women. Of the population of women, 63.4 percent joined the quartier on a “voluntary” basis while 26.6 percent were forced there after being caught by the police on a “legal ground.” Some statistics about the geographical distribution of these women are quite revealing: Table 1.1 The geographical origin of the prostitutes Geographical distribution Region of Casablanca Marrakech Rabat Fez Agadir Meknes Oujda Algeria Tangier Spanish Morocco Total

Number of prostitutes

Percentage

952 312 84 47 37 36 15 9 6 2 1500

63.46 20.80 5.60 3.13 2.46 2.40 1.00 0.60 0.40 0.13 100

Another study on the origin of the flow of working class migration to another shantytown in Casablanca shows some interesting remarks. Table 1.2 Geographical origin of immigrant labor in Casablanca Geographical distribution Region of Casablanca Western Atlantic Plains Marrakech Tadla Rabat Meknes/Fez/Taza Sous

Number of immigrants

Percentage

641 363 152 101 84 83 35

42.73 24.20 10.13 5.60 5.53 5.53 2.33

A cursory look at these statistics reveals that the region of Casablanca known as Chaouia had the highest numbers of prostitutes and of people who were living in the shantytown. As stated earlier, about thirty

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thousand hectares in the region of Oujda and Casablanca were confiscated from 1907 to 1912, and about sixty-two thousand hectares in the Tadla region in 1927. The overall land confiscation reached 837,000 hectares by 1932. In one aspect, migration to Casablanca was closely linked to colonial land seizure. There was also a clear correlation between the geographical origins of the population living in the shantytown and the percentage of prostitutes from the same origins. The third point to make is that the prostitutes in the quartier were from various regions in Morocco. As previously mentioned, colonial expansion had strong economic effects particularly on peasant women. Out of the forty-one cases that were interviewed, seventeen came directly from parents who were fellahs or khammes, while the rest were from a peasant background and immigrated to the city to work in petty jobs (Mathieu and Maury 1950, 23). About 19 percent of the prostitutes worked as domestic servants in French households in the ville Européenne before they came to the quartier. It seems plausible that the “transgression” of this geographical and cultural space, as it was perceived by their male counterpart, was an element of scorn and contempt that alienated them into a social category prone to prostitution. “Sobisat” was a common derogatory Moroccan term for women who ventured outside the enclave of the house in order to make a living. Used in an equally derogatory way, the term “garsonat” (which is the Moroccan feminine rendition of the French “garcon de café”) was also used to refer to female domestic servants. The term garsonat, in a revealing way, would eventually mean prostitute. The female domestic servant was therefore seen as persona non grata in the private sphere of the old medina, while in the modern city, she could find prostitution as a source of living to support her meager salary as a servant.

T HE M EDICAL C ONTROL

OF THE

P ROSTITUTE

As a closed and regimented space, Bousbir had a self-fulfilling telos of obedience to the coercive power and discipline of French colonial authorities. The quartier represented literally and symbolically a space where female bodies were subjected to the control of the French medical and police force on a daily basis. This particular space encompassed a colonial relationship of power in its most immediate and intimate forms. As part of the overall techniques of discipline and control, a

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dispensary (dispensaire) was established inside Bousbir as early as 1921. In this dispensary, the prostitutes had to submit to routine medical examinations. Here the function of the doctor was somewhat intertwined with that of the policeman. We are in this context reminded of Frantz Fanon’s insight about how the “colonizing doctor adopts the attitude of his group . . . Behind the doctor who heals the wounds of humanity appears the man, a member of a dominant society . . . The doctor himself has decided to exclude himself from the protective circle that the principles and values of the medical profession have woven around him” (Fanon 1965, 133–35). The dispensary was symbolically located in front of the police office inside the quartier. As stated by Jean Mathieu and P. H. Maury in their study, “Once the prostitute is under surveillance, she is from the very beginning under the rigid authority of the patroness. A concentrational regulationism takes away her freedom and puts her under frequent police and medical controls” (Arrif 2003, 123). Like a kind of laboratory for the control of the body of the prostitutes, the dispensary included in the first floor a room for “genital disinfections,” two rooms dormitories for the Moroccan prostitutes, two rooms for Europeans, a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom, and an office. It seems that the urban segregation in colonial Casablanca was somewhat replicated inside Bousbir; the Moroccan prostitutes who constituted more than 90 percent of the population inside the quartier could not share the same rooms or bathrooms as the European or Jewish prostitutes. On the second floor of the dispensary, there was the doctor’s office in addition to two rooms for medical examinations. The second floor included also a room for a woman guard (surveillante) who was responsible for the constant surveillance of women. The medical control of the prostitutes had to take place systematically twice a week. They had to take showers and go through the examinations in order to determine whether they had been infected with any venereal disease. This practice was commonly referred to as triage. The triage was generally conducted by a nurse who had to inform the doctor about any infected prostitute. As stated by Alain Corbin in another context, “We have to take into account the prejudices of the time, which helped to make the medical examination of women’s sexual organs an assault on their modesty, if not exactly rape” (Corbin 1990, 88). Because of the Moroccan cultural codes and the relationships of power generated by the colonial context, the

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Moroccan prostitutes could only have perceived this medical examination as even more invasive. Since the dispensary was used not only for the prostitutes at Bousbir but also for other women from outside, it became gradually the site of recruitment of potential prostitutes sought after by the patroness. Mathieu and Maury reminds us that “every Friday, the patients or clandestine prostitutes who are cured are set free to go to town. At this moment the patronesses try to persuade young and beautiful women recruits to join Bousbir. This is how the dispensary, with the help of the medical personnel, replenishes once a week a real slave market” (Arrif 1993, 125). In this sense, the personnel of the dispensary also served to facilitate the contact between different women and the patronesses in Bousbir.

E VERYDAY L IFE

IN THE

QUARTIER

Life in the quartier is divided between calm mornings and very festive evenings for the European tourists who went there frequently in search for the images and lights of that mysterious literary Orient so common in their imagination. They came to look for pleasure and happiness in the miserable life of the prostitutes. Yet the realities of those women betrayed those romantic images that they had come across in colonial postcards. Life in the mornings was generally spent between the café, the public bath, the hairdresser, or the laundry room. As part of a system of incarceration, there were very regimented rules that prohibited the prostitutes from leaving the quartier without police permission. They had the right to leave the closed space of the quartier twice a week but only after a visit from the doctor. This permission could last between twelve to twenty-four hours. It was common for many of them to escape during the permission time. In the evenings, the cafés are open, and music can be heard in the narrow street of the quartier. Through dancing and singing, group after group of women tried to attract potential customers. Scenes of supply and demand repeated themselves in which both Europeans and Moroccans were part of. The rooms are identical and are shared by two prostitutes without much privacy. It was part of the plan that the French architect of the municipality had designed. Furniture was limited, and the environment was not sanitary. There was no running water, so each day a woman was

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responsible for bringing water from the public fountain. Meals consisted of bread and tea in the morning, cooked vegetables for lunch, and a soup for dinner. It was part of the regimented organization of the quartier, but it was the women who paid for their food. Time was spent waiting for more customers in front of the houses. Playing cards was forbidden because it distracted them from attracting more customers. Bousbir was a closed environment for the prostitutes who remained dependent upon the patroness. Many of the prostitutes became addicted to cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol. Ninety percent of them smoked an average of two packs of cigarettes a day. Canabis (kif) was also smoked very regularly as drug dealers from the north of Morocco were among the customers. Much of the money that the prostitutes earned was spent on alcohol. Out of a monthly income of 15,800 francs, a prostitute spent 2,700 francs on tobacco, two thousand francs on kif and five thousand francs on alcohol. This means that more than 50 percent of her monthly salary was spent on drugs and alcohol. When we add the living expenses including rent, most prostitutes spent all their earnings at the end of each month. The lives of the prostitutes ultimately became a vicious circle and very dependent on the closed environment of the quartier. On this related aspect of the life of the prostitute, Mathieu and Maury state the “prostitutes live as slaves and are not independent at all. The patroness does not hesitate to lend them money but they are never able to reimburse her. Without hoping for an escape they must work under the orders of a woman who fobids them from going out to the city” (Arrif 1993, 107). As a result of the economic dislocation of the colonial encounter in Morocco, a significant number of peasant women started to inhabit a social environment that must have offered them very limited opportunities to earn an independent income. The prostitute in colonial Morocco can therefore be viewed as an economic agent in the face of constrains imposed by colonialism. It seems clear at least from this angle that engagement in prostitution could only have been part of an economic activity. While the historical narrative that I sketched out earlier is revealing in terms of the socioeconomic causes behind the phenomenon of prostitution, it does not “capture the voice” of the prostitute. Also this economic explanation of prostitution has the potential of sounding too deterministic in assuming too hastily that women were compelled into prostitution because they had no other alternative for earning money and making a living. This brings me to the fragments of history that I evoked earlier and which give us

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another angle or a gender-oriented model for explaining prostitution in colonial Casablanca.4

F RAGMENTS

AND

S ILENT V OICES

The causes of prostitution cannot solely be attributed to economic factors. As stated above, economic explanations, while useful, put the subaltern position of the prostitute only within the rigid binaries of colonial relationships between the “colonizer” and “colonized.” What is left absent from this economic framework is the gender relationship between the male and the female. From this gender perspective, the prostitute comes out as the “casualty” not only of a colonial economic system and colonial warfare, but also of a male-dominated system of power relationships. It is only through an analysis of what I referred to as the “fragments” of history that we get some sense of the gender dimension behind the subaltern condition of the prostitute in the quartier réservé” in colonial Casablanca. Let me first start with the colonial text from which I am trying to search for these fragments. One source I use is part of an unpublished report entitled La Prostitution Surveillée de Casablanca: Le Quartier Réservé. This work was written in 1950 by two most likely colonial doctors, Jean Mathieu and P. H. Maury, and kept at the Centre des Hautes études sur l’Afrique et l’Asie Moderne. In 2003, this document was finally published and edited with an introduction by Abdelmajid Arrif. What attracted me first to the document was the nature of the subject. As I was doing research about Moroccan soldiers in the colonial army and having read previous literature about the connection between prostitution and the colonial army in India, I already started thinking about the fact that this document could be the basis of a chapter in my dissertation. But that turned out not to be the case as the subject deserves more specific attention for its own sake. The second reason why I was interested in the text was simply the important details that it included about a world that we don’t know much about when we read Moroccan social history in general and the colonial period more specifically. Finally, I was struck by the title of the book, which was devoid of any racialized discourse that was commonly associated with the colonial production of knowledge. As opposed to such titles as La Syphilis Arabe (Lacapere 1923, 6) or L’Afrique Galante (Salardenne 1930), we are confronted with what

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seems to be an objective and straightforward sociological analysis of a quartier réservé in colonial Casablanca. As I looked closely at the pages, it was clear that the two doctors have done very meticulous research based on statistical data and, more importantly, on interviews. Even though it is not clearly stated by the authors, the kind of narrative information that was included could only be gathered from oral accounts. On page twenty-three of the document, the authors made reference to the “interrogatoire” that they conducted. The way in which the statements of different women were typed into the text had the unintended effect of “giving a voice” to these women. When we look at specific cases of women in the quartier, we get more insight into the gender dimension of prostitution. The example of one woman named Fatima Bent Brahim reveals another story. Fatima was born in Meknes. She was married to a laborer when she was thirteen. Six months after her marriage, her husband left her and she married a carpenter from Rabat. Two months after her second marriage, she escaped from her house because of the ill treatment of her alcoholic husband. After several adventures, she worked as a packer in a sardine factory in the port city of Asfi. In order to gain more money, she decided to become a prostitute. After a visit to a hospital in Casablanca, she was arrested by the police and taken to the quartier. Fatima’s story speaks for itself. A combination of repressive marriage practices and patriarchal authority, combined in the end with a search for more means of subsistence, changed the direction of her life and she decided to make a living out of prostitution. As presented in the text, other stories reveal even more complex reasons for becoming part of the quartier: Miriam el-Mati, 21 years old, had been in Casablanca for three years before she was brought by a chikha (patroness) who was a friend of her parents. Zorah was 16 years old when she had a fight with her mother-in-law. She escaped her house to find refuge with a patroness in the quartier. She came there voluntarily. Malika Liazid Youssef is 23 years old and was born in the outskirts of Marrakech. She was married to a security guard who used to beat her. She left her house to search for refuge in Bousbir.

40

D RISS M AGHRAOUI Malika bent Mohammed, 22 years old, was sent at age 12 to Casablanca to work as a domestic servant in a home of a European household who had a farm in Settat where her father works. Two days after her arrival to Casablanca, she was taken by the police in the street and brought to Bousbir. Zohra ben Abdallah, 28 years old, was born in Ouled Frej in the Haouz region. Her parents had immigrated as a result of misery that resulted from bad harvest. She came to Casablanca on foot, without work and without means of subsistence. She was taken the very first day of her arrival. Hadda Bent Mohammed was 24 years old. She was born in Taza. She was married to a peasant who ultimately wanted to marry her younger sister. After losing her two-year-old son, she worked as a domestic servant in Fez for nine months. She became a friend with somebody who was close to the pasah of Fez. He brought her to Casablanca and introduced her to a patroness who lured her into Bousbir. She was 18 when she first came in to the quartier. Khadouj bent Omar, 16 years old, was born in Casablanca. As an orphan, she lived with her mother who was a dressmaker. Later on she moved to live with her brother who was a police officer in Rabat. She married a police officer who was a friend of her brother. He was married to another woman who did not get along well with her. The husband was violent and was beating her regularly. After one month, she left her house. She went back to live with her mother and brother for three months and tried to help her mother with dressmaking, but the hostility of her brother pushed her away. She decided to live with her father’s second wife in Casablanca, but she was not welcomed. She attempted to live alone in Derb Carlotti for a month while working as a domestic servant with a European family. One day, in the hammam (public bath) she met a patroness who lured her to Bousbir after telling her about how she could make a good living, eat and buy clothes in the quartier.

C ONCLUSION The physical order of the quartier réservé of Bousbir was not merely the reflection of a confined and controlled space by the police and medical personnel, but also the reflection of the authoritative presence of colonial politics through which the French could literally confiscate

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the bodies of Moroccan peasant women. Bousbir in Casablanca, with its strong techniques of control, continually mediated by daily relationships of power, presented a unique spatial framework for the colonial exploitation of labor and for the instrumentalization of the female body as a commodity. The fragments of history quoted speak for themselves. It is clear that the factors that pushed these women into prostitution varied. Some of them were related to economic conditions and to the colonial urban context that created them. Others were the results of a more complex situation in which male repression was clearly a factor. These fragments show how some of the prostitutes as “social wreckage” who, rejected by society and the urban environment, eventually choose to go to Bousbir. Some of the prostitutes were forced into prostitution as a result of urban politics of hygiene. Some stories reveal the fact that a number of prostitutes were married before they decided to come to the quartier. Prostitution in Casablanca was undoubtedly related to the politics of colonial rule and to economic factors. But it also resulted from the pervasiveness of male-to-female violence in its different forms. It came from colonial doctors, policemen, husbands, brothers, and other family members. Women also persuaded other women to join the quartier. In the hierarchical environment of a regimented prostitution such as in Bousbir, prostitutes were subject to strict control and discipline by their patroness as well. Many of them viewed their patroness with the highest contempt. Many people, including the patroness, the sous-maitresse, the “doctor,” and the police inspector constantly controlled the daily life of the prostitutes. In a nutshell, the quartier resérvé in colonial Casablanca was an institution that combined both a prison and a brothel, a “maison d’intolerance” to put it otherwise.

N OTES 1. There are few exceptions such as Ennaji’s Soldats, Domestiques et Concubines: L’Esclavage au Maroc au XIX Siècle (1994). 2. For the best analysis of this regimented prostitution, see Corbin 1990. 3. This section is based on Rachik’s work, Casablanca, L’Urbanisme de l’Urgence (2002); see especially p. 25. 4. For a very useful discussion of the different explanatory “models” of prostitution, see Phoenix 1999.

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R EFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1980. Rabat: Urban apartheid in Morocco. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Adam, André. 1968. Casablanca: Essai sur la transformation de la société marocaine au contact de L’Occident. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. ———.1972. Berber migrants in Casablanca. In Arabs and Berbers from Tribe to Nation in North Africa, ed. Ernest Gelner and Charles Micaud. London: Lexington Books. Arrif, Abdelmajid, ed. 2003. Bousbir: La prostitution dans le maroc colonial. Paris: Iinstitut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman. Berque, Jacques. 1962. French North Africa: The Maghreb between two World Wars. Trans. Jean Steward. London: Faber. Corbin, Alain. 1990. Women for hire: Prostitution and sexuality in France after 1850. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ennaji, Mohammed. 1994. Soldats, domestiques et concubines: L’Esclavage au Maroc au XIX siècle. Paris: Balland. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A dying colonialism. New York: Grove. Gilfoyle, Timothy. 1999. Prostitutes in history: From parables of pornography to metaphors of modernity. American Historical Review 104 (1): 117–41. Guha, Ranajit. 1996. The Small voice of history. In Subaltern studies IX, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Mark. 1995. The British army and the problem of venereal disease in France and Egypt during the First World War. Medical History 39:131–46. Jole, Michele. n.d. Les villes et la politique de recherche Francaise au maroc. Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc 147–48. ———. n.d. L’Hygiène publique et ‘l’espace urbain. Bulletin économique et social du Maroc. 147–48. Lacapere, G. 1923. La syphilis arabe. Paris: Gaston Doin. Largueches, Dalenda, and Abdelhamid Largueches. 1992. Marginales en terres d’Islam. Tunis: Cérès. Laroui, Abdallah. 1970. L’Histoire du maghreb un essai de synthèse. Paris: Francois Maspero. Le Tourneau, Roger. 1949. Fès avant le protectorat: Etude economique et sociale d’une ville de l’Occident Musulman. Casablanca: L’Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines. Mathieu, Jean, and P. H. Maury. 1950. La prostitution surveillée de Casablanca, le quartier réservé. Pris: Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l’Afrique et l’Asie Moderne.

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Montagne, Robert. 1951. Naissance du prolétariat marocain: Enquette collective 1948–1950. Paris: Peyronnet and Cie. Phoenix, Joanna. 1999. Making sense of prostitution. London: St. Martin’s. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. Boston: MIT Press. Rachik, Abderrrahmane. 2002. Casablanca, ‘l’urbanisme de l’urgence. Casablanca: Fondation Konrad Adenauer. Salardenne, Roger. 1930. L’Afrique galante reportage chez les prostituées juives et mauresques. Paris: Editions Prima. Serhane, Abdelhak. 1995. L’amour circoncis. Casablanca: Editions EDDIF. Smith, Julia Clancy. 1996. The colonial gaze: Sex and gender in the discourses of French North Africa. In Franco-Arab Encounters, ed. Carl L. Brown and Gordon S. Matthew, 201–28. Beirut: American University of Beirut. ———. 1998. Islam, gender and identities in the making of French Algeria, 1830–1962. In Domesticating the empire race gender, and family life in French and Dutch colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, 154–74. London: University of Virginia Press. Taraud, Christelle. 2003. La prostitution coloniale: Algerie, Tunisie, Maroc 1830–1962. Paris: Payot.

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4

MORPHOLOGIES

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SOCIAL FLOWS

SEGREGATION, TIME, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Susanne Dahlgren

Ideas always come in history wrapped up in certain practices, even if these are only discursive practices. —Charles Taylor (2004, 33)

In this chapter, I will focus on the reenactment of sexual segregation

in the Yemeni port town of Aden during the course of the 1990s.1 In order to see what segregation means from the perspective of the public sphere, I will compare the present situation to Aden of the late colonial era in the 1950s. My interest is to see what makes the present situation entirely different not only from the era when segregation was played down (during the 1970s and 1980s), but also from the colonial period when segregation of all kinds—social, ethnic, and sexual—was the norm. What do such differences tell about the public sphere? In a larger perspective, how do local social dynamics interact with current translocal and global processes and constitute local variations that make up what actually is special to a particular town? To approach these questions, I will take a critical look at Charles Taylor’s notion of social imaginaries (Taylor 2004) and to some in Middle Eastern studies currently influential deliberations on the public sphere.

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In and around the Middle East, much of the research on modernization and emerging public spheres challenges earlier understandings of the constitution of society (Anderson 2003; Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Göle 2002 and 1997; Salvatore and Eickelman 2006). Still, as Mahmood (2003) suggests, much of the literature concentrates on the technologies of discipline through which public subjects come to be produced while little attention has been paid to the contesting notions of social authority that undergirds such disciplinary practices in particular historical circumstances. We also need to see how the public sphere is a site for the creation of particular kinds of subjects and a place for cultivation of capacities people draw upon. Furthermore, as I will argue here, if we want to try to avoid reproducing residual Cartesianism in approaching social processes and the ways embodied subjectivities are constituted, we should look at the morphology of everyday actions, that is, how actions are “made” in human agency. Earlier studies on gender segregation have lacked a comparative approach and perspectives that observe its embeddedness into other social divisions. Here I will treat segregation the way Castoriadis advises us in relation to institutions, “Apparently similar institutions can be radically other, since immersed in another society, they are caught up in other significations” (1987, 368). Evidently, Castoriadis talks in terms of spatial moves; here I want to apply his idea while considering temporal jumps. What we need is a detailed analysis of particular historical situations where the notions of public place, public space, and public sphere are discussed. Furthermore, I will apply an intersectional approach2 in discussing gender; that is, seeing it embedded with other significant distinctions, such as socioeconomic status, religious-ethnic background, and transnational and translocal family histories that complement the institution of segregation. Importantly, I will focus on agency to allow complementary points of view to structural considerations. I will discuss segregation the way Hatem writes about sexuality, from the lens of (sexual) access and security that calls upon focusing on institutions that organize social interaction and sexuality in particular historical circumstances (Hatem 1986, 272). As Hatem puts it, we need to look at the whole social arrangement through a sexual lens (1986, 251). But let us first take a look at Aden, the focus of this inquiry, and its social morphology—the way social groups and human agents have left their mark throughout the past fifty years to the spatiality of the town.

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After this historical exploration, I will take up two women, an elderly mother and her young daughter, to discuss terms of sexual segregation in two different periods of time.

H ISTORIES , S TRATIFICATIONS ,

AND

G ENERATIONS

Aden, once a British military outpost and colony (1839–1967), later the capital of People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, 1967–90), and today the “economic” and “winter” capital of the unified Yemen Republic, embraces multiple stratifications based on historical flows of people and goods, shifts in political systems, and changing tides of global economies. Aden is not only a postcolony but also a postsocialist outpost with legacies that carry from distant and recent golden eras. Two physical factors, climate and morphology, structure Aden as a town. They influence how daily life is organized, how houses are built and how subcommunities are imagined. With sunshine and hot and humid weather most of the year, the position of the sun dictates where the open-air market is erected and food is served in street restaurants. It also plays a role in everyday calculations on how and when to engage in outdoor activities or whether to settle for staying indoors. Due to its morphology, Aden is not a unified area with a town center but consists of several towns, making it a polynucleotide city, with mountains and the surrounding sea dividing it into separate and detached subtowns in two distinct peninsulas. During the colonial era, Aden was divided into separate “ethnic” and religious communities. The division was partly the result of the British policy to exaggerate communal differences among the colonized subjects (the “divide and rule” policy), and partly due to the local tradition of emphasizing a person’s descent (nasab). Each community had its own symbols and practices that strengthened communal unity and distinguished the group from others. The European community consisted of the British service personnel, military and civil, and British businessmen who relied largely on supplying the demand of the military base. Other Europeans, Italians, French, and Greek ran commercial firms and the few industries. Their number was small but share in total economy considerable. The role of Europeans in running the town’s economy grew considerably at the turn of the 1960s as Aden became one of world’s

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busiest ports. Early twentieth-century Aden was a society of contractors and brokers who contracted everything from daily foodstuffs to luxury goods and labor. An increasing number of British service personnel and later their accompanying families made a market for European styles of consumption. Transit passengers in the port brought a demand for tax-free items. The main part of the labor force came from outside Aden, including a powerful group of headmen (muqaddam, pl. maqa ¯dima). Their dealings entailed recruiting labor from the Aden Protectorates and the Kingdom of Yemen and organizing everything from board to lodging for these migrant men. Typical to the Adeni labor market was the surung, persons who supplied labor on a daily basis wherever manpower was needed. These labor contractors tended to come from same villages or tribes as the laborers and formed pockets of men who worked, resided, and socialized together. In 1955, a total of 35 percent of the entire population of Aden came from the Kingdom of Yemen, 13.7 percent were from the two Aden Protectorates and 11.4 percent were of Indian origin. Local Adenis with resident rights accounted for only 26.7 percent of the population. The influential Europeans and Jews comprised 3 percent and 0.6 percent respectively (Aden Colony, Census Report 1955, 12).

M EN ’ S T OWN Colonial era provided a town scene of separate communities, with little interaction, yet most of the time living in harmony alongside each other. Due to Aden’s role in attracting labor and commercial entrepreneurs, gender disparity remained uneven throughout the colonial period. In the 1955 census, the number of males exceeded that of females by more than fifty-two thousand. That is, out of the total population of 138,230, only 31 percent were women. The presence of a European power for more than a hundred years (1839–1967) and an unbalanced sex ratio among the population evidently had an impact on gender interaction. From the men’s perspective, it meant looking for bridal candidates from the home village not only for normative reasons but practical, too. From the women’s perspective, shortage of men improved every woman’s chances to get married. Since streets were full of men without perhaps a single woman in sight, women’s free movement outside home was considered risky. The increased

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control of woman’s movement outside home told also about her mahram’s (or her “guardian’s”) considerations of people’s talk. Since women in modest numbers participated in working life or went to school after reaching puberty if at all, “legitimate” reasons for women moving outside home were less than today. Concerned of the problem how little physical activity and fresh air Adeni women normally could obtain, Hamza Luqma¯n, son of an influential merchant family and member of the city council, suggested in 1960 the establishment of a “purdah park”3 for women to move freely in fresh air. After a lively debate where a competing motion was presented for a park for both sexes, the city council decided to reserve one of its parks to women only and to erect a fence six feet tall around it (Takhsı¯s busta ¯n al-baladı¯at li-lmuhaggaba ¯t in the page devoted to women entitled “‘Our beautiful half”’ in Fata ¯t al-Gazı¯ra newspaper, issue no. 1555, 1961). After World War II, and with the increasing number of British service personnel’s wives entering the colony, clubs and societies started to be established to invite women “in purdah” to participate in life outside the home with the “legitimate” reason of participating in promoting welfare. Activists of the societies testify that such legitimate causes were needed to motivate men to allow their wives and daughters to leave the home (Ingrams 1970; IOR files R/20/B/2810, 2813). Women and men were in different manner in contact with the modernization that came along with the British. Even though the British were careful not to irritate local people in matters they considered to belong to “custom and religion,” the presence of a European power with different lifestyles from the local ones paved the way to alternative models for sex/gender relations. However, British influence was seldom direct. British colonial rule was military in nature and brought to Aden single servicemen. Rather unsurprisingly, prostitution was widespread and prospered throughout the colonial era. Large residential areas in Macalla and Shaykh cUthma¯ n, two sections of Aden, were reserved for public prostitution, officially called “prostitutes’ lines.”4 After independence, the new government closed these areas and employed the public women as factory workers in the recently established tomato can factory. Prostitution concentrated now in restaurants and nightclubs and developed in “private” character of direct contacts between customers and providers of sex services.

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Wives to service personnel started to arrive in Aden in large numbers only after the 1950s, when British military presence was expanded and a new oil refinery added to British interests in the area.5 Big housing projects in Macalla, Khormaksar, and the mainland town sections of Shaykh cUthma¯ n, al-Mansu¯ra, and Little Aden, involved erecting family housing for the British service personnel. The British wives lived a secluded life in their own community and seldom encountered local women (Ingrams 1970, 125; Knox-Mawer 1961). By the early 1950s, British ladies introduced charitable work in Aden and attracted local women to join visits to hospitals and bandage-making parties. Later on, these women’s organizations radicalized and formed part of independence struggle and consequent women’s activities.

S HIFTS FROM THE C OLONIAL TO THE P OSTCOLONIAL S ITUATION By the time of independence,6 social composition and ethnic variety of Aden changed dramatically. The economy was in ruins, suffering from the evacuation of the foreign base and all the economic activities it had attracted, and from the exodus of foreign companies. The Sixday Arab-Israeli war in 1967 caused another blow and the number of ships arriving to Aden port dropped dramatically (Ismael and Ismael 1986, 104). Furthermore, Britain suddenly withdrew its direct and indirect support, which it had promised to continue after independence (79–80). With the British left groups that had cooperated with colonial rule, such as the remaining part of the Jews,7 European businessmen, and a large part of the Indian community who had occupied junior posts in administration, education, and healthcare. As the labor market collapsed, labor migrants from the surrounding countryside and North Yemen returned to their villages, later to turn their gaze to the booming oil economies in other areas of the peninsula. The departure of administrative personnel and manual and skilled laborers created a lack of eighty thousand qualified people in a dramatic time of the establishment of the national economy (80). This resulted in a call directed to women to join the labor market. With all these changes, social hierarchy of the town was shaken. Some of the new rulers belonged to lower social strata, with no previous entry into the administration. The new government directed measures against hierarchies of all types, be they based on a person’s

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descent, religion, country of origin, or sex. Most of the elite sada families left Aden after the government’s politics radicalized following the June 22, 1969, “Corrective Move,” when the nationalization of banking, insurance companies, and part of other businesses took place. Members of the former upper strata felt threatened as their traditional respected role in society was questioned and some were actually persecuted. Independence and the consecutive economic crash brought changes to the sex ratio of the town, too. By 1988, gender disproportion had been already eliminated with only 1,020 men to every 1,000 women (People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen 1990, 56).

T HE S OCIETY

OF THE

M IDDLE C LASS

Aden of the 1980s, the capital of the PDRY, was a weird society with neither extremely wealthy nor devastatingly needy people. When I visited homes, working places, and other places where I conducted my research and asked people about the social standing of the family, most replied “middle class” (mutawassit). The middle class turned out to be a very flexible concept indeed, comprising of families where the main supporter might be head of government office, police inspector, or factory worker. Homes of these people ranged from former colonial villas of Khormaksar and Tawahi to makeshift huts erected from wood or corrugated metal plates in the shantytowns of al-Qa¯hira or al-Hash¯ı sh. Irrespective of external outlook of the residence, these “middle class homes” tended to have similar furniture and decorations with a huge wooden double bed taking a big share of space. Characteristic to Aden as a former colony, even years after the British left the infrastructure and everyday systems of management resemble the way things are run on a daily basis in Britain. In those parts of Aden where little construction took place after the British left, namely in Crater, Macalla, and Tawahi, the town scene in the late 1980s still spoke the language of the early 1960s with old advertising signs, shops, restaurants, and rusted, broken-down cars. For those Adenis who left after independence, this stagnated town view meant that no development had taken place during the years of socialist rule. But the changes were not manifest in construction of roads or houses as in North Yemen. In Aden, development meant educational, political, health care, and job opportunities to women and earlier disfavored social groups. Typical to a port town that has had dealings

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throughout the histories with distant places, added with the communal variety of the colonial era and the relaxed and open-minded atmosphere of the PDRY times, the unifying factor today that makes Adenis distinguishable from other Yemenis tends to be the idea that Aden is for all who respect its tolerant air.

N EW P EOPLE F LOW

IN

Aden changed rapidly at the turn of the 1990s. In 1990, people without a permanent residence and income started to arrive in large numbers. Some were refugees from the horn of Africa and others returnees from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries following the Gulf crisis of the early 1990s. Congested refugee camps were erected with makeshift huts and no electricity or running water. Beggars and traffic-light peddlers from the North came next. Some of these people cleaned windscreens, others sold newspapers or items drivers were expected to need. For all these people, Aden offered a completely new market. Wealthy families who had fled from Aden after the radicalization of the government were the last group to arrive. When the postunification government started to give back nationalized housing and property, hotels filled with these people. Some claimed noble descent, and came to see if they could restore their lifestyle and position of respect (kara ¯ma). After years of policies of downplaying social stratification, with the arrival of both the rich and the starving and huge rises in consumer prices, social status started to matter again. Soon after unification, segregation of the sexes started to structure the town again. Particular areas became restricted to one sex only. In restaurants, separate “family areas” were reserved to allow women to sit undisturbed. Women disappeared from cinemas entirely. To see a film, formerly “women’s most popular entertainment” (Luqman 1960, 207), women rented a cassette from a video store and watched it at home, often in an all-female company. Women appeared on beaches draped in black cloaks and refrained from going into water. Still, public transportation remained unsegregated: passenger taxis and buses became places where men made efforts to allow women to be left alone. This challenged the widespread belief common at that time that, since men suddenly cannot control themselves, women have to disappear from public places.

M ORPHOLOGIES

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P UTTING S EGREGATION

IN

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P LACE

Intersex avoidance and new veiling came about the same period. Some women started to cover their heads and took the hijab with great enthusiasm, while others had mixed feelings about it. Since hijab was considered a “religious” cloth, young people who thought the new costume just a new exciting fashion called it mandı ¯l (headscarf). Most middle-aged women resisted the new fashion, accustomed to wearing a dress and having the hair made by a hairdresser. These women complained that the new dress was an interference in women’s own affairs. Women adopting this new outfit was a result of a complicated process rather than the question of direct force used against them. By this time, ideologies that favored traditional familyrelated role models for women were coming to the fore. In particular, among young women in marital age, such ideas gained response. In a society where marriage is considered a compulsion for women, for these women, “risking” marital possibilities with education or a career was out of the question. In addition to that, those who resisted and refrained from using the covering costume were harassed in the streets while adolescent boys took the chance to pinch and grope them. Avoidance spread to many homes, too, where it had not been the custom earlier. Most houses in Aden are small, with the entrance directly from the street to the living room. If a man wanted to enter a house, even his own, he had to announce his sex by uttering anything from outside the door. Once he was given permission to enter, he was expected to lower his gaze in anticipation of non-kin women being present and cross the room fast without greeting and acknowledging anybody. Segregation in schools followed only after the 1994 civil war, when the government in the new capital Sanc¯a’ gave free hands to forces that wanted to promote “Islamization” in Aden. Despite their manifold efforts, such forces did not manage to get a foothold in Aden and they were forced to leave city administration by the end of the 1990s. Working places were left outside measures of putting segregation in place. All these phenomena indicated the coming of a new era in gender regulation in comparison to the PDRY period, when a woman’s role was declared to be alongside her “brother” in building up the society and when men were expected to respect every woman like his “sister.” In the new era, “unregulated” male-female interaction was targeted,

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but not without resistance. A lively debate flourished in newspapers and other forums on desired roles for women in society and in the family.8 During the fifty years observed here, three mutually very different periods of gender interaction become manifest. During the British colonial era, while women’s own menfolk controlled their movement outside the home, women ultimately emerged from the domestic sphere to participate in charities and political activities. During the PDRY, women took their place alongside men in all fields of life, as the widely repeated slogan put it. After Yemeni unification, women’s free movement outside home became again a problem. Still, women continued to access higher education and work alongside men in all fields of working life.9 As part of lip service to foreign donors, selected women from the president’s party, People’s General Congress, were allowed visible but less influential positions in administration.

RUPTURE

AND

C ONTINUUM

When starting to write about Aden years ago, I wanted to pay attention to the way the people discuss about changes that have occurred in their town. I soon realized that what would be a standard political theoretical approach with focus on socioeconomic changes does not match with local understandings on history.10 As I wanted to focus on intersex relations and their developments in the public sphere during different historical periods, an outline that focuses on regime changes turned out to be futile. I learned that people do distinguish between various political periods in the country’s history, but that these periods are not discussed in terms of political systems. Instead, they are discussed in reference to the personality of the leader in power. This seemed also to be the way of discussing likings and dislikings of a particular period. Thus, I could meet cAli Na¯sir people, proponents of Sal¯ı m Rubaya cAli or those who favored cAli Sal¯ı m al-B¯ı dh, among others. With some people who originated from the countryside such adherences followed tribal affiliations. But when I talked with people about social and cultural changes and developments in their own lives, changes did not translate into ruptures. I could also notice that traditional and modern processes manifested continuums rather than breaks with socioeconomic changes. I also learned that when it comes to moral ideas and notions

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of propriety, there was no single morality code that would have prevailed in any period. If looking spatially in different social contexts, various public spaces seemed to have their own rules of conduct. Still, it was not the question of moral anomaly. Instead, people seemed to shift from one order to another when changing public places, accustomed to prevalence of contesting moral orders. To be streetwise, one had to know what mattered in a public space, each marked by a particular morality discourse. During my fieldwork, I could distinguish between three such morality discourses. By picking up the usual terms people used when talking about these discourses, I started to call them “our customs and traditions” (c¯ ada ¯t wa taqa ¯lı¯d haqqana), “our religion” (dı¯n haqqana), and “revolution” (thawra). These entities do not point to “the traditional,” “the religious” or “the modern,” but each has its own version of all these three important aspects of social process. Earlier (Dahlgren 2004), I discussed such discourses in terms of “moral frameworks,” applying the concept by Charles Taylor (1989). While everyday practice and talk about it manifested such “conflict” in morality, state regulation was based on one single morality discourse that also guidelined legislation. When observing this “shift in morality,” I noticed that for some people, it was easy to accommodate to controversial moral expectations, while for other, more committed people, such adaptation was hard. In particular, it was interesting to follow such people for whom moving from one morality context to another was so perfectly mastered that it looked as if natural. When writing about this complex social dynamic, I still had to consider the fact that historical stratification has brought along different knowledge of the social reality. I noticed that people of particular age groups shared ideas of what belongs to such knowledge even if they did not share views about it. In outlining such age groups, I came to the conclusion that the period of each group’s coming to adulthood is strategic. I started to call such a corpus of knowledge with the term “generations.” With such a term, my aim was not to squeeze people into neat generational groups, but instead to focus on general atmospheres that mark the period the age group came into adulthood.11 In particular this approach turned out useful when looking at sexual segregation, which, in Aden, has remained a social institution without conspicuous government measures in either way.12 Such an approach allowed me the ability to see longer lines in social history than a standard political theory approach. It also allowed taking modernization

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as a continuum rather than ruptures. Thus, in outlining what segregation has meant in each period, I had to inquire people about their experiences and views of it and, for the later periods, to compare such ideas with my own experiences while living in Aden between 1988 and 2001.

T HE S OCIAL M AP OF A W OMAN W HO N EVER L EAVES H ER H OUSE “Arwa,”13 a woman in her late fifties, is the kind of woman who never goes out. She is what is locally called a ga ¯lisa fı¯l-bayt, the one who “sits” at home. But as she herself explains, she has so much to do at home that she never has time to go out and make visits. She is a widow, a mother of eight children who are already grown up. Her husband, whom she married when she was thirteen, had died some years earlier at the age of fifty-five. Both were born in the same village in Abyan, a tribal area some sixty miles northeast from Aden. After her wedding, she moved to Aden, where her husband had taken job as a driver. This was in the middle of 1950s, the height of colonial glory but at the same time, the era of beginning of anticolonial struggle. While living in the town, Arwa kept contacts with her relatives who remained in the village. Relatives and neighbors from home came and visited her, some of them who live in Aden, too. Even her married daughters had taken husbands who originate from the parents’ home village. Life goes on and when the society outside her home has changed, it barely has brought anything new and radically different to her life. As she put it, “Nothing changed after independence.” Arwa lives in an apartment building on the sixth floor in a block of apartments built by the British in the late 1950s for families of colonial service personnel. She shares the two-bedroom apartment, which has a big living room and a kitchen, with two unmarried daughters and families of another two married daughters, altogether ten people. Designed by a French architect to accommodate European expatriate families’ taste and class, the house lacks the usual conveniences that local women prefer, such as an open-air kitchen and a veranda. Three of Arwa’s daughters who share the apartment work or study and one stays at home. All the women in the house share the household chores. Arwa’s daily routines are the same from day to day, with Fridays making an exception. Arwa gets up around six every morning and,

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after performing the sunrise prayers, she prepares breakfast. Then she goes back to sleep, to get up around eleven in the morning to start cooking lunch for the family. After lunch, she takes a nap and gets ready to receive visitors who often comprise of her neighbors and her children’s friends. Later in the evening, she watches television with her family. When the daily late-night Arabic soap opera ends, she goes to bed. She complains about the lack of free time and that she can never go out. But nobody stops her; she has become accustomed to her life “inside four walls,” as the local expression has it. However, her life can hardly be described as uneventful. I was introduced to her by Safa, one of her daughters, a young woman in her late twenties who had two years earlier joined Aden University to proceed for a Bachelor’s degree. Before that, she had worked several years as a clerk in a big corporation. Safa had recently14 acquired a dress that “our religion requires us to wear,” as she put it. It was the typical Adeni young women’s outdoor outfit of that period with headscarf (mandı¯l) and a loose black overcoat (aba ¯’a). One afternoon, while sitting in a sofa in the living room, Safa, her younger sister, and I look at photos from the family album. The room has two sections: one with a sofa, an armchair, and a sofa table; the other with cushions on the floor circling the walls. This is quite typical living room furnishing solution of a family that has a room big enough to accommodate both “modern” (sofas and armchairs) and “traditional” (cushions on the floor) ways of life. Arwa walks in from the kitchen and, with some effort, sits down in the cushions on the other side of the large room. Sitting is painful due to a hip problem she has. Quiet, she settles for observing us as we look at the photos. Alongside the usual family portraits taken in a photo studio, there are photos of Safa with her former work colleagues having a picnic by the seaside. Some three years younger in the photo, Safa poses unveiled with her hair done by a coiffeur and makeup in her face. She wears shirt and trousers and sits with a happy face together with young and middle-aged male coworkers, the only woman in the picture. Everybody in the photo seems to have a good time and the atmosphere is relaxed. I point at the photo and tell Safa that she looks different there. “Oh yes, at that time we used to wear such clothes. We used to have a lot of activities outside the work. I really enjoyed working there and liked my work mates. But times were different then,” she says. In another photo, Safa poses in a masquerade party, dressed as a man. She wears the male loincloth futa, with a men’s scarf

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wrapped around her head like a turban. Moustaches and beard are painted in her face. The photo makes Safa and her younger sister laugh. It is from a party where she was the only cross-dressed woman. While we all laugh, Arwa sits quiet in front of us and smiles. She enjoys watching her children while they are happy, she explains to me. The door bell rings and a neighbor comes to visit. Amal is a woman in her early fifties and a housewife who lives next door. She does not greet others in the room in a formal way except me, whom she meets for the first time. She takes my right hand and kisses it; it is the way elder women still greet people they presume to be of higher status. Her presence makes the atmosphere simply explode. She is a talkative woman who always makes jokes. Safa explains that she is little bit crazy but always makes everybody laugh. I can see that she is a welcome visitor in the house. The air becomes electric when she starts what seems to be her version of stand-up comedy. The setting before she arrived centered around the photo album and us giggling at the old photos and Arwa watching us. Now we become the audience in a performance that Amal orchestrates to us. Safa introduces me to Amal by saying that I study “the new Yemeni woman” and this inspires the old woman to tell stories about what a great politician the world has lost in her. “I am Ali Abdullah Saleh!” she announces and starts imitating the northern leader of the country. We all laugh and she continues her performance.

E XISTENTIAL C OORDINATES

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The focus of Arwa’s life is her home, but the physical limits of her apartment do not constitute her boundaries, even though she never leaves it. In her childhood, her father arranged her marriage with a distant relative. After the wedding, her life continued the same way as earlier, moving from father’s custody in the countryside to the husband’s care in the town. In a typical marriage of her generation, the husband was the breadwinner while she was the domestic housekeeper. While he was still alive, the husband used to have his own life outside the home with his work and social networks. To add his role as an outsider in his own home, as men often complain they are, he used to chew his qat15 outside his house. But staying inside four walls does not trouble Arwa. From her perspective, this is what she wants: after staying most of her life in the secure atmosphere of home, she no

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longer knows how to orientate and constitute a presence outside it. The spatial-social coordinates outside her domestic compound are not familiar to her. Lacking that vital knowledge, she “just sits” at home, as younger women with mobile aspirations view it. In particular, women tend to describe their physical whereabouts with the term “sitting.” Thus when asking a woman where she lives she might reply, “I sit in Macalla” (aglis fı ¯ Macalla). Consequently, “sitting” does not hold only physical meanings, but social and symbolic ones, too. Physically, it can be linked to corporeality and a woman living “inside four walls,” as well as how her body has adjusted to the movements that living in such a limited space requires. Women perform most of the household chores in a squatting or sitting position. With elderly women, “sitting” is often embodied in a curved back, and manifest in difficulties in rising up or standing upright and reluctance to move long distances or climb stairs. Socially, “sitting” could refer to action signs (Farnell 1999, 2000) inside those four walls. In Arwa’s case, her action signs are inscribed inside her housing compound with its closest neighborhood. Orientation outside this social space is difficult as she lacks the social map and the action signs necessary for moving in a strange place. More than that, she does not master the modes of deference and presentation (Taylor 1993, 58) anticipated for a woman of her standing. Other people visit her and she certainly knows how to receive them, but she does not move places in her daily communications with others. However, this “failure” to visit public places does not mean that she would not be in connection with those places and the kind of “public things”— verbal and action-related—that take place. From the point of view of the constitution of the public sphere, public places are not in some special position. This is simply because, as Taylor says, the public sphere is metatopical (Taylor 1995, 263, 271). This aspect of the public sphere is reinforced in a community like Aden, where kalam na ¯s (people’s talk) counts everybody in the community, whether they want it or not and whether they act presence in face-to-face communication or not. Seclusion does not “erase” a person from her community. As we know, in Middle Eastern cultural context, it is difficult to draw explicit and permanent lines between “public” and “private.” Kadivar’s definition of “private” from an Islamic point of view, as forbiddance of unwarranted inquiry on the one hand and, as recognition of the right to freedom in action on the other, does not require fixed, permanent entities (Kadivar 2003). As El Guindi elaborates, the private

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is a flexible concept with temporal and spatial dimensions. Thus, any place can act as a private place for a particular purpose and for a given time, in the same way as homes can make both public and private spaces. There is no principle that would make homes permanently “domestic” or “private”: homes are platforms of societal gatherings, weddings, various rituals, and receptions of all kinds. While the simple public/private dichotomy has been pointed out in Middle Eastern studies as problematic some time ago (El Guindi 1999, 77–78), in discussions on the emergence of Middle Eastern public spheres, it has not yet been widely criticized. Göle (1996) discusses differences between “Western” and “Islamic” notions of body and privacy in connection to the veiling movement in Turkey. Her focus is on the differing notions of privacy of the body and sexuality in these two “civilizational” contexts. Her focus is on modern self-conscious religiosity as manifested in the veiling movement. Such an approach, however, is not useful here, as our focus is not on religious activism. Our two women, Arwa and Safa, do not have anything to do with such expressions of religiosity. Arwa is a Muslim typical of her generation; she observes her daily prayers, including the first one early in the morning, and likes to listen to religious sermons delivered in radio by a religious character whose message and tone she accepts. Safa, on the other hand, is likewise quite typical representative of her generation. For her, it would be impossible for practical reasons to get up before the sunset; even rest of the day her daily routines are not intervaled by praying moments. However, this does not mean that she would not pray. She just does not pray “that way,” as she once put it to me. These two expressions of religiosity tell nothing, as such, of the public and private. Both represent direct, unmediated forms of religious activity that are indicative of the repertoire of religious practices characteristic to the public sphere in Aden. Thus, we cannot follow Göle in her suggestion that such religious expressions do not belong to the public sphere or that they would constitute “secular” elements when contrasted to what she distinguishes as “Islamic,” that is, expressions that characterize the recent Islamic awakening (sahwa islamiyya).16

K NOWLEDGEABLE B ODIES If we go back to the term “sitting,” we find that it has a symbolic aspect, too. This is the position from where a woman “inside four

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walls” takes part in the community. While she spends most of her day in a sitting position, her existential coordinates are embodied in this posture. Where she sits is where she lives and acts a presence to others. But this is not all; in order to understand symbolic meanings better, we have to consider also the way social units are composed and imagined. For Arwa, much of the knowledge she receives comes through her children and visitors, and on the other hand through TV and radio. Her children are active and always bring news to her. Their joy and happiness is important to her even beyond her own wellbeing. As she herself put it, she is happy whenever her children are happy. In other words, her children are central to what happens in her life. If we apply concepts that Joseph (1999) has developed, we can suggest that Arwa sees herself in relational terms vis-à-vis her family. Thus, we have to add relationality to the aspects of her existential coordinates and ways of acting relationship to the outside world. In contrast to her daughter Safa, whose activities spread throughout the town and are hard to describe in one single posture-related term, Arwa provides us an interesting concept to our analysis. The residential-existential notion “sitting” can be viewed as physical action that includes existential and culture-related elements and represents a manifestation of conscious or habitual agency-related production of meaning. Statements such as “This is where I sit” can be treated as actor’s evaluations that are ideological in the sense that they embody broader values, beliefs, and self-legitimating attitudes. Such evaluations are metalinguistic or metadiscursive to the extent that they bear directly on language or discourse serving to fix its meaning.17 In analyzing social maps of different people, we can avoid residual Cartesianism by approaching the existential question from an action point of view. As Farnell asserts, human beings everywhere engage in complex structured systems of bodily action that are laden with social and cultural significance. Such dynamically embodied signifying acts generate varieties of forms of embodied knowledge involving cultural convention and creative performativity. Such techniques du corps—the “ways in which from society to society [people] know how to use their bodies” (Mauss [1935] 1979, 97)—are everywhere constitutive of human subjectivity and intersubjective domains (Farnell 1999, 343). Safa’s social maps differ considerably from those of her mother; she has a career behind her and now she is actively pursuing her studies. She moves as she pleases outside her home; she walks in the street, drives in a route taxi, meets friends, goes shopping, takes longer walks,

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and earlier, used to attend the movies, too. As men only now visit movies, she has gone into the habit of renting a video whenever she wants to see a film. She does not mind being restricted from attending the movies; it is fine with her that she can see films at home. Adapting to new patterns of gender avoidance was not a big issue for her either; she took the mandı ¯l and balto when everybody else did it. As she says, “Earlier we used to dress differently, but this is the costume our religion Islam requires us to wear.” Still, with the changed outfit, her religious commitment did not get new shades and she, for instance, did not start making salat prayers. When talking with her and moving around with her, I got to know her as a person who does not make religion an issue but whom, at the same time, is profoundly religious. Safa represents a very special case of a young woman in comparison to many other people for whom giving up earlier freedoms was considerably harder and who even engaged in some sort of resistance such as refusal to wear the scarf. For her engaging in controversial issues never seems to be a problem. She always finds appropriate explanations by contextualizing her doings to the time and period that allows agency controversial from the perspective of another time or place. To use Joseph’s notion of connective personhood, we could describe Safa as a personality for whom allowing others to interfere on her affairs makes no problem. Still, the formula she used, “This is how our religion requires us to do,” calls for further contextualization. Such claims emerged in everyday talk by the time of the early 1990s. Safa was applying a sentence that became common in commentaries on the “place” of the new phenomena that started to emerge in Aden; that is, gender avoidance, women’s covering dress, and home-related role models for women. Such a “place” refers to the ideological framework where people consider the phenomena to belong. As such, the statement does have very little to do with religious adherences. Instead, I would suggest that is something Hanks has called “actor’s evaluations” (1996, 234). These are ideological in the sense that they embody broader values, beliefs, and self-legitimating attitudes and stand as commentary on agency. This particular claim “our religion advices us to do so” belonged to a repertoire where the word “religion” had a central place. Thus, I started to call the repertoire “religious.” This “new” repertoire started now to compete with earlier repertoires in commenting social reality, linked respectively to “our traditions” (c¯ ada ¯t wa taqa ¯lı ¯d

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haqqana) and “revolution” (thawra). Still, it constituted as such nothing new. For a long time, a similar manner in addressing moral issues had existed that questioned the religious quality of both the “traditions” and the modern (as represented earlier of the century among others, by the British and their local allies). During the years of the PDRY, the repertoire had been suppressed and now it was coming in again. Such expressions belonged to, at that time, new vocabulary in discussions on public moralities. While such discussions are constitutive of the public sphere, people do not necessarily share ideas related to them, just the fact that the discussion “belongs” to the particular repertoire (“moral framework”) and thus that it is constitutive of the public sphere.18 For noncommitted people, it is no problem to use a formula without “believing” in it; this is one way how people participate in the public sphere. As Taylor explains (2004, 29), when a new theory penetrates the social imaginary, people involve in improvising new practices.

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While Safa’s outfit changed, her social maps barely altered. Cross-sex picnics no more took place in her life and the new working environment, the university campus, provided quite a different platform for cross-sex interaction. With her new outfit, she participated in this new moral space, communicating that she accepted the unwritten rules for modest behavior of a female university student. She explained to me the changes in moral expectations in a manner that times were simply different earlier. For her, it was not a big issue, even though she was aware of harassment and grouping that women who did not cover were subjected in the streets. Safa, already in her late twenties, wanted to get married and have children. Typical of young women in her “late age” for marriage, she explained that after marriage, it will depend on her husband whether she will be able to carry on with her studies or to work. Getting married and having children was her primary goal and she was ready to allow her social maps to be curbed for that purpose. Still, the kind of life her mother lives—inside four walls—was not a realistic vision to her. Once, when we visited a home in the same street and I conducted some interviews, she started giggling when an elderly woman replied that she never goes out. Safa’s mother was already very old in local standards, fifty-seven years old, and her generation’s social patterns were past and gone. Even though, as a wife, Safa was ready to give up her

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work career, she could not imagine having a husband she meets in her wedding and with whom she does not discuss family decisions. Stopping to move outside home was no prospect for her. For her, the existentialphysical notion of “sitting” was not a realistic perspective even after marriage, which she otherwise viewed in terms of a compromise. As we saw in Arwa’s home, women can have a life full of events inside those four walls. Women also follow politics and public discussions at home. In the heated debates of the postunification era of the early 1990s, everybody, literate or illiterate, had an opinion of the country’s state of affairs. Arwa was in the habit of having her TV set open in afternoons if no visitors were around to follow politicians speaking in the parliament in live broadcasts from the national capital Sanc¯a’. She does not read newspapers, but her children and visitors always bring news to her. She is illiterate and always at home, but she is not ignorant of life outside her physical walls. In Arwa’s case, we could see that her social maps step out from the physical boundaries of her daily life. In her “sitting” at home, the society comes to her and she makes the best out of it. Still, for younger generation of women, such life is not enough. They want to accomplish something, experience new things, and acquire “knowledge” (macrifa). Thus, they are mobile and their social maps resemble those of men. For them, acquiring knowledge means going to places where particular discussions are “made,” and where social networks are built. The reemergence of segregation and new veiling has not meant that women withdraw from face-to-face activities with men; with the scarf, they can have a better say of the terms of that interaction. That is one of the reasons why the covering outfit became so widely accepted among the youngest generation of women in Aden.

M EDIATED, C OMPLEMENTARY, AND U NMEDIATED K NOWLEDGE The main difference between Arwa and Safa in their relationships to the outside world is that Safa acts presence in those domains while Arwa does not. It is Safa, together with her sisters, who bring “news” to Arwa as it is locally expressed. Thus, Arwa participates in the public sphere through mediated channels: through her children and visitors and through the media. While Safa acts public roles (a secretary in a big corporation, a student in Aden University, a pedestrian in the

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street), which manifests in her daily agency, the features of visibility, display and bodily presence in public spaces, Arwa’s roles limit to her family and their friends, relatives and neighbors with whom she practices the same qualities. However, such a limited role does not prevent her from being part of the public sphere. As we have learned from Taylor, among others who have participated in developing the Habermasian notion, the public sphere is a common space where people meet “through a variety of media: print, electronic, and also face-toface encounters; to discuss matters of common interest; and thus to be able to form a common mind about these” (Taylor 2004, 83). Central to this elaborated idea of the public sphere is common space; the public sphere is metatopical and not bound by physical or spatial elements. Still, Arwa’s participation in the public life is merely mediated while Safa acts face-to-face encounters in it. This is not due to Arwa’s reluctance to “go out,” but her lacking the knowledge of how to orientate and constitute a presence outside it. As I explained earlier, she does not know spatial-social coordinates outside her domestic compound. This is not that she does not know the physical features of the neighborhood outside her building but that she lacks the knowledge of the logic of social dynamics out there, the “moral map.” If we once more take a look at the way social dynamics is constituted in Aden, the picture becomes clear. In Aden, the stuff that breeds the social imaginary comprises of three mutually different and contesting moral orders, not one as Taylor bases his theory upon. These moral orders, or moral frameworks if we apply Taylor’s own notion (Taylor 1989), each contain ideas of traditional and modern, visions of social hierarchy and ideas of the constitution of the community, gender roles, and ideas of selfhood. Each also has its own ways of practicing ritual, as well as public forms of religious expression. What people share is not a common moral framework, but the idea that the social imaginary embraces several, mutually contesting ideas for propriety and that the agents need to recognize them and know their specific existential coordinates and relationships to the social imaginaries in order to successfully cruise in such a social dynamics.

C ONCLUSIONS While gender avoidance and segregation again became a norm in Aden after twenty-five years of downplay, the way these institutions

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are acted out and socially improvised today has little to do with the sex segregation that prevailed in Aden during the colonial era. This is partly due to the difference in positions out of which women in each era access the public sphere. While Arwa as characteristic to her youth in the late colonial period—when the issue was to establish an isolated park for women in seclusion—accesses the public sphere from “sitting,” for Safa similar existential-corporeal notion could be “walking.” Such symbolic positions give room to a more action-oriented approach than what Taylor considers when he describes how particular action makes sense only as part of a larger predicament in understanding how we “continuously stand or have stood in relation to others and to power.”19 People change their positions but also societies become more complex. With the knowledge Arwa obtained as a young woman in segregated colonial Aden, it is no more possible to move around in the present-day sex-segregated Aden. In this chapter, I have attempted to describe the city of Aden as a condensation of social relations and a product of social flows. By focusing on the pulse that makes the city and on everyday agency as constitutive of particular urban spaces, I have attempted to show how cities are made in spatial-temporal encounters that manifest particular social imaginaries. While in the 1950s, gender segregation was embedded in social hierarchies and accompanied by inter-ethnic avoidance and even constituted part of the ideology that informed state regulation, in the 1990s, it is still in the point of improvisation.

N OTES 1. Material for this chapter was collected during a two-year long ethnographic fieldwork in Aden (during the PDRY and the Republic of Yemen) and in colonial archives in London. 2. Intersectional methodology characterizes much of the post-colonial feminist approaches (see Vuorela 1999). 3. “Purdah” meant segregated in the Indo-Arabic dialect common at that era. 4. In their careful drive to organize and regulate everything, the British kept lists of prostitutes classifying them according to “‘ethnic”’ background. The main classification involved division between “‘public”’ and “‘private”’ prostitutes. See IOR R/20/A/1284, 1285, 1375, 2212 and 2213, and R/20/B/990 and 991.

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5. The British built a refinery in Little Aden to compensate their loss in Iran after Musaddiq had closed the Abadan refinery in 1951. 6. In November 1967, the People’s Republic of South Yemen was established, comprising of the two Aden protectorates with Aden town as the capital. In 1970, the name of the country was changed to People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). 7. The main part of Adeni Jews had left during the 1950s after anti-Jewish riots that local misunderstandings and the establishment of Israel had resulted. Most of Adeni Jews went to Britain, despite Israeli campaigns. 8. The debate involved, among other issues, the question why an uneducated woman is more desirable as a bridal candidate than an educated one. 9. Women were no more allowed to enter judge training after it was moved to the new capital Sanc¯a’, where female students are not admitted. 10. In classical urban theory, separate phases of history would be drawn according to socioeconomic changes or shifts in political systems. See Low 1996, 385. 11. I have discussed this idea in more detail in Dahlgren 1999. 12. The British treated sexual segregation as a matter belonging to “customs and religion” that remained outside colonial interference. During the early years of the PDRY, abandoning the veil was demanded in popular demonstrations but the government soon realized that a veil ban would not benefit its tahrı¯r al-mar’a policies (women’s emancipation). For a critical discussion, see Documents of the General Union of Yemeni Women (1977). 13. All the names of people discussed in this chapter have been changed. 14. This took place in Fall 1991. 15. Most Adeni men of mature age chew a mild narcotic shrub called qat during afternoons in societal gatherings or on their own. In Aden, few women used to chew before the civil war in 1994. Those who started chewing then felt that they had lost all remaining means of entertainment outside home, and thus qat makhdaras (gatherings) spread among women. 16. In her article Islam in Public: New visibilities and new imaginaries (2002), Göle distinguishes between an “Islamic public sphere” and a “secular public sphere,” which, according to her, exist parallel in presentday Turkey. “Islamic” in her treatment comprises only of self-conscious modern religious expressions indicating that all other ways of religious expression fall under the label “secular.” 17. On actors’ evaluations as ideologies, see Hanks 1996, 234. He explains, “When we say ‘ideology’ in this context, we denote something rather unlike classical ideologies, understood as ideas. Given the concept habitus, value orientations are embodied both in corporeal practices and in

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mental presentations, being distributed over what the Cartesian perspective takes to be the different domains of mind and body.” 18. I have explained this process in more detail in Dahlgren 2004. 19. From an anthropological point of view, the weakness of Taylor’s writings on social imaginary (2004) is in that the stuff he applies as material in developing his ideas does not root to any place, but evidently comes from his general observations as a commentator of “our time.”

R EFERENCES Aden Colony. 1955. Census report 1955. Aden: Government Printer. Anderson, Jon W. 2003. New media, new publics: Reconfiguring the public sphere in Islam. Social Research 70 (3): 887–906. Calhoun, Craig. 1992. Introduction. In Habermas and the public sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 1–48. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The imaginary institution of society. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Dahlgren, Susanne. 1999. “The chaste woman takes her chastity wherever she goes”: Discourses on gender, marriage and work in pre- and postunification Aden. Chroniques Yéménites 7: 77–86. ———. 2004. Contesting realities: Morality, propriety and the public sphere in Aden, Yemen. Research Reports no. 243, Department of Sociology (Social Anthropology), University of Helsinki. Documents of the General Union of Yemeni Women. 1977. First General Congress of Yemeni Women in Saiun, July 15–16, 1974. Aden: 14th October Corporation. Eickelman, Dale F., and Jon W. Anderson, eds. 1999. New media in the Muslim world: The emerging public sphere. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Farnell, Brenda. 1999. Moving bodies, acting selves. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 341–73. ———. 2000. Getting out of the habitus: An alternative model of dynamically embodied social action. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (3): 397–418. El Guindi, Fadwa. 1999. Veil: Modesty, privacy and resistance. New York: Berg. Fata ¯t al-Gazı¯ra. 1961, issue no. 1555. Göle, Nilu¯fer. 2002. Islam in public: New visibilities and new imaginaries. Public Culture 14 (1): 173–90. ———. 1997. The gendered nature of the public sphere. Public Culture 10 (1): 61–81.

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———. 1996. The forbidden modern: Civilization and veiling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hanks, William F. 1996. Language and communicative practices. Boulder: Westview. Hatem, Mervat. 1986. The politics of sexuality and gender in segregated patriarchal systems: The case of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Egypt. Feminist Studies 12 (2): 251–74. India Office Records (Unpublished) n.d. R/20/A/1284 Lists of prostitutes ———. n.d. R/20/A/1285 Venereal disease ———. n.d. R/20/A/1375 Prostitutes ———. n.d. R/20/A/2212 Prostitutes ———. n.d. R/20/A/2213 Prostitutes ———. n.d. R/20/B/990 Prostitutes ———. n.d. R/20/B/991 Prostitutes ———. n.d. R/20/B/2810 Arab Reform Club ———. n.d. R/20/B/2813 Arab Women’s Club Ingrams, Doreen. 1970. A time in Arabia. London: John Murray. Ismael, Tareq Y., and Jacqueline S. Ismael. 1986. PDR Yemen. Politics, economics and society: The politics of socialist transformation. London: Frances Pinter. Joseph, Suad. 1999. Introduction. In Intimate selving in Arab families: Gender, self and identity, ed. Suad Joseph, 1–17. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Kadivar, Mohsen. 2003. An introduction to the public and private debate in Islam. Social Research 70 (3): 659–82. Knox-Mawer, June. 1961. The sultans came to tea. London: John Murray. Low, Setha M. 1996. The anthropology of cities: Imagining and theorizing the city. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 383–409. Luqman, Farouk. 1960. The Aden guide. n.p. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. Feminist theory, embodiment, and the docile agent: Some reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival. Cultural Anthropology 16: 202–36. ———. 2003. Ethical formation and politics of individual autonomy in contemporary Egypt, Part III: Individual, family, community, and state. Social Research 70 (3): 837–68. Mauss, Marcel. 1979. Sociology and psychology: Essays. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. 1990. Central Statistical Organisation. Statistical yearbook 1988, 6th ed. Aden: Da¯r al-Hamda¯nı¯. Salvatore, Armando, and Dale F. Eickelman, eds. 2006. Public Islam and the common good. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Shukry, Hazem Ali. 1986. Morphology of Greater Aden and related problems. PhD diss., Aligarh Muslim University.

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Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. To follow a rule. . . . In Bourdieu: Critical perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, 45–60. Cambridge, MA: Polity. ———. 1995. Philosophical arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vuorela, Ulla. 1999. Postkoloniaali ja kolmannen maailman feminismit. In Rotunaisia ja feminismejä, nais- ja kehitystutkimuksen risteyskohtia, ed. Jaana Airaksinen and Tuula Ripatti, 13–37. Tampere: Vastapaino.

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PULP FICTIONS READING PAKISTANI DOMESTICITY1 Kamran Asdar Ali

Maulvi Saheb saw a packet with monthly “Ismat” printed on it. Beneath it, in red ink, the packet was addressed to Sheikh Irfan Ul Haq’s daughter. Maulvi Mehrban Ali could not believe his eyes. He forgot his own money order and returned home with a new story to tell. He relayed that a magazine bearing the name of Irfan ul Haq’s daughter is lying at the post office to some of the more mature individuals in the neighborhood. But such news cannot be kept from people for long. Soon the news of magazines arriving for Irfan ul Haq’s virgin daughter spread like wildfire. Magazines coming for an unmarried daughter itself was embarrassing enough, furthermore it had the daughter’s name on the envelope. Delhi is far away, who knows how many and what kind of men had read her name?

The above passage is from Ehsan Manzil,

2

an Urdu short story by Intezar Hussein. The story narrates the changes within the domestic sphere in Indian Muslim households. Hussein gives us a sense of how religious reform, expanding opportunities for education for both genders and colonial modernization in the first quarter of the twentieth century undermined and challenged the more traditional aspects of middle-class Muslim life in North India. The community’s anxiety

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over a woman’s name being exposed to strangers is echoed in depictions of households from other parts of the Muslim world. For example, Assia Djebar, in her book Fantasia, similarly shows how while growing up in colonial Algeria, her female relatives were scandalized when a postcard sent by her father arrived specifically addressed to her mother. Hence the postcard, letter, or magazine subscription to a woman in the family became a metaphor for modernity, the public and the outside penetrating Muslim moral boundaries and domestic ethos. In this chapter, I seek to understand the process of this change within the social context of contemporary Pakistani domestic space. I use examples from Urdu fiction in popular women’s magazines in order to comprehend how middle- and lower middle-class literate women articulate notions of family, individuality, and sexual mores in a rapidly changing social and economic milieu of present-day Pakistan.3 In short, I will explore how popular Urdu writings tend to inform and represent domestic life. These Urdu magazines, known commonly as digests, contain a specific genre of short stories that are considered shades below the highbrow literary production of more established yet less commercially successful literary journals. The closest translation of these narratives into a Euro-American idiom would be to compare them with Harlequin romances or television soaps. As these writings reflect women’s traditional roles as daughters, wives, and mothers, and predominantly portray women as sexually naïve, passive, and submissive in their relationship to men, the similarities to Western romances are obvious. However, this comparison does not quite capture the particularity of the genre itself, which has deep social and cultural links to the development of the modern Urdu short story4 and also historically to the specifically women-oriented narratives of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North India. This said, as much as these writings retain a dialogic relationship with high literary forms, they have in recent years attained a polyphonic tendency that contains a semblance of the carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1968); a carnival that typically combines critique and “indecency” that Rabelais relied on for his source (Willis 1989, 130). The multiplicity of voices and themes invoked in this genre has strains of the older oral tradition of women’s storytelling and other forms of popular performances. A tradition that, as Sumanta Banerjee (1990) shows for late nineteenth-century Calcutta, included the transformation of rural folk culture of songs, dances, theatrical performances, and recitations by the newly urbanizing poor men and women. These popular creative

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expressions were condemned by the modernizing Indian elite and colonial officials as “vulgar and voluptuous” (Banerjee 1989) as they had not yet been disciplined and sanitized by the more modernist and somewhat “veiled” literary forms (Najmabadi 1993). To be sure, this chapter is not an exhaustive survey of the literature.5 To investigate the domestic sphere in contemporary Pakistan, I present two short stories from a popular Urdu digest published in the 1990s. I analyze these narratives beyond established reading practices of Harlequin romances and popular women’s writings in the West; although such practices are critically attuned and sympathetic to female voices, they also share a progressive agenda of emancipatory politics (see, among others, Modleski 1982; Radway 1984).6 The question for me is not to find a preconceived progressive or retrogressive politics in the texts. I suggest a reading that may enable us to move away from liberal modernist interpretive strategies that force the plurality of social life into the representational apparatus of a particular political philosophy, “no matter how different the circumstances within which the philosophy originated might be from the culture under study” (Chakrabarty 1995, 757). With this in mind, the task before me is to translate the particular cultural and historical milieu of the narratives into a sociological language while remaining sensitive to the plurality of interpretive possibilities open to us.7

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To situate the argument, it is important to historically look at women’s literature linked to the reform of Muslim domestic space in colonial India. In a much-cited work, Partha Chatterjee (1993) shows how Bengali nationalists sought to close the domestic space to colonial penetration through constructing the categories of home (spirituality and culture) and the world (modern science, materialism, and technology). He argues that the reason the issue of “female emancipation” disappears from the public agenda of nationalist discourse is because the nationalists refused to negotiate with the colonial power on the women’s question and the “inner” space. The middle-class nationalists could not permit the colonial regime to enter an area where it considered itself sovereign. It needs to be noted here that as much as Indian nationalists resisted the penetration of the inner space by colonial discourse, the changes they advocated were always a reflection of the outer

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public domain. To reform domestic space, albeit on their own terms, and to claim moral superiority over the colonial agenda, was to also concede a “lack” in the nation’s present (Prakash 1999, 158). Hence, the reforms instituted within households were always under the shadow of colonial governmentality; criticizing it by articulating alternate values, yet continuously influenced by and in dialogue with it. In the same work, Chatterjee also argues that Bengali Muslims were, however, excluded from the formation of this national identity. Hence, the reformulations of Muslim domestic space needed further negotiations between the Muslim elite, its Hindu nationalist counterpart, and the British colonial power. Within this context, in the late nineteenth century Muslim reformers resisted the rising Western cultural hegemony by emphasizing Shari’a (Islamic laws) and the advancement of Muslim cultural heritage. Muslim religious reformers, like the Deobandi Ulema, also published religious-oriented reformist texts8 in which they advised women to distance themselves from the realm of custom (deemed as superstitious, un-Islamic and irrational). Adherence to reformed practices aided some women to gain more rights within the emerging middle-class households. To accept the authority of men in the interpretation of religious practice provided a future in which rewards and divine blessings were to be the same as men. Literacy skills and modes of reformed behavior opened spaces for these women to articulate their rights in marriage and property. Yet, these gains were at the cost of losing separate spheres of female activity that were condemned by the religious reform movement as the realm of the nafs, the area of lack of control and disorder.9 Such reformist tendencies are also seen in the works of Nazir Ahmed, a more secularly oriented nineteenth-century Urdu novelist who wrote award-winning texts on women’s domestic life and education (see Naim 1984).10 In his novels, Nazir Ahmed stresses the reconfiguration of the Muslim household where practicality and reason would triumph over superstition and irresponsible behavior. In his several books, he emphasizes how the British have reason and aql (wisdom) and portrays them as embodiments of progress and practicality, enabling them to rule India from thousands of miles away.11 Nazir Ahmed is particularly critical of those women from respectable households who associate with lower-class women who potentially carry crass influences with them into these homes.12 In Nazir Ahmed’s pedagogical books, respectable women needed to discard the coarse

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influences of the streets in favor of refined literature and the company of women from similar sharif (singular of ashraf, respectable) households. This threat of the outside is similar to the discussion on the dangerous influences of lower-class women—as servants, sweepers, singers, sellers—who had access to the middle-class domestic space, that Sumanta Banerjee (1990) so eloquently describes for late nineteenth-century Calcutta. During the first part of the twentieth century, the social influence of these early reformers13 and the compulsions of the “new era” led to an increased interest in women’s education among the middle- and upper-middle-class Muslim families (primarily North Indian). Some of this social agenda was taken up by women’s journals that competed for attention among a small group of literate Urdu-speaking female readership (Minault 1998). The debate on female practices among Muslims in colonial India partly spoke to the split between the modernizing elite and the yet-to-be-modernized poor. By and large, the advice given to women in these journals was restricted to sharif bibias (respectable women) who could define and set themselves apart from the popular and coarse culture of the street and the rural areas. This was a tiny group indeed. In 1924, merely 137,800 Muslim (four out of every thousand) women qualified as literate and out of these, only 3,940 had received some Western learning (Jalal 1991, 81). These magazines, such as Ismat, Purdah Nashin, or Khatun, emphasized the benefits of the new educational opportunities for women as it improved their housekeeping and child-rearing skills (Minault 1998, 133). In the larger discourse, it was clear that the responsibility to raise children, the future of the nation, could not be left to uninformed or uneducated women. To produce new kinds of individuals in the emerging moral order, women needed to be trained and trusted to fulfill the task.14 However, female voices in such journals also provided competing visions to an essentially upper-class male discourse of creating citizen-subjects for the future Muslim nation. On the one hand, organizations like Anjuman-e-Khawaten-e Islam or the All India Muslim Ladies Conference, founded in the early part of the twentieth century, contested those national organizations that claimed to speak for all Indian women (Jalal 1991, 83). On the other, they worked for the social and educational uplift of the Muslim woman. Through such vehicles, upper-class Muslim women questioned male-centered representations of the domestic, calling on their own for more education, autonomy, and independence for women.

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Further, as much as they shared the reformist male agenda, there was also a diversity of opinion among women themselves on issues of gender segregation, wage work, secularization, veiling, and Islamic revival. The consensus for social change was mitigated by women’s own response to the evolving situation. Irrespective of patriarchal social norms, middle- and upper-class women did shed the seclusion of their households to acquire education, yet they still veiled themselves in public and studied in segregated institutions. In this regard, one of the main contributions of the Anjuman-e–Khawateen-e–Islam was to introduce a new style of Burqa—a garment that covers women to their ankles—patterned on the Turkish model (Minault 1981).15 By the late 1930s, many Muslim women had transgressed boundaries, albeit on their own terms, and left their homes to acquire an education, work in public spaces, and also were increasingly participating in politics.16 Between the 1930s and 1950s, other Muslim women writers exploded onto the Urdu literary scene dominated by men. Ismat Chughtai, Qurutul ain Haider, Rashid Jahan, Hajra Masroor, and Khadija Mastur are some names among the many that have since become eminent in this sphere. These writers were highly critical of the older reformist literature and in their writings constantly undermined the class-based pedagogical underpinnings of the earlier writings. Taboo themes like sexuality, interreligious romance, antipatriarchal politics were openly discussed. Some of these authors, like Chughtai, were initially condemned for being vulgar and indecent. But their works have survived and are respectfully included in the pantheon of Urdu literature. Important as social critics and in depicting the changing norm within the Muslim domestic realm, these voices due to their high literary style and publishing venues have, however, remained limited to a narrow percentage of the reading public. In conjunction with the more highbrow literary works, there has been an ongoing tradition of Urdu novels and short stories specifically targeted towards middle-class female readership. This genre would borrow heavily from the more established techniques of Urdu literary writings but thematically be more attuned toward domestic life. Authors like Razia Butt and A. R. Khatoon are famous among Urduspeaking households in the subcontinent for their productivity within this genre. Pakistan’s independence, along with expanding urbanization and educational opportunities, has resulted in the growth of the commercial market for mass publication of multiple magazines and for

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diverse media outlets serving the various demands of the newly consolidating urban middle- and lower-middle classes.

PAKISTANI U RBAN S PACE : E THNICITY

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Since Pakistan’s creation in 1947 as the homeland for Muslims of South Asia, the country has been a configuration of shifting alliances and competing political and social ideologies. One dominant feature of the state has been the nonresolution of its ethnic problem. Culturally, the Mohajirs (literally refugees, those who migrated from India) along with the majority Punjabi ethnic group have been the most closely linked with Muslim nationalism and with Urdu as being the Pakistani national language (see Zaman 2002).17 Almost half a century after its independence and more than thirty years after the creation of Bangladesh, the Pakistani state has been unable to resolve the question of national integration of its many cultures and diverse linguistic groups. Where English has remained the language of government and commerce, Urdu has retained its pivotal place. Urdu’s dominance of the cultural center has bred a sense of exclusion among other linguistic groups leading to a proliferation of ethnic nationalism and the strengthening of regional identities, further hindering the emergence of a national culture that democratically includes the diverse voices and languages present in the Pakistani cultural spectrum. This politics of ethnic difference linked to urbanization and ruralurban migration has led to ethnic and social heterogeneity in most urban spaces. For example, if we take Karachi as a microcosm of Pakistani social life, we see a glimpse of the nation’s history unfold with all its social and political tensions.18 About half of Karachi’s growth since the 1970s is attributed to migration from rural and other urban areas of the country.19 In the twenty-first century, Karachi remains the industrial, commercial, and trade center of Pakistan along with its major port. It houses approximately 8 percent of its overall population and 24 percent of its urban population (Zaidi 1999). On the one hand, spatially, the city is segregated into privileged neighborhoods with private security arrangements (a phenomenon seen globally in major cities) and independently managed social services. On the other hand, the phenomenal growth has resulted in the maldistribution of civic resources to the poorest of its population. The state’s inability to provide housing and other social amenities to its populace has encouraged a privatized

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informal sector of land grabbing and allocation, resulting in the mushrooming of unplanned squatter settlements that house almost 40 percent of the city’s population (Zaidi 1999). These social and spatial processes are partly reflected in a politics of consolidation of various communities around the vertical axis of ethnic identification and religious groupings, making Karachi in the 1990s one of the most socially violent metropolises in South Asia. Within this context of cultural politics, urbanization, and ethnic polarization, the Pakistani state has, as in other postcolonial societies, periodically tackled the demands for female emancipation connected to discourses on cultural authenticity. Women’s changing status in Pakistan has been portrayed largely linked with the role of Islam in the modern state. The political question has been how civil and gender rights that are common in Western societies can be reconciled with Islamic family law within a Muslim polity. The passage of Muslim Personal Law in 1948, that gave women the right to inheritance under Shari’a, and the passing of Family Law Ordinance in 1961 are seen as major victories in this struggle. The Family Law Ordinance did provide some legal curbs against polygyny, expanded the right for women to initiate divorce proceedings and also dealt favorably with inheritance rights for women. Its impact on the lives of a large majority of women in Pakistan, who remain illiterate and also live under the rule of more restrictive social conventions, has been minuscule. The state, at least in this instance, sought primarily to bring the regulation of the private sphere under its supervision and control (Rouse 1998, 55). Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan after a protracted and brutal civil war in 1971 forced the Pakistani military to hand over power after thirteen years of rule to the elected civilian government led by Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto’s more socially progressive and populist government that came into power with the slogan Roti, Kapra aur Makan (food, clothing, and shelter) is seen as an important milestone in the history of women’s rights. During this period, the state passed the 1973 constitution that guaranteed full citizen rights to women for the first time. The Bhutto government also signed the UN declaration on women’s rights, set up women’s institutes, and promised universal education for both genders, yet it did little to ensure that such measures had permanence (Rouse 1996, 62). Moreover, neither the Family Ordinance Law nor the various populist efforts during the Bhutto years significantly raised the issue of violence against women. Rather, Bhutto’s progressive regime, with all its

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populist rhetoric and prowomen stance, is remembered by many as one filled with political intimidation of its opponents and terrifying the people by threatening the honor of their women-folk (Jalal 1991). Along with the laws that discriminated against minorities and curtailed civil rights in Pakistan, the issue of women’s honor and sexuality became one of the most important aspects of General Zia-ul Haq’s regime (1977–1988) that consolidated its power by ousting Bhutto through a military coup in 1977. Zia’s Hudood Ordinance in 1979 instituted harsh punishments for adultery (Zina). Yet a twist in the ordinance left several loopholes for rapists to not be prosecuted unless other men witnessed the crime, while an unmarried rape victim who became pregnant could be convicted in a case of adultery. Rural and urban poor women have been the main victims of these laws, which are still on the books in the early twenty-first century.20 It needs to be emphasized, like anywhere else, that Pakistani women of different strata and economic class have varied histories and ability to negotiate state imposed and social restrictions. Hence, in what Ayesha Jalal (1991) calls the phenomena of “convenience of subservience,” most women from middle and upper strata, even under the most antiwomen regimes, have retained social and familial privileges as long as they did not transgress social norms (78). Keeping the history of state repression of women’s rights in perspective, studies on women in Pakistan have largely been written in the context of the struggle of elite and urban women against the antiwomen laws and structural changes that have adversely affected women’s lives. Important as this literature has been, such representations have traditionally ignored the experiences of the majority of poor and rural women and the domestic experiences of women within the household. They have also been framed in a teleological grid as histories of progress and setbacks. 21 To circumvent these thematic lacks and ideological underpinnings, Shahnaz Rouse (1996) has argued for a return to sources where we find women speaking in nonpublic spaces. The proposed remedy seeks to incorporate the analysis of Pakistani women’s autobiography, diaries, fiction, and journals to enhance our work on the private sphere of their lives. 22 Following this suggestion, my close reading of popular fiction focuses upon those aspects of Pakistani contemporary life that are generally underrepresented in social-scientific literature by flushing out aspects of Pakistani social history that remain hidden in the margins and interstices.

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“P ULP ” F ICTION Since independence, Pakistan has seen a steady yet extremely slow increase in education levels for women. The current national literacy rate of 16 percent for women as compared to 35 percent for men conceals a major rural-urban differential within it. The literacy rate for urban women is 37.3 percent, more than five times the rate of rural Pakistani women (7.3 percent). In recent years, due to economic pressures and the dissolution of extended families in urban areas, many more women are also working for wages than in the past. Recent estimates put the level at between 15 and 20 percent of the labor force, which by all means is a conservative guess as traditional notions of propriety lead families to conceal the extent of work performed by women.23 The increased level of education and wage-based employment among urban women has transformed the publication industry in Pakistani. Until the 1960s, audiences for digests were gender neutral. Except for older established reformist magazines for women like Ismat, most digests would include a specific women’s section or have an interest column for them. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of competing women’s magazines that targeted different readerships. Publishers targeted younger urban working women who were leaving domestic spaces to work as stenographers, telephone operators, bank clerks, and schoolteachers. Some digests were pitched to women studying in Urdu medium colleges in middle-class neighborhoods of larger Pakistani cities. Other publishers targeted the growing number of female readership in smaller towns where women in substantial numbers were acquiring at least a high school diploma if not higher college degrees. The popularity of these digests has been phenomenal. According to advertising expenditure data, the number of magazines published in Pakistan went from 214 in 1993 to 406 in 2000, the majority of these were in Urdu and were women’s magazine. The same sources document that about 7 percent of the adult population of 141.5 million read these magazines. Women’s digests such as Pakeeza or Dosheeza have monthly circulations of sixty thousand copies reaching an average of three hundred thousand adult readers, far more than the first run of the most respectable literary publication.24 Moreover, they have helped create and consolidate a whole industry of female writers, editors, sketch artists, and designers that make a living through the publication of these digests.

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I chose the following stories as they represent contemporary examples within the genre of popular women’s fiction in Urdu. In past two decades, Pakistani society has seen an “increase in traffic, restaurants, video outlets, expensive boutiques” (Rouse 1998, 61). It has also witnessed a diminishing of female presence on the urban streets linked to an increase of public and domestic violence against women. In an increasingly hostile and restricting public sphere, the stories may represent social aspirations of lower-middle-class women, who have to brave public transport without the social protections that class bestows on elite women. I admit that the two stories discussed below may statistically not be the norm. In my reading of a various digests of the past several years, however, I periodically encountered similar themes in several forms. Most of these stories were published in the 1990s and the overtly sexual content of the following narratives may perhaps reflect the opening of social space that digest publishers and women writers have experienced after the more socially censored atmosphere of the Zia era. These particular stories were published in the journal Pakeeza in 1995, which like others of its kind, caters to a range of readership. Digests like Pakeeza consist of various sections; interviews with celebrities, cooking tips, Q&A columns, and several pages of fashion spreads. One of the most popular sections is the one called “Three Women Three Stories.” The editors25 introduce these stories as true depictions of women’s lives. They then edit the narratives to give it some publishable form. Women are encouraged to send their stories, according to the editors, as they reflect social moral dilemmas that need to be shared with the larger reading audience. The stories discussed below are taken from this section. The story, titled “Chains” (“Zanjeer”), starts with the protagonist, a woman (Salma), narrating a story in a long flashback sequence. She tells us that she lived with her family in a small town in former East Pakistan. There, her family was close to two Urdu-speaking families, one of Rahman’s and one of Naseer’s, who lived nearby. She liked both of them but had particular feelings for Rahman. She thought that if permitted to choose her life’s partner, she would choose Rahman, as he wanted to succeed in life by acquiring higher education. In contrast, Naseer, although a friend, was more money-minded in his outlook toward life. Time passed and the families moved to West Pakistan much before Bangladesh’s independence. The families remained friends and prospered. Her parents received marriage proposals for

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her from both the families. Given a choice, she decided in favor of Rahman, whom she had always liked and admired and who now had a respectable job. The preparations for her wedding were underway when the news arrived that Naseer had an accident in which he lost a leg. This came as a shock to the whole family and the wedding was postponed. A few weeks later, Rahman informed Salma that she had to give up the idea of marrying him and instead marry Naseer. He said that not marrying her was a huge sacrifice for him, but Naseer had begged him to consider it. Naseer had told him that, as he was now handicapped, no woman would ever look at him again and he would, therefore, become a social outcast. Rahman implored Salma to marry Naseer, initially she resisted the idea, but then she agreed. On the wedding night, Naseer came into the room. After giving her an expensive present and talking to her, he went and lay down on the sofa without touching her, while she remained waiting for him on the bed until dawn. The same thing was repeated every night. Naseer would come into the room but not near her. Salma describes her feelings by saying, “Why was he treating me like this. I keep on burning. After all I am a woman. I cannot say much, but I was worried. I felt unwanted. Marriage also means something else, was he taking revenge. But after our wedding I have never even thought of Rahman. I am an Eastern girl. Our upbringing compels us to only live for our husbands. My respect and love is only for Naseer now, can he not see that?” After the passing of a few months, one day Naseer told Salma how he had succeeded in his determination to marry her. Further, he said that in the accident, he had not only lost his leg but also his masculinity—he was impotent. This was a crushing blow to Salma. He asked her for a divorce, as he was ashamed of what he had done.26 Salma was furious and said that she would never divorce him because that would set him free. She was his wife and she would remain so, but she would never forgive him and see to it that he received adequate punishment for his deeds. In the days that followed, Salma’s demeanor toward Naseer changed and she became even more caring and loving toward him. After a few years, she persuaded him to move to Islamabad from Karachi. They bought a house outside the city in a fairly deserted new neighborhood. Within a few years of living there, most of their relatives passed away. Normally, Naseer slept without his artificial leg. One day, while Naseer was sleeping, Salma removed his leg and threw it away. When

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Naseer woke up, he started screaming but Salma did not respond knowing full well that he could not move without his artificial limb. After a few days, she mixed some tranquilizers in the food and when she was sure that he was asleep, she went in and tied him in chains. These were then pushed through the hole in the wall and secured to a heavy iron bar in the garden outside. The chains only allowed Naseer to move around in the room and go to the bathroom. Now Naseer was totally in her control. After a few days of shouting and screaming, he became docile and passive. Salma, during this same period, became depressed herself. She started taking care of Naseer; changing his clothes, combing his hair, washing him. Eventually as days passed, she felt herself falling in love with him. She would take care of all his needs, read him the newspaper, and make the foods he liked. She realized that he was not the only prisoner, she herself had become his captive. If he was confined to the room, she was also trapped in the house. Thirty years after their marriage and years after she had chained him, one morning, when she called him for breakfast, he did not respond. He had passed away, finally escaped from his imprisonment. The story renders a sense of Pakistani history and geography that makes the terrain very familiar to the native reader. The invocation of East Pakistan, of Bangladesh’s independence, the move to Karachi, as previously mentioned, Pakistan’s largest city and commercial center, and then Islamabad, the sleepy capital where the protagonist could live unnoticed by her neighbors for years, all provide a cultural and spatial context for the story. It also lends itself to a range of readings. The affirmation of the Eastern girl as being faithful to her husband, her sacrifice, and her self-doubts all lead to reestablish stereotypes. Her violence can also be interpreted as a classic trope of the revengeful woman. Even though she identifies with her captive and falls in love with him, she proclaims, “I was not ready to free him; I had to take revenge.” Her rekindled love for Naseer also allows us to indulge in a reading that can attribute this act as seeking pleasure through inflicting pain on her lover/husband. Can we translate her actions into the idiom of sadomasochism? Is Naseer’s consent not necessary in the liberal formulation of this pleasurable practice? Before following this line of thinking, I would argue for caution, as it is difficult to fix the precise sociological meaning of how Salma receives pleasure in her acts. To inscribe a practice from another cultural space onto Salma’s actions may, in my opinion, be an act of excessive translation. We need

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to be aware that, drawing on Walter Benjamin (1968), although German brot and French pain refer to the same object (bread), each are culturally specific and historically unique. Yet, Salma does give and receive sexual pleasure and, in doing so, challenges perceptions of “proper” behavior within polite Pakistani society. Salma’s predicament is multilayered. Choice of partners, adjustment to married life, betrayal, her right of conjugal pleasure, and her revenge are some of the more obvious themes. Her narrative may resonate with women who feel trapped in nonsexual or bitter marriages. It is a fantasy that may have broad appeal not only in Pakistan but also in many other cultures. Irrespective of the moral language, Salma’s measures can be read in an extremely sympathetic mode. Further, although there is explicit condemnation of her own actions by Salma, specifically through her periodic voicing of self-doubt, her sexual practices are presented as one of the many forms that people give and receive pleasure. Denunciation and disapproval of assertive or “deviant” sexual practices, in a Foucauldian sense, coexists with the proliferation of a discourse about them. There are, of course, two levels at which pleasure can be analyzed here, one experienced by Salma and the other by the reader. We can perhaps assume an individualized pleasure by the reading subject who is experiencing a performance, a privatized carnival in the shape of a polyphonic text that also portrays the grotesque features of a chained handicapped person. It is a fantasy that questions social conventions from a specifically female point of view. The transgressive potential of this carnival, as Stallybrass and White (1984) point out, is perhaps limited due to the fact that the social force of a public carnival is shifted to the private space of individualized readership. Yet such stories force the concerns of the domestic private sphere into a more public domain of popular literature. In doing so, they not only challenge the representational norms of literary production, but also critically insert a different narrative on women’s personal histories (Willis 1989). Before developing a broader analysis of this and the following story, let me turn to my second narrative. Loosely translated as “The Great Sin” (“Gunnah Kabeer”), this story starts in the northern Pakistani town of Charsaddah and also ends there via a detour in the ghettos of the southern city of Hydrabad. It begins with the protagonist Zaitoon, who is shown to be in her late teens, marrying a forty year old man, Aziz Khan, who was home on leave from his work in Hydrabad. Only three months after the wedding, he wanted to return

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back to Hydrabad. When Zaitoon asked him to stay, he said that he did not have much interest in women and he had married her due to his family’s pressure on him. However, Aziz Khan did impregnate his wife before leaving and did not return for five years. In this period, Zaitoon gave birth to a child, Ameer Khan. A few months after his second visit, Zaitoon traveled with her young son to live with Aziz Khan in Hydrabad. She found the abject poverty of their urban existence extremely hard to get used to. Leaving a semirural life, she was forced to adjust to the dark and airless hovels that are the residences of the urban poor in Pakistani cities. Soon they had another child, and within a year, Aziz Khan was killed in an electrocution accident at his work. Zaitoon was left alone with two children to care for. To support them, she started washing dishes in middle-class homes. In a few years, her son Ameer Khan became an apprentice in an automobile workshop and earned a little money. Time passed and the family’s living improved as Ameer’s income had increased and Zaitoon could reduce her own work. She would, however, remain worried about him, as every evening he went out with friends whom she did not know. She occasionally heard rumors that Ameer was associating with the “wrong kind of people.” One day, Ameer came and told his mother that he was going to Karachi and would not live in Hydrabad anymore as his master had passed away and he did not want to work at the workshop anymore. Once, when Ameer came home on a visit, a young woman, whom he introduced as his wife Gulzar, accompanied him. Zaitoon was taken by surprise and was a bit angry. She had all along dreamed of her son’s wedding and he had just turned up with a woman by his side. Having no choice, she accepted the girl as her daughter-in-law. After some months, Zaitoon suggested that Gulzar get pregnant. She insisted that Gulzar should go to a doctor for a checkup, as women with small breasts, according to her, were prone to be infertile. Gulzar kept on resisting these demands until one day they had an argument. When Ameer came home from work, Gulzar said that she could not stay in the same house with her mother-in-law anymore. Zaitoon got angry and explained how she had just asked Gulzar to go to the doctor. At this stage, Kabeer, the younger brother, said that she should not have insisted, as Gulzar cannot have children because she is a man. Zaitoon could not believe what she heard. Kabeer described how he had accidentally entered the bathroom while Gulzar was taking a bath

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and he had seen everything. Then Ameer said that this was true. Gulzar was a son of wealthy person in Karachi, but because of their mutual love, he was willing to live in this hovel. Now both of them would leave together, never to return. Zaitoon had a half brother in Charsaddah and she decided to return to her ancestral land before Kabeer also got involved in what she considered immoral acts. She sold her house and arrived at her brother’s place. The brother ran a restaurant and Kabeer started sitting on the cash register. Kabeer was a handsome young man and soon different Khans (local elite) started coming to the restaurant after hearing about his beauty. The uncle would laugh and make fun of Kabeer because of his many suitors. But Zaitoon was worried. One day the news came that a jealous Khan had murdered Kabeer, who was himself killed by a rival lover. There was a fight among the supporters of the different Khans and the restaurant was burned to the ground. Zaitoon was devastated and she is now waiting out her last days writing this piece for us to hear her tragic story. Zaitoon’s life story of betrayal and her social and economic hardship falls into a genre of representation in Pashtun culture that emphasizes gham (sorrow) and suffering as a form in which female folk narratives are constructed. Remaining within this genre of representation, the story has a more realist setting than the previous one and a complex sociological background. The suggestion of Aziz Khan being from Charsaddah cannot be translated. It coveys, in unsaid forms, to many Pakistani readers a moral geography and a certain ethnic marker connected to a sexual economy in which same-sex relations among men is acceptable.27 It is a stereotypical construction of Pashtun ethnicity. As much as rural Pashtun men travel far and wide to find work and sell their labor, their negative construction also compels middleclass families in many urban areas to frighten their children from the Kabuli wallah28 who preys on adolescent boys. Pashtun or otherwise, it is common for urban boys traveling to school in crowded public buses to sometimes live the reality of men pressing against them and they learn to deal with it on their own terms. These realities are shared and experienced by urban men and women who grow up on the proverbial other side of the tracks in Pakistan. Moreover, same-sex desires are commonplace enough that the mostly female readership of such stories can easily identify with the homosexuality depicted in the story as an experience familiar to them within their own family structure. The moralizing on the issue of homosexuality notwithstanding,

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the story does let Ameer Khan affirm his love for Gulzar as he leaves his mother to live with his partner. The story also depicts how Kabeer enjoys the attention he receives from his many lovers. Again, like in the previous story, denunciation of the practice by Zaitoon coexists with the representation of same-sex desire and the proliferation of talk about it. There is also a related point here. Pakistan in the last decade, as previously mentioned, in especially its southern large cities like Karachi and Hydrabad, has experienced endemic ethnic violence and rivalry. Within this context, we see two men, Gulzar, who is depicted as a Muhajir (due to the fact that he is from Karachi, a marker of Muhajir ethnicity), and Ameer a Pashtun (two rival ethnicities) falling in love, albeit Gulzar is the wife. Muhajir (refugees), as suggested, are descendants of those families that migrated from various parts of India during and after the division of the subcontinent in 1947, while Pashtun belong to the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan and Central Asia. Not only ethnic boundaries are crossed but also class is overcome as Gulzar belongs to a middle-class family and we are aware of Ameer’s social origins. The story’s depiction of people from different ethnic and class backgrounds seeking to share common destinies is emblematic of late twentieth-century Pakistan where a diverse, multilingual, and ethnic population considers the challenges, pitfalls, and compromises of coexistence. I am not arguing that these stories are allegories of some larger national narrative, yet such stories do reflect a changing cultural process and radically diverge from the older portrayals of Muhajir family life as an unmarked universalized experience in Pakistani Urdu literature. The story’s move toward depicting other cultural and ethnic realities not only speaks to people’s own lived experience but may implicitly contest and undermine the dominance of Muhajir and Urdu cultural standards. Hence, such stories should not be only read as moral sagas, but as narratives that seek to represent the changing social and cultural space of contemporary Pakistan.29 The irony remains that this diversity of experience is mostly available to the multiethnic-multilingual literate readership only through the Urdu language. The story also explicitly deals with the issue of rural migration and women’s labor. Social changes in the last few decades in Pakistan have forced a large percentage of women from all classes to work in the traditional and nonformal sectors of the economy.30 In urban areas, the poorest women, like Zaitoon, engage in work often as midwives, domestic servants, urban laborers, sweepers, or nannies for compensation outside

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the home. More often, poor urban women remain at home and sell manufactured goods to middlemen for compensation (Johnson 2001). Similarly, the narrative sensitizes us to the migrations of ethnically Pashtun laborers to the southern industrial cities of Karachi and Hydrabad where they join the lower rung of the urban poor and are, like Aziz Khan, consumed by the city. Since the 1960s, Pashtun labor has been used with ruthless exploitation in the textile industry, the least unionized sector of Pakistan’s industrial spectrum. When Aziz Khan returns home after some years, he is shown to be suffering from lung disease brought on by his long hours in a cotton mill. It is such a factory that eventually takes his life too. How the poor survive in their private and work life in Pakistan’s expanding cities are stories and histories that are yet to be told or written.

C ONCLUSION Romance novels, Cora Caplan (1984) argues in her reading of the 1970s novel The Thorn Birds, have helped women to become progressively reflective about sexuality, but unreflective and uninterested in thinking about politics. Fantasizing, she claims, is a constitutive part of being human yet, she argues, we should also pay attention to the progressive or reactionary politics that these fantasies are bound up in. Such arguments in their less sophisticated incarnations are echoed in Pakistani English language press and in feminist academic volumes (see Hussain et al. 1997). There is criticism of the depiction of women in popular press (Hyat 1997), in popular cinema (Guahar 1997), and in commercial theater (Safdar 1997). Such criticism, based on universalized notions of women’s rights, is also partially linked to issues of class privilege and to the place English language occupies in Pakistan. Even though Urdu maintains a certain hierarchical relationship with other languages in its position as the state-sponsored national language, English still retains an elite status that Urdu has not been able to displace. English-language press at times takes on a modernist and pedagogical voice of social criticism against traditional or “backward” cultural practices. For example, analyzing the proliferation of romance stories in popular Urdu digests, a recent article in the English press condemns the stories in women’s digests as intensely emotional and as stripping women of their individual identity (Ahmar 1997). Women are depicted, according to this analysis, only through their relationships

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with men as a mother, a daughter, or a wife. Linked to this loss of identity is women’s portrayal as a commodity that is traded in the act of marriage to accomplish the preordained role of procreation. The article stresses that the stories in these digests represent women as ideals of feminine virtue, as submissive to patriarchal authority, and as loyal to their husband’s wishes. Even when women appear as professionals working outside the home, in some stories, they are plagued with a feeling of guilt about the neglect of their domestic duties. Such comments in the English press are partly emblematic of the larger cultural difference between Urdu and other national languages and the hierarchically arranged symbolic power of English in Pakistan. Borrowing from Arvind Rajgopal’s (2001) argument on English and Hindi press in India,31 I argue that the English press in Pakistan is not only linked with secular and modernist ideals but also with a defined progressive politics steeped in the tradition of analytical, rational, and responsible reporting.32 This press signifies a readership that might not wield the power it used to posses, yet still demarcates the context of sophisticated culture. The critiques offered of conservative ideals by English periodicals imagine the female consumers of Urdu digests as more traditional and as passive recipients of these narratives. These lower-middle-class women are represented as being trapped in a social milieu where change is stifled by an authoritarian domestic realm. In contrast, implicitly, the English-speaking audience is constructed as graduating from Mills and Boons, Barbara Cartland and other romance stories to more serious and enlightened European literature. There is an underlying argument about the English language that makes such readers more critical and analytical open to self-reflection and to change. Urdu digests’ readership hence is constructed as victimized women who are crushed under the weight of patriarchy and need to be jolted out of their misery by some consciousness raising. It is akin to a universalizing narrative that privileges an assumed solidarity among women by abstracting out specific histories and local experiences (Butler 1998). The politics of understanding the Freudian question of what do women want, now rephrased into, why are women reading this pulp, is linked to a politics of conversion; a conversion into modern notions of self-consciousness, of individual identity, and of agency. Talal Asad (1996, 263–72) argues that conversion by itself is considered irrational by moderns, yet invoking the idea of agency renders it “rational and freely chosen” as everyone has agency and is responsible

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for the life they lead. The lives of these women are only seen as an accident of “natural inequality” that equal opportunity, or pedagogy could perhaps resolve (Chatterjee 1993, 232). In contrast to the dominant forms of readings in Pakistani elite circles, I suggest such “fictions” might be an intrinsic part of, as Arjun Appadurai (1996, 58) puts it, the conceptual repertoire of contemporary society. I would argue that the themes discussed in contemporary stories such as “Chains” do not merely shock us but rather reassert a sociocultural milieu in which most women readers find themselves. Women may come to these stories conscious of them as part fantasy and part reality based on their own social experience and surroundings. Fantasies, as Fredric Jameson (1983) writes, deflect our deepest desires and most fundamental hopes, but for them to be meaningful, they also need to have a connection to our lived experience. For example, both stories reflect women’s anxieties around the issue of male betrayal and violence. Salma and Zaitoon are married to men who are not, in their terms, real men, one impotent and the other more interested in other men. Although Salma seeks revenge for her treatment, Zaitoon does not have the class or material privilege to take that route. Within a hypermasculine and dominant heterosexual social more, these fantasies about “inefficient men” (the impotent, the homosexual) may, for example, resonate with women’s anxieties about the sexually threatening public sphere in which the readers of these stories find themselves in their everyday life. Despite the claims that the state made to protect women’s honor, especially during the Zia regime, Pakistan has unfortunately witnessed a marked increase in cases of rape and domestic violence in the same period.33 As women increasingly become the victims of male violence, such stories allow us to fantasize about the reversal of the status quo. Still, the stories, at least the way I read them, are not entirely dismissive of the male characters and do sympathetically depict the choices they make. Therefore, the narratives force us to seriously consider how people fantasize and imagine possibilities in shifting an ever-changing social situation. Their moral tone notwithstanding, these stories provide spaces where there is an exchange and negotiation of desires and of imagined lives. In the process, these stories continuously escape the larger moral tropes they are structured into and transgress the very boundaries that they inhabit. Further, popular narratives may offer a glimpse into some of the ways in which literate Pakistani households think about themselves. Reading these texts provides us not only a sense of change and shifts

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in people’s lives but also a representation (albeit a fragmentary one) of their own views on the body, self, and community. To carry this argument further, these notions of self and community can be sites of contestation for the universalized international standards of emancipation that constitute the agenda of modernization with its related emphasis on the liberal laws and the free market. It can constitute a narrative of people’s lives, as Partha Chatterjeee (1993) so eloquently puts it, that is unyielding through its alternate constructions of the individual and the social to the disciplinary and hegemonizing pressures of modern norms. Such a reading does not mean a rejection of modernity, or an attempt to resurrect some residual past; the idea is to situate other narratives of being and existence that are as much a part of modernity as are the globalized history of progress and emancipation (Dhareshwar 1995). It may also mean a tentative exploration of a future where we need to take into account ideas lived experiences of people themselves, who may embody different notions of self, time and space, social, and sexual relations. For us to appreciate the diversity contained within these stories, we must allow ourselves to critically investigate the teleological grid of modernist readings that are imposed upon these popular romances. Following Chatterjee’s (1993) discussed suggestion, a critical reading of stories like “Chains” may make us aware of how in postcolonial spaces, such as contemporary Pakistan, the construction of bourgeois individualism may be tempered by other visions of the self that coexists with it. Through Salma’s own contradictory inclinations of revenge and of spousal service, we see a coming together of different worlds and impulses in the construction of her own self.34 A self that may accept, contradict, and even transgress the imposed construction of the mythical, yet desired “emancipated” autonomous individual.35 In such renderings, we notice how women’s assertion of their conjugal rights, situated within the construction of individualized agency, may cohabit with their desire to be modest, self-sacrificial, subservient, and humble. Such illiberal representations are not that dissimilar to the forms in which preindependent middle-class Muslim women, as shown earlier, left the seclusion of their homes to acquire education, yet did not shun the veil. Similarly, the same-sex relationships depicted in “The Great Sin” exposes us to how poor urban men create sexual and social relationships in urban environments that have been historically hostile to them. Migration, the degradation of industrial labor, and the pressure to settle down and reproduce create spaces

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for a range of options. Men, women, and families respond to these circumstances in multiple scripts, none taking precedence over the other. Where early twentieth-century reformist literature had its overt pedagogical task, the digests are a more fluid and complex genre. I do not wish to argue that to have a sexual awareness of the kind depicted in these stories places women readers in a progressive moment in society’s history. Such an attempt would merely help me to reinsert Pakistani consumers of these stories into an historical trajectory that produces the humanistic subject. I want to also avoid labeling readers as falsely conscious or condemn their reading habits as vicarious pleasure that does not lead to “correct politics.” Further, I do not want to assume that readers are ignorant of the effects of these stories. Rather, I have sought to use these texts to see how they may resonate in the larger community and how desires and fantasies are created in specific cultures and histories. These fantasies are embedded in social practices in a historical moment of economic insecurity and restrictive public space for urban women along with a proliferation of urban lifestyle, global media, new art forms, cinema, and international migration. Therefore, popular narratives, the kind that I have discussed in this paper, remain local yet borrow from a variety of influences. They represent local histories in a global moment; as these localized stories become afflicted by cosmopolitan scripts that influence domestic life along with other social processes in Pakistan. As a way of concluding, before succumbing to the desire of categorizing these fantasies into a rigid grid of progressive or retrogressive politics, it may serve some purpose to understand how these texts resonate with women’s own experiences. Walter Benjamin (1968) argues that the task of translator is not to turn Hindi, Greek, or English into German; rather, it is to allow the power of the foreign language to penetrate the translation. I read this as a call for a culturally situated and historically grounded rendering of people’s lives, before imposing on them changes that have run their course in other cultural landscapes. To be precise, this demands a situated understanding of these texts within the extremely volatile social and economic times that people in rural and especially in urban Pakistan cope with, a task still ahead of us.

N OTES 1. This article, “Pulp Fictions: Reading Pakistani Domesticity,” first appeared in Social Text 78, 123–45, 2004. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of Duke University Press.

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2. My translation. 3. The magazines are marketed as women’s magazines, but they are as popular among men from mostly the same class background. 4. Urdu is unique among the major literatures of South Asia for its emphasis on the short story (as opposed to the novel) as the primary genre of narrative fiction (Mufti 2000, 9). See Aamir Mufti (2000) for a theoretically sophisticated treatment of this issue. 5. I am primarily interested in Urdu prose in this paper. The history of Urdu poetry by women has a somewhat different trajectory and thematically may also allow for a variety of experiments. See Carla Petievich 1992, 2002. 6. See Sarah Dickey (1995) for an analogous analysis in the South Asian context. 7. I borrow this argument from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s text, Provincializing Europe (2000). 8. See Barbara Metcalf (1990) for her analysis of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s (a Deobandi Ulama) Beheshti Zewar. 9. Afsaneh Najmabadi (1993) eloquently details similar processes in turnof-the-century Iran. She shows how the advent of social modernity linked to new schools for girls and the new press transformed women’s language and the domestic sphere. 10. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nazir Ahmed rose from a humble background with training in the traditional subjects and in Arabic and Persian language. Later he joined the educational services and became inspector of schools and then was promoted to the revenue service becoming deputy collector of revenue for the North Western provinces. 11. In the same period, in a comparative situation, Qasim Amin, the Egyptian prosecutor in the Europeanized legal system who belonged to the Turco-Circassian landholding class, wrote books on the issue of emancipation of women. The texts were also serialized in Urdu and Persian from a Calcutta publishing house. Qasim agreed with colonial critics of Muslim social life regarding women’s traditional and secluded position. He attested that the future organization of society in which women would be liberated was conditioned on the premise of following new ideas of science and progress learned from the European experience (Mitchell 1988, 113; Cole 1981). 12. See his Mir’atul-arus and C. M. Naim (1984) for a commentary on Nazir Ahmed’s text. 13. Nazir Ahmed, along with Sayed Ahmed, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University, and Altaf Husein Hali, was among a group of Muslim reformers who had experienced the revolt of 1857 and henceforth the impact of British rule on their lives (Minault 1998). Fearful of the declining social standing of the Muslim elite and the rising influence of the clerical workers and the mercantile class in post-1857 India, all of them, like the Deobandi religious reformers, argued for educational and social reform.

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

K AMRAN A SDAR A LI Muslim middle-class households were supposed to produce sharif gentlemen who were “pious without being wasteful, educated without being pedantic and restrained in his (their) expression of emotion(s)” (Minault 1998, 5). The stress on self-control and discipline was to produce new male subjectivities, which, like the emphasis on reform of female spaces, would assert an independent Muslim identity in colonial India. In such debates, Muslim reformers were not that far from those nationalists that worked with concepts and practices such as brahmacharya to retrain the Indian/Hindu self. These processes also acknowledge the “lack” in Indian social life that needed to be addressed, ironically conceding to the demand for reform pushed onto them by the colonial regime (Prakash 1999). See Beth Baron (1994) and Lila Abu Lughod (1998) for discussions of similar processes in early twentieth-century Egypt and the Middle East. These attempts have to be seen in contrast to the processes in other Muslim countries during the same period. In Iran, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East, the main struggle for feminists and educated women was the removal of the veil (see Badran 1995, especially for Egypt). They were a crucial voting-bloc that the Muslim League (the party seeking to represent the Muslims of British India) relied upon during the 1945–46 elections. It is indeed a popular assertion that Urdu was the language of North Indian Muslims. As much as this claim is historically inaccurate (in late nineteenth and even in the twentieth century, Urdu was the first language for many Hindus and Sikhs and indeed some of its most famous literary figures are non-Muslims), I do not have the space here to discuss the history of communalization of the Urdu language as the language of South Asian Muslims (see, among others, Ahmad 1996; Mufti 2000). However, during the struggle for Pakistan’s creation and after its independence, Pakistan’s political leadership did emphasize such a linkage at the cost of even alienating those Muslim ethnic populations, like Bengali, Pashtun, Sindhi, Baluchi, and Punjabi, that lived within its own borders. Karachi was the major beneficiary of Pakistani State’s industrialization program. Between 1947 and 1955, 774 new industries were established in Karachi, representing almost 50 percent of all industrialization in Pakistan (unpublished manuscript Fasihuddin Salar). It was one of the world’s fastest growing cities between 1947 and 1972. With a growth rate of almost 5 percent between 1972 and the present, its population is estimated to have grown from 3.6 million to 13 million within this period (Zaidi 1999, 81). In 1993, five years after the end of Zia’s regime, 75 to 80 percent of all women in Pakistani jails were on charges of Hudood offenses (Rouse 1998, 61).

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21. Hence the famous title, nods to Lenin’s tract notwithstanding, of a book written by two Pakistani feminists (Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed), “Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward?” 22. The use of autobiographies and fiction has effectively been used in the Indian context, especially in the historical writings on gender by participants in the Subaltern Studies Project. 23. The 1980 Pakistan agricultural census showed that women’s participation in agricultural labor was 73 percent. The 1990–91 Pakistan Integrated Household Survey indicated that female labor force participation in rural areas was 45 percent and 17 percent in the urban areas, hence a more realistic yet still conservative estimate of female participation in the labor force may lie between 30 and 40 percent (Sustainable Development Department, FAO, United Nations). 24. Pakistan: World Magazine Trends, 2001–2002. 25. The editors of these magazines are mostly women who have college degrees in Urdu literature and are well informed about the literary trends in the country. How contributions are solicited, who are the regular writers, how are themes identified are questions that require further research with the writers and editors and are beyond the scope of this text. 26. Pakistani Muslim personal law does give women the right of divorce under a range of circumstances if this has been stipulated in the marriage contract. Historically, several schools of Islamic jurisprudence give women the right of divorce in the case of husband’s impotency (Mussalam 1982). 27. In recent months, articles have appeared in the New York Times on the preference for boys among Pashtun men (reported by Craig Smith, February 2002). What is a lived experience for many in Afghanistan and Pakistan has now become available to the West as an example of liberated sexual politics. Such representations tend to assimilate a range of sexual preferences into a narrow reading of sexual politics. 28. This literally means those from Kabul. In South Asia, Afghan men have been long distance traders of a variety of goods for centuries. 29. Of course, to incorporate an increasingly non-Mohajir readership, it makes financial sense for the publishers to accept and celebrate difference. 30. Women’s involvement in nonhousehold labor increased dramatically in the early years of Pakistan’s existence. Women in 1951 constituted 3.1 percent of the total civilian labor force, by the 1961 census, this figure had increased to 9.3 percent (Jalal 1991). While the majority of women worked in the agricultural sector (almost 90 percent) between 1961 and 1964, the number of women that were employed in the nonagricultural sector of the economy increased by almost a quarter of a million (Jalal 1991, 96). 31. Specifically, see chapters 1 and 4.

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32. See Shemeem Abbas (1993) for a discussion on the continuing emphasis on English education in Pakistan and its links to global flows of capital. 33. According to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s report (1995), a woman was raped every three hours in Pakistan, half of them minors and one-fourth were gang rapes. 34. I am indebted to Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994) for this line of argument. 35. We need to also pay attention to Carol Pateman’s (1988) reminder that the conception of the modern individual belongs to patriarchal categories of thought.

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R A C E , S E C U R I T Y , A N D S PAT I A L A N X I E T I E S I N T H E P O S TA PA R T H E I D C I T Y Thomas Blom Hansen

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he apartheid city perfected colonial forms of governance by converting race to space. Each of the country’s four race groups (Africans, whites, coloureds, and Indians) inhabited separate neighborhoods, shopped in separate shopping areas, and schools, religious institutions, and leisure were almost completely separated. The only points of contact were workplaces and the urban transport corridors that enabled populations of color to commute from townships to industrial parks and city centers for work. According to the dominant ideology, this spatial organization reflected different temporalities. One would travel from the city centers of (white) modernity towards the African townships that often were administered directly under the “Native administration” of the African “Homelands,” the pseudostates governed by traditional chiefs and under customary law. In the apartheid city, one became an “Indian,” an “African,” and a “white,” not merely by virtue of one’s color of skin, but because one lived an everyday life that was highly structured by determinate spaces and institutions. All this changed rapidly and abruptly with the unbanning of ANC (African National Congress) in 1990 and the gradual lifting of the racial strictures on movement and residence. Many erstwhile white or

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Indian neighborhoods saw a rapid influx of Africans from the townships and from the rural areas; the public spaces, roads, beaches, and malls of the former white city became racially heterogeneous, and loci of intense everyday conflicts. A new informal sector of street vendors, taxi businesses, and multiple squatter settlements on public land in the suburbs became conspicuous signs of a new spatial order. Along with this, the postapartheid order also introduced new cultural and economic freedom and increased exposure to global cultural flows. As a result, a new hedonistic and highly visible youth culture made its presence felt, noisily celebrating the new freedoms of the city. The most resounding effect of this transformation was a phenomenal rise in violent crime and the emergence of the young African man as the very embodiment of the dangerous criminal. While public spaces within racially demarcated areas hitherto had been seen as relatively safe and within a realm of “cultural intimacy,” the street now emerged as an intrinsically racialized, violent, and amoral space. Sexual and domestic violence has seen a steep increase since 1994 and South Africa held, in the 1990s, two sad, and partly related, world records: the incidence of rape, and HIV infections. Based on ethnography from a formerly Indian township in Durban, this chapter explores how gender, violence, and racial anxieties are articulated in the continuing moral panic around the integrity of the Indian family and the Indian household. The chapter will explore, firstly, how the large number of African residents in the township has led to fortification of homes, panic around chastity and safety of Indian girls and women in schools and public spaces. Secondly, the chapter will explore how the collapse of policing and security locally was interpreted as a loss of “our place” and a loss of cultural intimacy. Incipient attempts to launch community policing quickly turned into brutal and unaccountable vigilante initiatives and later to the dominance of private security firms whose activities are justified as necessary violence protecting Indian women and the Indian family. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how public space have been reracialized in recent years in South Africa, now as spaces of danger and uncontrolled poor Africans. These spaces are understood through metonyms of the “wildness” of the African nature, as spaces of danger, but also daring, fecundity, and eros.

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M ELANCHOLIA OF F REEDOM AND THE S PECTER OF THE T SOTSI Possibility is the heaviest of all categories.

—S. Kirkegaard

The fall of apartheid’s repressive police state was followed by a dramatic increase in crime—often violent crime. By the late 1990s, the specter of fear of sudden death or victimization at the hands of anonymous and unknowable criminals suffused everyday life throughout the country. The front garden, the driveway, the traffic lights, any dark street at night, and even one’s own house were now zones of insecurity. This specter was completely racialized and the fear had a colour—black. Living with an Indian family in the township of Chatsworth south of Durban, I often felt unnerved by nocturnal sounds and the many stories of crime and death circulating in the neighborhood. The house was right at the edge of the township overlooking the Umlaas River. On the other side was the huge African township of Umlazi, and when the wind was southerly, the sounds of music, laughter, and loud brawls from Umlazi could be clearly heard. The African world was also quickly becoming a part of the erstwhile purely Indian township—and Indianness should here be understood in the local sense as a racial category comprising people of South Asian origins. Informal settlements of Africans spread across the slopes towards the river, along the edges of the townships, and sprang up on empty land and grassy patches. I was embarrassed about lying awake at night, ashamed of my own fears while determined not to let the creeping fear constrict my movements. I soon realized that my gut feelings were shared widely in the predominantly blue-collar neighborhood I lived in and in adjacent areas. The face of the neighborhood changed. Walls were built, barbed wire on top, tall gates were installed, and more houses had ferocious-looking dogs scaring visitors away. The world of my informants was inundated with crime, accidents, and stories of sudden death and misfortune. Crime—both real and spectral—security, and death are experienced and understood in different ways within the racially defined social worlds in South Africa. In the African townships, high levels of violence and physical insecurity had been the norm for a long

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time, not least in the 1980s when the permanent youth rebellion in the townships that finally brought down apartheid had created an enormously dangerous and violent environment.1 After 1994, the state of panic was most palpable in the white suburbs as township youths and tsotsis (gangsters) spilled out into the main urban environment, and into the crime statistics. There was something almost prophetic about crime becoming the primary symptom of a new democratic era. South Africa’s white settler society was always bedeviled by fears of the natives. In the colonial and contemporary view, Africans were understood as nature, as people in the thrall of elemental and child-like desires and appetites beyond their control. Only the combination of the word of the Bible and a firm hand, it was believed, could control the otherwise natural desire to consume and devour the white world of order and plenty. In the Indian areas, crime had not been an overriding concern for several decades. The effects of the transition in 1994, and its concomitant influx of thousands of African in informal settlements, have perplexed and surprised many Indians. Although sharing some of the racial prejudices of whites, the anxieties of being swamped by Africans were influenced by two distinct experiences of attacks by the local Zulu-speaking majority population—the riots in 1949 in Cato Manor, a mixed African and Indian neighborhood in Durban, and the attacks and driving out of Indians from Inanda north of the city, including Gandhi’s famous Phoenix settlement, in 1985. In both cases, “white instigation” was widely understood among Indians to be the moving force behind the attacks. In the Indian townships that were set up in accordance with the Group Areas Act after 1960, crime was associated with the persistence of the charou culture, the Indian working-class culture with origins in a “coolie” past, but not a cause of major concern prompting fortification of homes. In spite of these differences in how crime and criminality was experienced, something has happened to all South Africans since 1994. There was a loss of certainty, and the loss of the illusion of power having a center and an origin in a “system.” What was lost was a both monstrous and ineffective apartheid state that nonetheless managed to portray itself as powerful, dangerous, and omnipotent—both to the oppressed majority and to the privileged groups it protected and promoted. While the new era and its new possibilities were celebrated by some, including many well-educated people of Indian origin, the predominant feelings among the ordinary working-class Indians in the

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townships were those of loss and bewilderment. The oft-repeated saying, “Before we were not white enough, now we are not black enough,” summed up this sentiment. The sense of loss had a very real material basis in recent economic and spatial transformations. The new ANC government embarked on a program of economic liberalization that aimed at inviting global capital into the country and simultaneously close or privatize the many public and semipublic enterprises that had been part of the apartheid regimes attempt to create a “protected” economy that would secure the prosperity of whites. Accompanying this came a restructuring of the labor and employment laws in order to strengthen and empower the African majority. These measures resulted in massive job losses and economic marginalization of the Indian community that, for years, had enjoyed a relatively cushioned position in South Africa’s economy (Freund 1995, 77–93). The simultaneous efforts at providing cheap housing and free schooling to everybody in the country resulted in a conspicuous redistributing of resources. Thousands of Africans live today in informal shacks or in newly built “government houses” in Chatsworth; Africans are highly visible on streets and in shopping centers as well as in the public schools in the township where Zulu-speaking children now constitute above 50 percent of the students. The effect of these changes was a multilayered sense of loss: loss of economic security; loss of the township as “our place”; the loss of a certain sense of existential and physical safety; loss of a sense of community unity that apartheid’s repression made possible; and finally, a more imperceptible version of what Hegel called “loss of the loss,” that is, the disappearance of the blockage—unfreedom and apartheid—that prevented true self-realization and thus could explain a range of problems and shortcomings in everyday life. With a new freedom, everybody in the country was left to rethink himself or herself beyond that overpowering shadow and structuring power that apartheid had imposed on them for decades. In his well-known essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud argues that while mourning expresses a feeling of loss of a loved object, “melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object . . . but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost. [The patient] knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (Freud 1969, 586). The symptoms of this condition are often difficult to gauge and understand both for the melancholic and his surroundings. Yet one symptom is clear: self-reproaches and self-revilings.

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Freud continues, “The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning—an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (1969, 587). While a projection of Freud’s clinical-analytical categories onto an entire community or group of people invariably will lay itself open to a range of methodological objections, it is nonetheless striking how powerfully this formulation of melancholia resonates with the multilayered sense of loss and the representations of everyday life in this particular community. Much public debate, many performances, as well as much informal conversation, are organized around an oscillation between intense self-reproaches (of the past, of family life, tradition, of introversion, etc.) and loving self-absorption and idealization (of family life, culture, and sociality) in what consistently is called “the community.” This oscillation arises, I submit, from a deep anxiety regarding how the identity and history of “the community” can be represented and enunciated. Misgivings about the postapartheid loss of economic and existential security often are dismissed as embarrassing nostalgia caused by a necessary adjustment to a globalized and democratic present. Yet, a deeper and older sense of a loss of the innocence and intimacy of the “pure” Indian community during the colonial era, and later in the apartheid townships, reverberates through the various artistic and everyday reflections on identity, freedom, and space that I will discuss later. This is a shameful loss, a shameful yearning for a happy life in unfreedom. Through jokes and caricature, the object of this yearning is represented as a phase of immaturity of the community in which an older generation indulged in the innocent pleasures of those who did not fully know that they were enslaved. This representation enables both a self-reproaching gesture of disavowal and the idealization of a wholesome community life of the past. The themes of loss, anxiety, and bewilderment in the face of transformations after apartheid all revolve, one way or the other, around the loss of intimacy—spatially, socially, and in terms of how domesticity and gender are reproduced in the home and outside it. The postapartheid city presents itself as full of possibility—of movement, desire, and freedom—yet its racial and social heterogeneity is experienced as severely constricting. Before illustrating how these fears and desires are played out, we need to look into the historical relationship between Africans and Indians.

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M UTUAL N ONRECOGNITION

The relationship between Indians and Africans in South Africa is a strange story of mutual nonrecognition. Not misrecognition, but simply nonrecognition. What do I mean by that? Quite simply, again in Hegelian terms that these two groups never have been able to constitute their identity through actually looking at each other, by deciphering each others gaze or “desiring the desire of the other,” as Hegel famously put it. Neither of the groups ever desired the gaze or the desire of the other and their relations have always been mediated through the colonial and later “white” power, gaze, and presence. This relative invisibility or nonrecognition of other dominated groups except through “white” mediation may not be a unique situation. Maybe it is intrinsic to most forms of colonialism but it is nonetheless particularly stark in Natal. A striking illustration of this was to be found in Inanda north of Durban at the beginning of the twentieth century. Inanda had two pioneering institutions within less than five kilometers distance: Gandhi’s Tolstoy inspired commune on one hilltop, Rev. John Dube’s, the later founder of the ANC, ran a seminary on another hilltop. Both institutions fought for the recognition of the rights of colonized people of color and both of them were to exert seminal influence on the political consciousness among Indians and Zulus respectively. There is limited evidence of regular contact between the two institutions and one finds in Gandhi’s writings only a vague sense of Zulus being potential allies in the confrontations with the colonial government of Natal. Both of them focused exclusively on demanding recognition from the colonial government, on educating their own people, and on creating pride in being Indian and Zulu, respectively. But it actually went further than that. Gandhi complained to the colonial authorities about the mixing of Africans and Indians. He ceaselessly worked for separate treatment of Indians. He also organized an ambulance corps of Indians assisting the British government during the Boer War, and again in 1906 assisting the white authorities in Natal in their bloody repression of the Bambata rebellion, the last Zulu resistance against colonial domination.2 Only in the 1950s did more regular forms of alliances and cooperation between Indian and African organizations emerge in Natal and elsewhere in South Africa. I will not get lost in political history here, but the complete lack of connection between these two institutions

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over many years seems, nonetheless, an arresting image of the relationship between the two groups. The lack of contact between the two groups was, among other things, an effect of colonial governance that, from early on, gave widely different opportunities and freedom of movement to the two categories of people. Africans were as a rule regarded as rural and were only allowed into cities like Durban and Pietermaritzburg to work for specified periods of time during which they had to carry passbooks and permits. The Indians by contrast were generally accorded the right to become quasi citizens of Durban and other urban areas like the predominantly Muslim merchant elite had been from the 1870s. Indians gave up sugarcane farming along the coast in the twentieth century. They settled in and around Durban and soon formed the bulk of the city’s working class, market gardeners, petty traders, waiters, and artisans. One of the biggest Indian areas was Cato Manor, a sprawling area of houses, little farms and factories, and informal settlements at what in the 1940s constituted the outskirts of Durban. The area was declared as “white” in 1959 and thousands of both Indians and Africans were forcibly removed to new townships further away from the city. Cato Manor has become a mythical place, a place where an organic Indian culture supposedly had developed and where people had built houses and compounds for their large extended families. The fact that Africans and Indians lived together there has only added to its mythical status. Over the years, many intellectuals and political activists have held forth Cato Manor as an example of the harmonious relationship between Indians and Africans before apartheid. A popular play called “Cato Manor Stories” was staged in the 1980s by Ronnie Govender, one of Durban’s foremost and popular playwrights (Govender 1996). Govender’s celebration of the easygoing interracial sociality of the place was not clearly supported by stories I heard from people who grew up in Cato Manor. Few of those stories ever mentioned the presence of Africans, unless specifically asked. Attempts to frame the story of Cato Manor as analogous with the mixing and tolerance of the famous District Six in Cape Town, the “Ur-home” of modern coloured culture in South Africa, have been feeble and unsuccessful. The story of Cato Manor seems largely to have been one of unequal coexistence. Legal action by Indian landowners after 1994 to reclaim their considerable landholdings in the area stood opposed to strong Zulu notions of autochthony and original land rights in the

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area, notions shared across the ANC and the Inkatha movement. This seems to suggest a rather agonistic past. Today, the area is designated for large housing projects for the thousands of illegal squatters in the city. The following fragments, told by two middle-aged men, are quite typical for the way the supposed racial harmony is remembered: We lived in this kind of compound with a number of houses where my uncles, aunties and brothers lived around a little yard. There the women would cook and we children would play. In one corner, but outside the yard there was an African family living. They rented the house and the man worked for my uncle in his little shop. We never had any problems with them—in fact we children were sometimes sent to their house with food and sweets if we had a celebration or a festival. But I remember that I thought this black man and some of the friends that came to him were very big. I guess that we boys were a little afraid of them. I did not like going down to that corner in the evening when you could hear them sing and sometimes shout very loudly.

Another man who grew up in Cato Manor related the following: My father was a gardener and every Saturday he would go to Crawford market with my uncle in their old van. I remember sitting in the front with them while our labourers, Africans, would sit on top of all the boxes with vegetables while they would sing in their language. My father would speak to them in fanagolo, ask them to unload the van and carry stuff around at the market. All day they would sit next to the stall waiting for thee next order . . . I did not speak to them, I did not know their language. But I liked their way of laughing and sometimes we played mischief and played football with old cabbages and things like that.

Most of the stories I have heard from Cato Manor seem to repeat this pattern of Africans being “intimate strangers”—living next to Indians, working for them, renting from them, or being customers in Indian shops—but never being familiar or invited into Indian homes or social gatherings. The stories are all strongly overshadowed by one event that still haunts the memories of Indians in Durban: the riots in January 1949, where African workers attacked, looted, and burnt Indian neighborhoods all over Durban over three days. The riots left almost a hundred people killed—mainly Indians—and thousands wounded and homeless. The memories of these events are still in circulation, now settled as stories and narrative frames of white instigation—that

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the “natives” were encouraged by white business men and property developers to attack the Indians in order to chase them off the land. Here we see again the mediation the relation between the two communities through the presence of white power or intrigue. Another common narrative I heard often externalized the event by making it into the doings of anonymous “people from outside”, stressing that it was neither “our blacks” or “our workers” who were involved in the attacks. These forms of externalization may be motivated by an avoidance of a personal story—too painful or intimate to narrate—or simply that the personal narrative over time has been subsumed by the larger standard narrative.3 The combination of intimacy and distance in the relationship between Africans and Indians clearly reflects that these relationships were overwhelmingly economic, and unequal. It was Indian property versus African tenants; Indian foremen versus African workers; Indian shopkeepers versus African customers, cleaners, and assistants; and so on. The distance was reflected in the use of fanagolo—the command language that developed in the mines of Johannesburg made up of Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, and Afrikaans words in a simple language without the many complex click sounds of these African languages. This was, and still is, the language that is widely use in workplaces and the language in which many Indians address Africans—although English is becoming more predominant, and simplified Zulu is used in the rural areas and inland towns in the province. Fanagolo is an unkind language, without nuances or room for complex sensibilities. It is quite simply a medium for transmission of information, full of imperatives and rude in its tone and form. In the 1990s, not least up to the historical elections in 1994, there was much talk about the “1949 syndrome” in newspapers and public debates, as if it was a collective psychological condition of the Indian community as a whole. It is beyond any doubt, however, that most Indians are very afraid of Africans, of African men in particular. A young woman, a primary school teacher, told me: You must understand that from early childhood we were always told that Africans were dangerous and that we should stay away from them. I was never afraid of the women but I never had an African friend . . . when I was in town and there was a group of African men on the sidewalk, we would cross over to the other side . . . We also never met Africans except as workers or people who were cleaning and things like

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that. Here in Chatsworth we never saw a black face except as the work gangs that were brought in to do various jobs . . . So most of us here know nothing about Africans, how they live and what they think. I have never been to Umlazi and to be honest, I don’t feel like going there.

Africans have worked as domestic workers for Indians for a long time and even families with modest incomes could afford to have a maid, at least a couple of times a week. However, live-in maids was never as common as in white suburbs, partly because it was more difficult for Africans to get a permit to live in an Indian township during apartheid, and partly because many Indians did not like the idea of Africans living in their homes and preferred not seeing them on the streets of what in the 1960 had become a new purely Indian space of the townships. A commonly used term for Africans is “ravans,” referring to the black demon king in the Ramayan who kidnapped Lord Ram’s wife Sita and who is big, fearsome, proud, and strong and belongs to another world, his kingdom in the South. The term is apt in many ways as it captures the fundamental sense in which the African world is seen as alien, distant, threatening, violent—peopled by strong and violent sexual predators consumed by uncontrolled bodily drives. It is a world seen as fundamentally undesirable and unrefined in terms of food, rituals, language, and custom—a world often described as being close to and intertwined with an awesome, extreme, and brutal African nature. While derived from European forms of exoticism and primitivism, Indian views of Africans seem devoid of the attraction towards nature and the innocence of the primitive that remains at the heart of “white” paternalist relationship with African culture and customs. Most Indians see the African worlds as hostile but also as essentially unknowable and unfathomable, a mass of dark matter where the dialectic of recognition stops as it reflects nothing; the gaze is simply absorbed and disappears in a world of magic, demons, and sorcery that is too scary and too unattractive to even begin to comprehend. Likewise, black faces are seen as expressionless, as surfaces that do not reflect anything comprehensible, as if they belong to a different but also original, autochthonous and therefore immensely powerful world. It is a world close to nature that will not recognize an Indian, will pose a physical threat to Indians, and where only the supposed cunning and brutality of “the white man” is respected. Such ideas resonate disturbingly well with widespread hostility and nonrecognition of Indians among many Zulus. Here, Indians are

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often referred to as parasites, thieves, as people who pretend to be white but do not deserve the respect given to whites, as aliens, and as gluttonous unmanly cowards. When an editorial in the largest Zulu daily Illanga in 1999 called for “a new Idi Amin to be born from the womb of a Zulu woman,” it undoubtedly reflected a mindset that is more widespread than the official denials would have it; a mindset that viewed Indians as opportunistic “fence-sitters,” as people who live of the land without having rights to it. In 1985, the old Indian free-holding area around Gandhi’s settlement in Inanda, north of Durban was invaded and taken over by groups of Zulus. Thousands of Indians lost everything, were displaced and lived in camps in nearby Indian townships for many months after, while the historical buildings in the Phoenix settlement were burned down. The area soon became a big informal settlement marred by bloody factional fighting and clashes between Inkatha and the ANC. Only in the last few years has the old settlement been reconstructed and made into a national monument. But no Indians have returned to their properties and the area has not been declared open for legal claims of restitution and compensation for loss of property during apartheid. These events served to reinforce Indian ideas of African unpredictability, aggressiveness, and danger, and the fear of homes and property being taken away. While such events often are portrayed as natural calamities, rationales are sometimes sought in “white” instigation, supposedly seeking to prevent alliances between Africans and Indians. Again, the white presence seems to be the only factor that can create intelligibility between the two groups. Racist ideology holds that the body is the site of both biological and historical truth and destiny. You can speak many languages, change your religion, your nationality, your habits, and you can imagine yourself into a new community, but you cannot change your race. This is what racial ideology will hold: that race is positive, embodied, objective, genetic, the ultimate fixation of identity. Yet, as we know, schemes of racial classification were always haunted by the impossible fixation of pure types and by worries about miscegenation and its outcomes—the mestiz, the quadroon, the creole, and so on. Ideologues and administrators of racial orders, from Gobineau to colonial officials, doctors, and scientists, were always obsessed with sexuality, desire and the forbidden dangers of racial mixture, as authors like Ann Stoler and Robert Young have shown so well in other colonial contexts (Stoler 1995; Young 1995).

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Race is commonly seen as something fundamental in the blood and the visible body, traces of which can never be fully concealed, erased, or changed by speech, education, or bodily comportment. Racial discourses and practices thus have certain stubborn qualities to them that tend to resist their dissolution into a contingent creation of the mind or to the effects of powerful discourse. It is as if the obviousness of color and physical appearance, or what Fanon calls the “fact of blackness,” resists full symbolization or understanding. Color and its perplexing sets of connotations can perhaps be captured by Lacan’s notion of the “real,” that is, that hard kernel that cannot be fully understood and fathomed and therefore becomes the site of countless forms of enjoyment and fantasy. Perceptions of race are thus suspended between naturalized notions of what you “really” are (blood, genes, inheritances, and dispositions) and performative registers of clothing, hairstyles, skin coloring, tanning, and bleaching that package, pronounce, or conceal the supposedly natural “facts” of hair, bodily form, and pigmentation. However futile such attempts at “fixating” or transforming the racial markers on bodies may be, they nonetheless reinforce one inescapable conclusion: that racial identities and anxieties are lodged in the body and constantly revolve around sex and procreation. The archive of ideas and stereotypes around the black body as primitive and oversexualized is well known. Suffice it to say here that one of the driving motives behind the infamous Immorality Act enforced by the apartheid state was to separate white women from the dangers and temptations of the supposedly oversexed black male body. Judging from my conversations with hundreds of people over the years, there is no doubt that much of this complex of stereotypes and fear of black sexuality has been internalized by Indians in South Africa. This complex merged quite seamlessly with cultural notions of purity, pollution, and a preference for endogamous marriages that Indians brought with them from the subcontinent. On the Indian subcontinent, caste is also based on ideologies of transfer of blood and essences and accompanied by elaborate popular ideas of sophistication and beauty associated with fair skin, and corresponding ideas of the coarse and unrefined nature of those with dark skin. There is no doubt that practices of caste and endogamy only have consolidated the predominance of racial ideas among Indians. Apartheid’s “compression” and racialization of Indians in separate areas and institutions contributed to preserve distinctions and practices that otherwise might have disappeared, or become less important. Marriages between

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Tamil- and Hindi-speaking people, for instance, have only become widespread in the 1990s. Physical separation arguably also reinforced the racial stereotypes and anxieties that already existed. There are hardly any marriages between Indians and Africans recorded, whereas the number of marriages between Cape Coloured and Indians—as well as between whites and Indians—now are on the increase. Marriages involving a white person are today widely accepted among Indians and rarely commented upon, except in terms of questions of the religion of the children. If such a marriage involves a white man of low status, the chastity of the Indian woman may be seen as slightly dubious, however. Marriages or unions involving colored or Africans invariably elicit qualifying or apologetic comments like, “But he is very fair skinned,” “His hair is straight,” “He is tall and handsome,” and often mention the education or wealth of the man concerned. Indian men marrying coloured women is a far less controversial affair, especially if the girl is beautiful and the man is educated or of financial means. Finally, Indian men marrying white women are still seen as being a part of taking a step up the social ladder, as if it in itself was a proof of the ambition and resolve of the man. Racial anxieties are, in other words, invariably centered on the physical security and chastity of Indian women and girls but also on physical security more generally. In the following, I shall focus on how the anxieties generated by the new postapartheid city are played out in terms of (1) the uses of public space; (2) the space of the “youth”— schools and the street; (3) practices of policing and vigilante activities. In all three cases, the sense of pollution from the outside is closely linked with a fear of losing respectability in the township—that the working class “charou culture,” with its supposedly weak moral foundations, easily falls prey to new and immoral practices.

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Let me now turn to some ethnographic details of the township of Chatsworth. The township was created in the early 1960s as a flagship in the new spatial regime introduced with the Group Areas Act that was to permanently separate the residential areas of the country’s four racial groups. Thousands of families were moved from the more organically grown Indian areas, such as Cato Manor, to what the city

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council called a new hygienic form of living in the modern and planned township. In an almost textbook Foucauldian fashion, the Indian townships were, for decades, administered directly by the city’s health department on the grounds that Indians were known for their “unhygienic living.” There were three categories of houses, all affordable and subsidized: small apartments in council housing given to the poorest; small semidetached two-bedroom houses to the working class, and independent plots where houses could be built. The housing types were distributed over the entire township in separate neighborhoods. The innermost areas in the township, nearest the adjacent white areas, were middle-class areas with independent houses, then came the average areas, and the housing estates further out, at the brink of the township, overlooking the Umlass River and the huge Umlazi township. The idea of the Indian township as a buffer between white and black was put into practice, with the poorer—the charous—as the outer rim near the Africans, and the proper and middle-class Indians next to the (working-class) whites. As intended, the township became racially pure, except for one area in unit two at the rim of Chatsworth. A community of several thousand so-called “Zanzibaris”—black Muslims who were descendant of slaves brought from Zanzibar in the nineteenth century, were moved to Chatsworth after sustained pressure from elite Muslim circles in Durban who had put this small group under their paternalist protection. The group was settled next to the large council estates in the area—the poorest area in Chatsworth, a center for drug trade, and the home of many of the Urdu-speaking poorer Muslims in the township—but integration proved complicated (Seedat 1973). The rhetoric of Islamic brotherhood could not transcend race and cultural difference and in the 1980s, the Zanzibaris were given a separate mosque at a hilltop overlooking the river, and an imam from Malawi was hired to create a separate congregation. The Zanzibari community did, however, have a strong internal organization for many years and the few educated men and the local imam were able to control and regulate the behavior of the younger men who were a matter of concern to authorities and local Indian leaders. “We came as guests to this place,” Abobaker, an elderly community leader, told me. “The community here had accommodated us so we felt we had to fit in and behave properly. Now, we feel more at home but we have lost some of the respect that we enjoyed among the younger generation. But that is the same all over Chatsworth—the

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policeman, the teacher, the Imam—no one is respected these days. So many people now stay in this area, people who are not Muslims, they just come over from Umlazi and hide among our black people—but what can we do about it?” What Abobaker referred to was the massive growth in the number of Africans living in Chatsworth that began in the 1990s. The regulation of movement of people of color—another cornerstone of apartheid—was coming apart in the 1980s and smaller groups of squatters began to appear in various parts of the township. Nobody objected as long as they were small in number or seen as domesticated through Islam as in the case of the Zanzibaris. I lived in an adjacent neighborhood that had a small industrial area with workshops and some warehouses. Around this area were modest independent houses and some row houses as well. In the late 1980s, some of the employers in the area had given some of their workers permission to build little shacks on an open ground between two warehouses. The families of the workers came to live with them and some of the women began to work as domestics in the nearby houses. By 1993, the little colony had grown to about two hundred families. In 1994, the year of the formal demise of apartheid, the city authorities decided to act after many complaints from residents in nearby areas who complained about African “vagrants” at night in the streets. A shootout killing a person in the local bottle store that still is one of the hangouts for the workers from settlement seemed to confirm the picture of the African settlement as the origin of violence and crime. Bulldozers were brought in and the owners of the property were given notice that they should see to that the illegal occupants were removed. However, informed by a mixture of interests in keeping their workers and domestics conveniently near, and inspired by the heady atmosphere of transformation and change of 1994, the local Indian residents formed pickets and prevented the bulldozers from clearing the area. The administration decided not to escalate the conflict and after ANC won the national election a few months later, forced removals came to a standstill. Since then the settlement has grown. Most of the people in the streets of this locality are now Africans and the local residents are no longer familiar with the faces, as they used to be in the recent past. “It has become a transit-camp—people move in and out all the time. They bring in their relatives and once they are here they find a

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job or somewhere else to live in Chatsworth. That way more and more people are coming. We can’t keep track of who is coming and going. They all look the same, especially at night when all this happens,” a local resident told me. “You should not walk in the streets here. Use your car, then you won’t be bothered by the dogs,” my friend told me after I had walked the relatively short distance to his house where I indeed was harassed, not by Africans, but by big dogs trained to be hostile to everything that walks in the streets. Many local residents now regret that action in 1994 as they now faced a marked depreciation of the value of their houses and apartments. Most people kept big dogs, houses all had tall fences, and the area soon had two shebeens and several bottle stores, visited by the hour by heavily armed men in fast cars working for the private security company that the local ratepayers association have contracted to take care of security in the neighborhood.4 The local shopping complex had two general stores, a bottle store, a video shop, and a pawnbroker. All of the shops are heavily fortified and the shop attendants and shopkeepers work behind two sets of iron bars. In “Moodley’s Superette,” Mr. Moodley serves his customers through a little opening, one foot by one foot, while the customers, mostly Africans, look at the goods through the sturdy grid of his security fence. “I have been robbed more often than I would like to remember,” Mr. Moodley said. “I never keep much money here . . . but as you can see these people never buy for more than five or ten rand. My Indian customers don’t come anymore, they go to the big supermarkets and you only have these youngsters buying a cold drink and some cigarettes.” The parking lot in front of the shops was a favorite place for African men to gather after work to have a drink and a chat. In the weekends, it often became a rather volatile place with frequent fights, broken bottles, and occasional shootouts. “It is all because of these two bottle stores. Where you sell booze you have problems . . . and these darkies . . . Well our own people are no angels but if these people make 20 rand one day, they will go and spend it on their friends in the evening. That is why they are so poor, they never think of tomorrow. At least our Indians have the decency to feed their children and keep a nice house . . . but these people, I don’t understand them,” Mr. Moodley told me. The playground on the other side of the road had also become a popular place for African workers to rest in the shade. In the daytime,

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groups of women and schoolgirls would sit there or rest in the midday heat, at night young men drank, chatted, and smoked dagga (local hashish) on the playground. The local ratepayers association demanded, but in vain, that one of the liquor shops should close down, but rumor had it that the owner, a retired policeman, paid off his former colleagues to leave him alone. This was but a microcosm of the situation around the edges of the big township where large informal settlements with thousands of huts and informal dwellings have emerged. Street corners, local shopping complexes, and the small patches of playground and recreational space that used to be the pride of many people in Chatsworth did now become the battle ground where civic organizations, security companies, and the city council fought over the future character of the township. Also the Zanzibari area in unit two had become a problem and was seen by many Indians in the area as a “bridgehead” for what a local man called a “black invasion of our Chatsworth.” The “Zansi” area was furthermore seen as an epicenter for trade in drugs, mainly mandrax, dagga, and crack. Community leaders and police officers routinely associated the drug trade with the presence of Africans— conveniently forgetting that unit two had been a center for drug trade for decades. Durban’s most notorious drug market is to this day to be found in the heart of an upmarket predominantly Muslim neighborhood near the city center. The battle over the character of the township revolved around the collision between two competing understandings of entitlement. One understanding revolved around the widespread sense of Chatsworth as a proper Indian space—a space that, according to many residents, was transformed from barren land to “our place” as the result of the initiative and self-help of its residents often in the face of adverse conditions such as being forced to pay rates almost twice as high as those applying to white areas. The older residents who recalled the forced removals and the loss of their ancestral home took inordinate pride in the fact that Chatsworth had become a relatively green and liveable place with many amenities. They felt that they had earned the right to enjoy the relative safety and pleasure they associated with living in an “Indian” space. In this generation, one found a distinct unease with the presence of Africans in public spaces of the township and a pronounced fear of crime, muggings, and hijacking of cars that also had become part of everyday life in Chatsworth. In a place previously renowned for its low crime rate, this was widely perceived as Africans

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targeting Indians—”We are soft targets, Indians don’t put up a fight, not like the whites,” as a standard saying went. This version of Chatsworth’s history was also essentially the tale of charou culture— how the move to Chatsworth enabled a working-class family to get their own house, expand it, make it their own place, and enjoy life in the ethnic-racial enclave. All that was now under threat and the comfort and sense of security had already disappeared. This sentiment goes a long way to explain the distinct hostility to the ANC in Chatsworth—the party received less than 20 percent of the votes, mainly in middleclass areas—and the preference for conservative-liberal parties like the Minority Front and the Democratic Party. The other understanding revolved around the relative privilege of the Indians during the apartheid period at the expense of African communities. In this narrative promoted by the ANC and left-leaning well-educated Indians, the residents of Chatsworth and other formerly Indian townships should be prepared to share some of their amenities and resources with the majority population and Indians should stop complaining about the loss of privilege. This had in fact become the policy of the government and the city council. Schools were open to all, and the informal settlements were being regularized and replaced by little brick houses set up on patches of vacant land, making thousands of Africans legitimate residents in the township with access to water, sanitation, and transport. Several municipal councilors who have supported this endeavor had lost their seats in recent elections. Many Indian residents saw this as a pure party-political move, sponsored by the ANC in order for the party to gain a foothold in the township and in order to deliver some of the promises to their African supporters at the expense of hapless charous. “Why don’t they move them into white neighborhoods?” people would ask in informal conversations. “There is more space.” The answer to this was partly that effective vigilante groups patrolled white neighborhoods with the sole purpose of keeping Africans out, and partly that the new social and economic elites in the country had no interest in changing the character of the leafy upmarket suburbs they now had become residents of. The strong nexus between the ANC and the informal settlements was indeed confirmed during the elections in 1999, when half-empty meetings in Chatsworth were filled with singing and dancing African supporters bussed in from the informal settlements. This meant in turn that Indians stayed away from these meetings altogether. A similar

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thing happened in July 2001, when Mandela’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in Durban. In an attempt to attract support for ANC, the stadium in Chatsworth was chosen as location and the organizers believed that the epic scenes of 1994, where thousands of Indians almost stampeded to see Mandela at the same location, would be repeated. They had underestimated the aversion to the ANC and the depth of the fear most Indians have of being in a crowd of thousands of Africans. The result was a half-empty stadium mainly with Africans coming from the settlements and from nearby Umlazi. Although Mandela is almost universally loved and respected also in Chatsworth, most of my friends and informants did not even consider attending the day-long free program of music and entertainment at the stadium because they knew in advance that it would be a predominantly black audience. “You may get killed in a crowd like that,” I was told by a friend. “To be honest I don’t feel comfortable when they start dancing and toy-toying . . . they also speak at the top of their voice and the music is loud . . . it is too much for me,” said another Indian, a longstanding ANC member. Younger people in the township told me that, because the music and the dance would be mainly African, they would not like to go. The only item that seemed interesting to younger Indians was some of the Kwaito bands from Johannesburg. But in the end, the idea of the physical danger associated with large numbers of African bodies remained the decisive factor that kept most local residents away.

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The taxi industry has in the last decade emerged as a very important locus of both crime and of the reproduction of the notion of blackness—as body culture, music, and style. Taxis are also associated with danger and fascination within a new and hedonistic youth culture that is beginning to cut across class and colour (Hansen 2005b). The enjoyment of the new possibilities of the postapartheid city—its nightlife, the public parks, the city center, and the beaches that used to be exclusively for whites—have largely been spearheaded by a new generation that has been called the “party-people,” as opposed to the people of the party, that is, the older and more politicized generation that resisted apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. This emergent youth culture and its more overtly sexualized styles of dress, appearance, and entertainment have generated considerable moral panic among community leaders, teachers, and religious leaders. At

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stake in a place like Chatsworth is the most cherished ideological object of all, the Indian family, the transmitter of values, chastity, and solidarity across the generations. While the notion of the extended family ceased to be a sociological reality in the 1960s—in part due to a systematic housing policy that favored smaller nuclear families—it remains a powerful ideological force, not least when confronted with the forms of sociality and sexuality that have developed in African townships (see Hansen 2005b). A crucial chapter in this ongoing drama around the question of sexuality and “family values” has unfolded around the secondary schools in Chatsworth. The biggest secondary school in the area I stayed in was Chatsworth High. Its history and current problems is like a microcosm of the township. In the 1970s and early 1980s, this school was known as one of the best Indian high schools in Durban because of the presence of highly motivated teachers and equally motivated parents, many of whom were climbing the social ladder in that period. A long serving teacher at the school described the mood in that period as defiant and determined. We Indians knew we could not go anywhere and we could never teach at the white institutions. Many of us were radicals and most of us still are with the ANC in spite of all that has happened. So we decided to beat the system from within, to become the best and overtake the whites academically. Although the curriculum set for Indians was more demanding, more drill and senseless stuff to be learnt by heart, our school came out as one of the top achievers in the country for several consecutive years.

As Indian elite areas developed elsewhere, Chatsworth High appeared less attractive, and after the racial strictures on schools were lifted in 1994, a large number of middle-class children moved to the formerly white schools. Chatsworth High now got students from its local area, mostly very poor Indian families in the council housing estates, from the Zanzibari section and from the informal settlements where most of the African children hardly have any knowledge of English. There were now more than 50 percent African students in the school. Many of them told me that they have been sent from Umlazi or even from the north coast to live with relatives there because of the attractions of education in Durban. Indian schools are still considered some of the best in the city; Indian teachers are highly respected and the schools in Chatsworth generally charge low school fees.

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The school is today riddled by massive social and disciplinary problems. In spite of a tall fence with barbed wire around the entire compound, a massive gate, and multiple security guards, burglaries and vandalism have become common. The few computers have been stolen, many windows are broken, and the run down state of the solid buildings bears witness to the effects of drastically reduced budgets for such “historically advantaged institutions,” as all formerly Indian schools have been classified. The school has massive disciplinary problems and the local police carry out frequent surprise searches for guns, knives, and drugs. Male teachers admitted that they were afraid of confronting some of the big African boys out of fear of being overpowered and that they found it difficult to discipline the African boys in physical education classes. Several of the female teachers admitted that they found it very difficult to deal with the very sexually charged atmosphere in the schoolyard and in classrooms. Many girls, both Indian and African, wore their school uniform dresses as very short miniskirts and jokes and contact between the sexes was very direct. Often students would disappear for hours, going to bars, having sex, or watching X-rated movies; some girls were known to be prostitutes from the age of fourteen or fifteen, and drug dealing in the school was rampant and difficult to control. Based on conversations with students and my frequent visits there, it became clear to me that none of this actually involved interracial relations. Students would establish friendships in school across the racial boundaries, especially the girls, but it would not develop into friendships outside the gate, and even more rarely into interracial relationships of love or sex. On the outside, lives became largely separate in terms of which corners students were hanging out, the fashion in clothes, and the style of music they preferred. As a girl explained to me, “It is hard to say why it is but we feel more at ease with Indians— it is the Indian thing—you know the way of talking (they don’t understand any of it), our jokes, our food and spices, bhangra and the films as well. How can they understand any of that? It is a charou thing” (all the other Indian students laughed at that punch line). Similarly, the knowledge of and interest in the African worlds they lived so close to was minimal among the Indian students, except for kwaito and soccer. Even the discos and clubs in Durban remained almost completely racially divided, except for a certain mixing between whites and Indians. Many teachers and parents saw the changes in the schools, the disciplinary problems and the sexualization of the teenage culture as a

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direct result of the entry of African students into Indian schools. They saw it as a threat to Indian girls and saw the sexualization as something utterly alien to “Indian culture.” However, as a group of Indian students from the school explained to me in the most disarming manner, it is all happening because “there are too many charous in the school.” One of the boys, seventeen years old with two gold teeth and a firm resolve to own his own nightclub one day and definitely a charou himself, put it succinctly: We always blame the darkies, but they work harder in school than most of the Indians. I live in the flats, I know these charous, they just want to cheat, to get by without work, to drink and do drugs. In my block there are twelve families and I only know one ou [guy] there who has a regular job. If you have anything and is doing good they will pull you down, cast a spell on you or something. We charous always pull each other down. So why study and get a job if you get by in other ways. I ask myself, why am I here? My friends have money but I don’t.

The perceived African menace, and the anxieties that the presence of large numbers of Africans clearly created in many Indians, revolved around the notion of the naturally strong, aggressive African body seen as superior to soft and weak Indian bodies. It was also clear that a constant displacement took place between race and class: the many different effects of “charoufication” of Chatsworth, and the general liberalization of laws and cultural attitudes in postapartheid South Africa, were attributed to the presence of Africans in a variety of forms. Such anxieties converged in repeated rumors and collective hysteria in February 1999 over alleged attacks by African students on Indian students in Chatsworth with syringes filled with HIV-positive blood. By 1998, the full scale of the rapidly developing AIDS pandemic in South Africa was becoming clear, and it was furthermore clear that the province of Kwazulu Natal and the city of Durban was the epicenter in the country, with infection rates among pregnant women running as high as a staggering 45 percent. This reporting was accompanied by a number of stories in the city’s newspapers about young HIV-positive Africans who told the journalist that “they did not care anymore, and that if they were going to die, they would take others with them.” This theme of a dreaded African revenge and a general white and Indian anxiety about walking in the city center of Durban, now widely regarded as “black” territory, led to rumors of

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white women being stabbed with AIDS-infected needles. These stories instantly became urban legends. They were never corroborated and the police never identified any perpetrators or any needles or syringes. In February 1999, one “stabbing incident” was reported at a school in Chatsworth and in the following days, students from many schools, almost exclusively girls, reported that they too had been stabbed, or that they had felt a certain pain in their neck or arms. It seemed like a concerted attack on Indian girls and after Post, the biggest Indian weekly, ran the story on the front page, parents, school principals, and chairmen of the governing bodies all over Chatsworth demanded swift action from the authorities. Several principals called in the police to make searches for syringes and a number of male African students were suspended from several schools on suspicions of having carried out these “racially motivated attacks” as they were called in the Indian newspapers. Some of the concerned parents kept their children away from school for days and weeks. Chatsworth High also had an incident, but the principal did not panic. Instead, a doctor was called and, after an examination of the girl who claimed to have been stabbed, the doctor found a tiny little spot on her shoulder that seemed to have been made by a sharpened pencil. Investigations were carried out at several schools but not a single syringe was ever found, no students were ever identified with marks form a syringe, or with a sudden HIV infection (which could have other causes), and no pupils were ever identified as culprits. The affair died as quickly as it had risen and is today referred to with halfembarrassed smiles from teachers and principals, some of whom maintain that “some kind of stabbing must have occurred in the first place.” However, the whole affair seemed to be generated from pure conjecture, a somatic effect (the sting felt by students) generated by compounded fears of the threat of contamination by the black bodies in the school. The affair also indicated how the widespread notion of AIDS as a “black thing” confirms and recycles ideas of the black body as unrestrained and oversexualized, and how it adds a medical and apparently objective aspect to the longstanding construction of black bodies as contaminated and polluting entities.

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R ACIAL F RONTIER

The equation of the high visibility of young African men in the streets was in Chatsworth, as elsewhere, translated into a sign of danger and insecurity that quickly gripped the township. This happened regardless of the fact that a very substantial proportion of the serious felonies and killings in the townships indeed were committed by local Indians. Gun ownership had increased dramatically among Indians after 1994 and this had led to a dramatic increase in domestic violence, not least the so-called “love-murders”—the killing of young Indian women by jealous lovers and husbands who find it difficult to accept the more independent lifestyle of younger Indian women. This was as evident from interviews with police, security guards, and the extensive reporting in local newspapers, as it was certain that the perception of swart gevaar (black danger) nonetheless remained the unassailable truth of any discussion on crime and security. From 1997 onwards, Community Policing Forums (CPFs) began to be established throughout the country. The idea was that policing now was to be carried out in a collaboration between local “communities” and the police. Local “citizens,” a term that did not sit too comfortably for some time, were to assist the police and act as their ears and eyes. Underneath this initiative were two assumptions: (1) only the mobilization of the local communities could check the crime rate, check the excesses of the police, as well as force the police to actually carry out their duties; and (2) the CPFs would carry out the fundamental symbolic task of constituting the “people” and the body of citizens as the new sovereign power on whose behalf the police should work. The many meetings of the Chatsworth Community Policing Forum were never a great success. Police officers were reluctant to come and found it extremely difficult to sit through long sessions, patiently listening to the barrage of complaints and demands coming from a range of people who, in various ways, claimed to represent the “community.” Some were the former foes of the police—ANC activists and others active in the antiapartheid movement; others were local self-styled leaders, religious figures, etc., whose claims to leadership and local authority often were extremely tenuous. The meetings soon turned into arenas where the very right to represent the “community,” and in which style, became the bone of contention. ANC people occupied a natural moral high ground (at least

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in the first few years) and they were listened to much more attentively by the police officers than the many local leaders. Yet, their authority was far from accepted in a place where the ANC at the best of times had enjoyed support from a quarter of the population. Soon, ongoing debates about the changing character of the township, the influx of Africans, the large number of African children at local schools, and general anxieties about Indian identity in postapartheid South Africa began to dominate the agenda of these meetings. A new station commander who recently had converted to a Pentecostalist church began to decorate his office with Christian symbols and it soon became known as the “station church.” He would pray loudly and publicly, also at roll calls, and it was alleged that he discriminated against non-Christian policemen. For more than a year, members of the CPF (predominantly middle class, mostly Hindu) were up in arms against what they saw as an undue mixing of religion and public office. They found it objectionable that the commander was overtly Christian and thus not a proper Indian in their view, disregarding the fact that, in the poorer sectors of the townships, almost 50 percent of the population were Christians by 2002. The issue was, in other words, who is a citizen? Who constituted the sovereign community that had the right to protect itself and be protected by the police in the name of democracy and rights? Was the average charou also a citizen and a member of the community? Could an African at all be considered a citizen in this township? Who should the community protect itself against and by what means? These questions became actualized as the issue of citizen’s patrols was raised—based on successful experiences from predominantly white areas. It was clear to most members of the CPF that the police itself was unable and unwilling to carry out the task of policing at night and it was decided to call upon volunteers to sign up for night shifts. Civil patrols were not supposed to carry firearms and should just alert the police in case of house breaking or suspicious activity, in other words, act like the ears and eyes of the police. Many of those signing up had very definite and set ideas of what and where they were policing: the target was young black men threatening middle-class areas and Indian women. There was a distinct reluctance among the volunteers to police and patrol in poor Indian areas that already were known as centers of drug trading. In practice, the citizen-vigilantes merely put into practice the widespread idea of the proper Indian “community”: good, respectable, taxpaying owners of property. The

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responsibility for organizing these patrols were indeed left to the ratepayers associations—the spearheads of the old “civics” movement that successfully had boycotted and obstructed the workings of the municipal authorities for years prior to 1994. The patrols quickly attracted a mixed group of volunteers—some with questionable motives and a history of encounters with the police force, others were driven by strong religious and ethical motives of revenge and violent protection of family and property. A number of radicalized Muslims, many of whom had been involved in the shortlived launching of PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante group formed in Cape Town in the mid-1990s) in Durban now got involved in the neighborhood policing. One of them was Ahmed, the owner of a small workshop, and his son Shahid. Ahmed described himself as a Tablighi (which in South Africa means allegiance not just to the quietist, conservative global lay movement Tablighi Jamaat, but more generally to the scripturalist and conservative Deobandi interpretation of Islam). Ahmed had a weapons license and felt strongly about defending the community and his family. He said, “In Islam the man is expected to defend his family and to protect women and children. A man who fails to do that is a man without honour, a man without courage, someone who cannot be trusted . . . In doing this I show my son what it means to be a Muslim.” Father and son would show up in their 2.5-ton truck, in boots, camouflage trousers, black jackets, and caps with La ilaha illa Allah—there is no deity but God—written in golden Arabic letters. Shahid, who studied Arabic every day after college, was excited about these night patrols and managed to get a number of his friends involved as well— most of them belonging to the same class in his local madrasah. Another new recruit was Shaun, a young man from a Tamil family that converted to Christianity some years back. There were several members of Shaun’s church (he insisted on never using his Tamil name) active in the patrols, but Shaun was the most articulate with regard to the duty of defending the neighborhood: There is so much evil in this world, not least in South Africa at the moment . . . the people we arrest are not evil people but I believe that they are possessed by evil forces and demons that make them steal and rape. They don’t steal because they are poor—most poor people are good people, they steal because they have lost their will and sense of pride . . . We have to stop them and detain them. People say that we

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should not beat them up, but you have seen in our church what people do when the demons take them . . . we have to be firm and strong and show the demons who are the strongest. That is the only way we can help the criminals.

The net result of the influx of these new, overly keen vigilantes was not a sense of security but rather a new insecurity. Visible policing or flaunting of public authority had vanished and instead these maverick and self-styled defenders of “the community” had taken over. The patrols got involved in a range of intractable and unpredictable activities. Some volunteers were highly unreliable and often risk-averse, while others armed themselves and went into situations and attempted arrests that resulted in shootings and savage beatings of young Africans. Some members of the patrols felt the entire situation got out of hand and the invisibility of the patrols and their increasingly freebooting nature made it apparent that law enforcement rapidly was disentangling itself from any accountability or even nominal oversight by the police and slipping into the hands of what began to resemble vigilante groups. For some residents, this amounted to a form of “category-confusion”—a mixing and conflation of worlds and realms of experience that should be kept separate. Remarks like “This is not a job for ordinary citizens,” “They don’t have the training to do this,” and “We need to be protected by professional people,” abounded in everyday conversations on security. The sight of your neighbor or uncle on patrol in the evenings did not necessarily produce a sense of security. On the contrary, it was almost as if it “profaned” an activity that many people preferred to be left somewhat opaque and handled by more anonymous “professionals.” Characteristically, it was not the police that called for an end to this short-lived experiments. It was ANC members who were alarmed by what they saw as the rise of a range of unaccountable practices, as well as the emergence of a regime of random terror exercised by fear-stricken, angry, and inexperienced family fathers. The alternative was obvious and almost tailor-made: a number of private security firms were now operating in Chatsworth and most of their employees were former policemen who had left the force disgusted with what is officially known as the new “human rights culture” promoted by the South African state. Soon, and on the recommendation of the CPF, the ratepayers associations in Chatsworth signed contracts with a range of security firms. Their job was to provide

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protection at night, visible policing in the daytime, including patrolling around schools to prevent drug dealers from entering through holes in the fences, etc. This seemed to provide a solution that removed the responsibility from inexperienced and frightened volunteers. It put the policemen back in charge of what Walter Benjamin called “the savage law making violence”—not formally but in practice—while Benjamin’s other category, “the law preserving violence,” remained in the hands of the police service that still held the formal monopoly of violence: arrests, charging, prosecution, incarceration, etc (Benjamin 1978, 277–300). During their operations, the security guards “withhold” or “detain” the suspects, collect “evidence”—making quick notes on the damage done, the effects stolen, and the possession of any weapons— and, in the morning, deliver them to the police station “prepared,” as the term goes, that is, beaten up. The policemen record the facts and decide whether to formally arrest the suspects. In most cases, there is insufficient evidence, or reluctance on part of the police, to detain suspects as this requires more elaborate paperwork, justification, collection of evidence, calling of witnesses, and later probing questions from the public prosecutor’s office. The security guards work as legally licensed firms. They are heavily armed—better than the police—and often schooled in the old style of policing in South Africa. Like their old colleagues in the police force, they agree that arrest and formal prosecutions have become much too cumbersome. One of the security guards told me, “The police are not allowed to do the work they should do. How can we get them to confess their crimes if we can’t lay our hands on them?” Instead of formal punishment, the security firms administer their own form of justice on the spot or in their vans by beating the young suspects. “We have to show them who is the boss around here, that they can’t get away with anything . . . someone has to do the dirty work and the police aren’t capable of it anymore,” a guard told me. The beatings go on with complete impunity, condoned and encouraged by the police, tacitly approved by the local community organizations that only take action if Indians are beaten up or wrongfully harassed by the firms. The local homeowners encourage the security firms to punish young housebreakers, or those merely picked up on suspicion of crimes, that is, withheld on the “assumption of criminal intent” as the new operative quasi-legal category goes.

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This leaves the young black men virtually defenseless, often scared and very violent. Needless to say, this only adds to the already ongoing cycle of violence that can turn a relatively harmless house burglary into a scene of killing and extreme violence. The security firms have several offices and control rooms receiving emergency calls from customers and from people in the neighborhood. Every night shift sees several alarm calls and cases of shootouts, either inside houses or outside houses as burglars flee the premises and are pursued by the security personnel. Most of the guards are seasoned, cynical, and battle-hardened former policemen. Many of them showed me gunshot wounds and were quite proud of their role as local warriors defending the community against attack, literally defending the border between the Indian and the African world. Few of them thought much about the causes of the crime they dealt with. For them, crime was entirely naturalized and racialized, that is, black bodies were seen as inherently criminal and naturally unrestrained. The widespread fact of violent crimes committed by local Indians were almost written out of the picture. “Most of the crimes among Indians happen in homes and we don’t deal with domestic disturbances,” the chief security officer explained. Many of these crimes involve firearms and severe abuse of women and children. Yet they were seen as domestic in a double sense, inside homes and inside the community, and thus a form of law preserving violence that upheld patriarchal control, and cultural codes.

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Having drawn this somewhat bleak picture of the compulsions and anxieties of everyday life in this particular township, the inevitable question is, how do ordinary people deal with these dramatic changes, these multiple senses of loss and the melancholia it has produced? The answer is simple and perhaps suprising: they laugh at themselves and their own past. The comical object is the figure of the charou, the simpleminded Indian who does not really get it, a living anachronism, an unwanted leftover from colonialism. For decades, the Bollywood film songs remained the visceral heart of the community, requiring a sense of colloquialisms, memories of weddings and family gatherings, and insider perspectives to be fully

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appreciated. The film music marked a zone of the truly ethnic-popular, a zone of enjoyment and jouissance, a license to indulge in things Indian without excuses, a strong sense of marking “our space” by playing “our tunes”—an indulgence in the ethnic always more associated with the charou culture of the working class, but also shared with the Indian middle class. This zone of cultural intimacy remains strongly associated with superstition, gullibility, funny accents, ridiculous submission to the white baas, excessive drinking, and thus often a source of embarrassment (see Hansen 2005a). Although charouness is firmly nested in the working-class culture of the townships, it is also a performative category that does not just disappear with education or a new house. Many of the successful Indians who have left the townships have a nostalgic recollection of the township and their childhood. These are memories of a haven of mutual support, care, and security where people did not have to lock their doors and where crime and violence was associated with the physically adjacent, but socially immensely distant African townships. Advertising, newspaper columns, and talk shows refer to the culture of the township charou as something simple, crude, or even quaint, but yet honest and unpretentious, unlike the charmed live of the aspiring middle class. In the view of the successful Indians, charoudom— funny accents, crude manners, simple food, and badly performed Hindi pop—signifies the Indianness they have left behind in order to embrace a modern, diasporic, and purer Indian identity. For the aspiring middle classes, charou culture is deeply ambivalent. It is ridiculed in much stand-up comedy and community theater, and despised when appearing in glimpses in the behavior, or speech, of people thought to be “cultured.” Yet, charoudom is also half-secretly enjoyed and even celebrated as “our” past, the ethnic thing that is truly ours and therefore object of both intense enjoyment and simultaneous disavowal. Let me dwell for a moment on the issue of the accents that continue to be a central element in everyday joking, stand-up comedy, and on radio shows in this and other Indian townships in South Africa. Accents are used as comical devices, for instance on the enormously popular radio show, The Weekend Lift-Off, which one can hear all over the township on Saturdays. Accents are funny in two ways, either as exaggerations or as discrepancies. Exaggeration is the most widely used technique by which a typical charou, often an elderly person, is depicted as both naïve/endearing and ridiculous. Similarly, exaggerated “white” accents are deployed to portray the typical overambitious person who tries to

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expunge every trace of his Indianness but is betrayed by the exaggerated gesture itself. The other technique is to create a discrepancy between a person’s appearance/race/class position and her accent in order to generate the comical effect. Examples include an expensively dressed Indian with a broad charou accent, or conversely, the character whose comportment and dress signals a charou but who, nonetheless, has a clipped “white” accent. These two techniques are often combined to generate a comical situation for instance when a charou naïvely encounters an unfamiliar situation and reacts to it in altogether inadequate fashion, drawing on his or her own limited universe. The comic effect of both these techniques base themselves on what Freud in his work on jokes and humor calls “difference (Differenz) between the two cathectic expenditures—one’s own and the other person’s as estimated by empathy” (Freud 1989, 242). Freud continues, “a person appears comic to us if, in comparison with ourselves, he makes too great an expenditure on his bodily functions and too little on his mental ones . . . our laughter expresses a pleasurable sense of the superiority we feel in relation to him” (1989, 242). What is particularly interesting in this case is that the plays, jokes, and comedy affords the ordinary township dweller watching a performance or a show two simultaneous positions: First, the position of the enlightened and educated Indian who can feel “a sense of superiority” when charou ways and accents are ridiculed. Second, the position of the charou laughing at herself, and at the absurdities of family conflicts, petty jealousies, narrow-mindedness, the ridiculous ambition of the upwardly mobile “coconuts”. This dual emotion allows for two simultaneous pleasures—the ridiculing of the charou as the past, and the concomitant celebration of the achievements of the “community” away from charoudom, as well as the mourning of the loss of the same past and its more innocent and authentic pleasures. The effect of sharing the enjoyment of these comic performances amounts to what I call “ethnic closure.” By this, I mean two things: Firstly, closure as in closing ranks. Both the enjoyment of superiority vis-à–vis the charou world, as well as the comical effects of the exaggerated accents, presuppose a sharing of the spaces of cultural intimacy where these accents and their connotations exist. Secondly, closure in the ordinary therapeutic sense as reconciling oneself with a certain traumatic event or process. The key here is what Freud in many places calls “economy in psychical expenditure,” that is, the exchange of energy between inhibitions (consuming energy) and their release in

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the laugh or the comical pleasure. What Freud calls “joke-work” basically consists in providing mechanisms for discharge, that is, exchange between the pent-up inhibitions or repressions (that which one cannot say, or perhaps not even think) and the preconscious, that is, that which becomes sayable, albeit in the specifically condensed, and always displaced, form that Freud argued were central features of jokes as well as dreams (Freud [1905] 1989, 143–93). On a more sociological note, one should add that the experience of community in the shared laughter in an audience, or in the everyday sharing, retelling, and laughing at jokes from stand-up comedians, or radio shows, in themselves add to the experience of “ethnic closure.” The laughter reaffirms a “we” and provides emotional economy and discharge in a situation fraught with anxieties.

N OTES 1. See for instance Bozzoli 2004. 2. For an overview of some aspects of Gandhi’s career in South Africa, see Brown and Prozesky 1996. For a critical account, see Hunt 2005 who is referenced on ANC’s official Web site: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/ history/people/gandhi/hunt.html. 3. The structure of externalization of violent events and riots, the attribution of agency to anonymous outsiders that become akin to natural forces not only avoids the personal narrative, it also creates a new community of shared victimization, however illusory. For an incisive analysis of this phenomenon in the case of riots in Mumbai in 1992, see Mehta and Chatterji 2001. 4. For an elaboration of the history of security concerns in Durban’s Indian townships, see Hansen 2006.

R EFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Reflections: Essays, aphorisms and autobiographical writings. New York: Schocken Books. Bozzoli, Belinda. 2004. The taming of the illicit: Bounded rebellion in South Africa, 1986. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2): 326–54. Brown, Judith, and Martin Prozesky, eds. 1996. Gandhi and South Africa: Principles and politics. London: Macmillan.

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Freud, Sigmund. [1905] 1989. Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. ———. [1917] 1969. Mourning and melancholia: The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth. Freund, Bill. 1995. Insiders and outsiders: The Indian working class of Durban, 1910–1990. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Govender, Ronnie. 1996. At the edge and other Cato Manor stories. Pretoria: Hibbard. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2000. Plays, politics and cultural identity among Indians in Durban. Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2): 255–69. ———. 2005a. In search of the diasporic self: Bollywood in South Africa. In Bollyworld: Popular Indian cinema through a transnational lens, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha. New Delhi: Sage. ———. 2005b. Sounds of freedom: Music, taxis and racial imagination in urban South Africa. Public Culture 18 (1). ———. 2006. Performers of sovereignty. On the privatization of security in urban South Africa. Critique of Anthropology 26 (3): 279–95. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural intimacy: The social poetics of the nation state. New York: Routledge. Hunt, James. 2005. Americans look at Gandhi. New Delhi: Promilla. Ilanga. 1999. Ilanga, February 14. Mehta, Deepak, and Roma Chatterji. 2001. Boundaries, names, alterities: A case study of a “communal riot” in Dharavi, Bombay. In Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering and recovery, ed. Veena Das et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mesthrie, Rajend. 1992. English in language shift: The history, structure, and sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Ngema, Mbongeni. 2002. AmaNdiya. From Jive Madlokovu!!! Johannesburg: Universal Music. Seedat, Z. 1973. The Zanzibaris in Durban: A social anthropological study of the Muslim descendants of African freed slaves living in the Indian area of Chatsworth. MA thesis, Department of African Studies, University of Natal. Stoler, Ann. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Radio LotusFM. 2000. The weekend lift-off. Radio LotusFM 87.7, October. Young, Robert. 1995. Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race. London: Routledge.

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REMAKING URBAN SOCIALITIES THE INTERSECTION OF THE VIRTUAL AND THE VULNERABLE IN INNER-CITY JOHANNESBURG AbdouMaliq Simone

I NTRODUCTION : T HE M ULTIPLY V IRTUAL

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his is a discussion about the ways in which the composition of households is changing in the inner city of Johannesburg. In many ways, it is a small story, which can be understood by intensifications in the vulnerability of urban life, of accelerated and sweeping changes to which many urban residents have a hard time adapting. And so they attempt to do the best that they can. But from small stories can also emerge important inclinations of productivity. Something is in the process of being brought to life, something specific to a particular set of urban conditions, but also something capable of radically altering the notion of what urban life is and can be. So this brief pointing to a diversification of household form can also point to ways in which cities themselves attempt to exceed their own capacities, and how constraint and possibility can emerge from the seeming process of things falling apart. Cities have become the critical locus of technological developments, embedding residents across diverse geographical spaces and scales into complex networks of exchange and interdependency. Here

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cities embody virtual or immanent forces provisionally concretized in diverse associational networks of varying duration, reach, and function; open-ended sites of circulation that mediate, redirect, and translate flows of information and matrices of connectivity (Amin and Thrift 2002; Smith 2003). A conceptual language based on metaphors of territoriality and place, capable of privileging the actions of discrete urban citizens—whose behaviors are accountable through their placement in specific local dynamics—is increasingly less applicable to urban life (Boyer 1996; Dicken et al. 2001; Multiplicity 2003). The interweaving of individuals with technology and virtual knowledge systems produces a very different kind of urban social subject than those of autonomous, self-contained human agents (Wise 2004). On the other hand, many cities embody a very different kind of virtuality. Their progressive impoverishment and deindustrialization, coupled with the enormous demands made upon urban space, engenders a reliance on the sheer density of inhabitants, actions, and associational possibilities to produce an urban life falling largely outside of any available conceptual language to understand it or governance frameworks to regulate it. While these cities are in reality no less connected to a larger urban world, they convey the sense of being off the map—marginalized from the “real” global urban world. Yet, they are increasingly becoming the locus of their own versions of immaterial economies, where the focus of the “secondhand,” on piracy, repair, improvisational reassemblage of cannibalized objects and information creates a specific sensate urban experience. Additionally, these cities give rise to capacities to participate in specific networks specializing in their own forms of translocal flows and exchanges—for example, the vast trade in illicit goods or the extensive spread of religious economies (Banégas and Marshall-Fratani 2003). The key issue for deliberation here concerns how to conceptualize actual or possible interrelationships between these superficially disparate forms of urban virtuality (Gandy 2002; Massumi 2001). While one seemingly represents the future frontier of urban life, the other embodies the persistence of the archaic, or a retrogressive frontier. Obviously, this framing is of limited value in terms of understanding the interrelationships among diverse urban areas. More importantly, it elides critical sources of urban knowledge, not only in the relegation of many cities of the South to a version of premodernity, but in keeping apart what may be highly interrelated forms of urban change (Maffesoli 2004; Robinson 2002). The elaboration of much of the

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urban South as the unintegratable phantasm where the conventional symbolic order of differences is no longer applicable precludes recognition of the extent to which the urban everywhere becomes zones of indistinction without discourses, territories, and economies capable of holding residents to particular signification, continuities, and coherence (Bishop and Clancey 2004; Crang 2000; Diken 2004). In both modes of virtuality, the nature of the urban resident is being radically altered. While we may know a great deal about the process through which such change is affected, much needs to be done in assessing the relationship among various dispositions—that is, what kinds of urban residents are being produced and how will they, in turn, produce particular kinds of cities (Narula and the Raqs Media Collective 2004; Woodward 2003)? These are decisions that are themselves “urbanized”—subject to an incessant recalibration of experiences and intersections that cannot surpass an incessant anticipation of what multiple others expect in frameworks of planning or calculation. Urban politics thus becomes, what Derrida calls in a more general context, a mad decision of politics—always gesturing beyond itself to an incalculable justice that necessitates and haunts every action and decision about what to do in the city (Derrida 1992). Additionally, virtuality is the locus through which the now common assumption of polarized, fragmented, and divided cities and city regions is upended, since it is across the virtual that superficially disarticulated urban spaces are continuously open and interwoven with each other. For the virtual is that reserve of differentiation or qualitative transformation in every event and place—not as a series of organizational alternatives—but as a continuous deformation of objects into different configurations in a process self-referred to its own transformations, remaining immanent to each and every conjunction (Massumi 2002). For individuals, collectives, and objects carry with them much that is not determined (they are always more than subjects, consumers, users, excluded, wasted), and, through a process of transduction, all participate in interrelations that are not yet determined (MacKenzie 2002). As Manuel de Landa indicates, what matters about each space, nested in other spaces, is its way of being affected (or not affected) by specific operations, themselves characterized by their capacity to fold, stretch, project, rotate, bend, and translate, so that spaces are always opening up onto other connectivities and conjunctions. As these spaces verge on becoming something else

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yet still remain what they are is the duration of the virtual—where things could go any way (De Landa 2002). Why this is important for many urban areas of the South is that they face an unprecedented effort to attempt to define what they are—the social, economic, and cultural identities of those who reside and operate within them. This effort emerges from an accumulating “irritation” of not being able to sufficiently account for the foundations of their urban residence or govern their urban life (Davis 2004). Attempts to frame the experiences and practices of residents in terms of trying to make explicit what they are doing in categories such as formal and informal labor, reiteration of primordial discourses of belonging and identity, and so forth can detract from understanding how these cities are used as platforms for maximizing maneuverability across varying urban worlds. All cities remain the densities of stories, passions, hurts, revenge, aspiration, avoidance, deflection, and complicity. As such, residents must be able to conceive of a space sufficiently bounded to consolidate disparate energies in order to make things of scale happen, but at the same time, conceive of a fractured space sufficiently large through which dangerous feelings can dissipate or be steered away (Jiménez 2003; Regullio 2004; Thrift 2000). So a major concern of African urban actors is the concern with what kinds of games, instruments, languages, sight lines, constructions, and objects can be put in play in order to anticipate new alignments of social initiative and resources, and thus capacity—rather than to represent or embody a specific set of aspirations, values, or social formations (Latham and McCormack 2004). How can people from different walks of life be engaged in each other’s lives without necessarily obliging specific transactions and obligations (Berry 1997)? Where the subsequent permutations resuscitate mutual interest in the game, even when the discernible benefits may not be clear or when participants are faced with inconclusive evidence of their own positions within them (Beck 2004). If legitimate production possibilities are limited across urban Africa, then existent materials of all kinds are to be appropriated— sometimes through theft and looting; sometimes through “heretical” uses made of infrastructures, languages, objects, and spaces; sometimes through social practices that ensure that available materials pass through many hands. The key is to multiply the uses that can be made of documents, technologies, houses, vehicles, parts, infrastructure, whatever, and this means the ability to put different kinds of

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combinations of people with different skills, perspectives, linkages, identities, and aspirations. For this practice constitutes a kind of perceptual system, a way of seeing that then engages the urban environment in such a way that single items, objects, and experiences are converted into many, otherwise unanticipated uses. If new uses are to be made of existent materials and resources, then individuals must in some sense delink themselves from the familiar social contexts in which they have been embedded. This is necessary in order for them to see differently—that is, in order to participate in ways of being social that permit a different kind of cognition to take place. They, thus, convert themselves into a wide range of positionalities, becoming almost a kind of infrastructure in the assembling of new household formations, work crews, and information conduits, and in ways where particular instances of use are no longer exemplary of general conditions. Here we confront the logic of convertibility—where all things and uses are convertible, and particularly people, their lives and bodies, can be converted into anything. This is no longer human capital formation, but partly. This is no longer enslavement or the wastage of human life, but partly—since both opportunity and destruction, opportunity and demise become conceptually and spatially entangled. Typically, specific aspirations or strongly socialized uses of places and things come to develop particular instruments for solidifying or fixing articulations among constructs, actors, techniques, actions, and technologies. But in this logic of convertibility, there is a marked fungibility in how significant portions of urban spaces, infrastructure, and things can be used that, itself, gives rise to the erasure of impediments keeping lives and bodies removed from being elements of any kind of trade (Gregory 2004; Mbembe 2004; Sidaway and Pryke 2000; Weber 2003). In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to explore the basis on which this facility of acting on an increasing urbanized series of possible engagements with difficult and underresourced urban environments— always already in existence virtually—is concretized in terms of a precarious navigation along the fault lines of everyday household residence. Here, the dissipation of conventional household forms opens up individuals, couples, and families to increased vulnerability in terms of maintaining the coherence of their security, livelihood, and social ties and, at the same time, potentially avails them cheap accommodation and to more heterogeneous sources of information and opportunity that can accompany household arrangements that incorporate a greater diversity

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of actors. Again, this is precarious terrain, for these living arrangements upend the recognizable frameworks that people have relied upon to connote a sense of stability and nurturance. But as the larger cultural and socioeconomic supports for familial arrangements increasingly convert virtuous ties into dangerous dependencies— where too much is expected from or attributed to family members— the universe of possible actions can diminish significantly, itself a vulnerability in a city that demands flexible action.

I NNER- CITY J OHANNESBURG This is an inner city that combines the tenacious holding on to specific residential opportunities at all costs with a sizeable “floating population” of residents changing residential locations several times a year. This is an inner city largely choked off from official sources of investment capital but also capable of circulating substantial amounts of hard currency through the proliferation of thousands of small investments that configure conduits of importation and exchange continuously extending their reach to diverse markets. These are markets in property, consumables, unconventional financial instruments, and even the markets of population movements themselves. This is an inner city that stretches a diminishing infrastructure to the limits of durability in terms of extending survivalist economies while, at the same time, consolidates a range of small technologies—from cell phones, satellite phones, networked computers, and small trucks and minibuses to exert an impact far beyond its apparent capacities. The inner city is embedded in an overall urban system subject to substantial transition over the past several years. Johannesburg is moving markedly away from a city primarily centered on the management of extraction economies within its borders. It increasingly provides quality infotech and financial services required for expanding and introducing new efficiencies into the primary production processes of extraction at a regional level and the articulation of gold, oil, diamonds, platinum, and agricultural products to financial infrastructures through which other forms of capital value can be derived. Given the mix of economic advantages and distortions affected by the apartheid state and the subsequent insulation of South Africa’s manufacturing sector, with its captured labor force, critical changes have ensued. These changes relate to how the accommodation of increased

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interactions between multinational and domestic actors and production processes are to be spatialized within the city (Fine and Rustomjee 1996; Habib and Padayachee 2000; Nattrass 1994). These changes are reflected in the reconstitution of a central business district to the north of the city, and to the availability of land for expansion, enclaving, and agglomeration. As industrial manufacturing continues to decline, and thus the need for miners and factory workers, Johannesburg is being physically reshaped to cultivate new intersections among finance, telecommunications, energy, engineering, construction, informatics, and tourism, as well as the subsequent new compositions of labor and habitation. What is clear is that the engagement of Johannesburg, as the country’s primary commercial center, by a wide range of African actors— migrants, businesspersons, academics, sojourners, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—has substantially increased as the South African presence in the rest of the region has itself broadened (Crush and McDonald 2000). Additionally, the speed through which South African predominance in the larger African region was institutionalized drew upon substantial amounts of capital flight and that occurred in the years preceding the political transition, as well as the networks through which this capital flight was organized. Operating under official regulatory radar, highly sophisticated conduits have been pieced together through which money and goods have circulated with great scope across territories whose varying banking and trade regimes would have otherwise impeded such flows (Fedderke and Lieu 1999). Through a combination of increased centralization of regional services, the domination of regional inward investment, and the continued elaboration of unconventional circuits of resource flows, South Africa has maintained a strong comparative advantage in terms of the costs of moving money, goods, and people across enlarged spaces of operation (Gastrow 2003). This makes Johannesburg a center not only for a formal regional economy, but also for a variety of other “real” economies at different scales and degrees of legality. The elaboration of a more sophisticated formal trading, service, and financial infrastructure has its counterpart in a more invisible, “informalized” one. The latter is composed of highly diverse economic activities and actors at widely divergent scales and capacities, often drawing upon either illegal goods, the illicit exchange of conventional goods or services, and the mobilization of diverse actors, some of whom are marginalized from more formal activities.

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Until the advent of the dissipation of racialized residential and occupational segregation in the mid–1980s, Johannesburg retained a clear geographical separation of black working class communities in the southern domains of the city and a white middle class in the northern suburbs. The combination of deindustrialization in the areas immediately south of the central business district and the reorganization of existing residual manufacturing processes shifted investment and jobs to the north. The preference for more secure, campus-style, and automobile-accessible office developments, as well as increasing emphasis on subcontracting work to informal enterprises, results in a structural circumvention of the central business district (Beall, Crankshaw and Parnell 2002). This relocation of economy has also led to a shift of commercial and residential investment to suburban-type shopping malls and gated communities. While an emerging black, educated middle class has been able to follow the trajectories of this economic shift, the vast majority of black urban residents face escalating unemployment and a seemingly immutable entrenchment in residential areas experiencing increasing impoverishment. An increased disjunction in the relationship between the skill levels of the black majority, the skill requirements of available employment, the location of job opportunities, and the location of affordable residential opportunities contributes to a highly differentiated and skewed housing market. Here, there are few transitional opportunities whereby residents can incrementally graduate to improved livelihoods. In light of this situation, the character of the inner city as a transitional space has only been intensified. Perhaps some 90 percent of the inner city’s present residents were not living here ten years ago (Bremner 2000). Foreign African and Asian immigrants and black South Africans coming from across the country are all vying to establish some foothold (Kadima and Kalombo 1995; Rogerson 1997). All attempt to do so without substantive institutional support and with an urban infrastructure in severe decline (Reitzes, Tamela, and Thulare 1997). It also appears that most residents are also living in ways highly dissimilar to those to which they have been accustomed in the past (Beall and Crankshaw 1999; Crankshaw and White 1995). Elaborate relationships are configured among hawkers, those with some form of formal employment, social networks organized around their patronage of specific bars and hotels, taxi drivers and passengers, railway workers, and the clients of the large number of hotels in the area.1 There are also large numbers

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of people operating in the inner city, both residents and nonresidents, who simply wait for something to happen, or aggressively pursue an opportunity to steal, work in somebody’s else scheme, or live off of someone else’s income. Thus, survivalist activities undertaken in highly provisional ways and with limited scope seem to be appropriated by “entrepreneurial” networks operating at larger scales. These scales would include in ascending order: the level of the specific quarter (e.g., Hillbrow, Berea, Yeoville); the translocal scale (e.g., flows between Hillbrow and Soweto; Yeoville and Alexandra; Berea and the central business district); and transurban scales (e.g., flows between Johannesburg and Durban; Johannesburg and Maputo). A great difficulty in assessing the character, composition, and scale of such activities is the high degree to which these activities are illegal and are protected by various affiliations with legal institutions and transactions.2 Within the density of activities and population numbers, information itself becomes an important resource—who is going where, who comes and goes at what time, who guards what, who knows whom—for all of this can be converted into a potential “income-generating” activity. Concomitantly, there is an intricate economy of managing impressions and the visibility of actions that accompany these broadly informal economic activities.

M AXIMIZING V ULNERABILITY: P RACTICES OF T RICKERY AND D ECEIT The inner city offers highly varied residential opportunities, depending on the ownership and upkeep of buildings. There remain several large blocks containing hundreds of apartments that are well-maintained and accommodate families who commonly have formal paid jobs. Access to affordable good housing stock within the central city remains vital to many households, enabling them to access educational and social welfare services otherwise too costly if disposable income were to be largely eaten up by either higher rents in suburban locations or by transportation costs commuting for outlying townships. Thus, many families are willing to take their chances in a highly insecure environment. Still, rampant insecurity has driven large numbers of households with access to steady employment out of the inner city, and as result, the majority of residential apartment buildings have suffered serious deterioration. In some instances, citywide programs,

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most coordinated by the Johannesburg Housing Partnership, have sought to reclaim buildings in receivership, rehabilitate them, and institutionalize a rigorous administration of tenancy. But for the most part, the inner city has become poorer and more precarious during the past decade. Residence often means living in buildings that frequency lacks basic amenities and security, or where provisioning of both requires substantial financial and personal investments. In addition, residents have to cope with an incessant preying upon their own vulnerabilities. For the inner city is an environment of trickery and deception, as well as the need to forge solid relationships of mutual dependency. Because such dependency is often relied upon in order to make ends meet, residents are all the more vulnerable to deception. Fellow residents who otherwise might look out for each other can also give information to thieves about who may not be in their apartments at certain times. Sexual partners are especially held in suspicion as the rights each individual in the couple would normally grant also leave them vulnerable to being taken advantage of. The desperation for jobs has cultivated an enormous industry of fake employment agencies and shakedown schemes. Residents are conscious about displaying any weakness and continuously watch what they say about themselves, what they wear, the routes they travel, and the company they are seen with. Even in cursory relationships with neighbors or associates, a person cannot be construed as having significant relationships in the event that others to whom these associates may owe money or are perceived to have harmed in some way decide to hold that person as somehow culpable. The following are excerpts of an array of interviews of residents living in Joubert Park that emphasize the degree of duplicity that they face on a daily level, as well as how, in the midst of difficult circumstances, there remain occasions when trust is necessary. Surveying local attitudes, interviewers tend to be regarded as spies for landlords or building owners. Most apartments are in a bad condition. Supposed landlords often promise to move tenants to better places. In the meantime, many live in appalling conditions. It is risky to conduct research in such places. Even the people who have complaints are scared to talk because they say they don’t know with whom they are talking. Landlords have been known to victimize tenants who voice out their complaints. It is not easy for unemployed people to find accommodation in the inner city. As a result, poor people often fall prey to people posing as apartment building landlords or caretakers, who demand deposits for

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places to stay. Most of these fake landlords disappear after collecting money, while others place people in overcrowded and risky conditions—particularly within buildings that have been illegally converted from office blocks, or even hospitals, into residential units. For example, the Philani Hospital on the corner of King George and Goch Streets was closed in 2002 to prepare for its reopening as a clinic but then was illegally occupied in December of that year. “Residents” reported paying rent ranging from R250 to R900 (approximately $35 to $130 USD) before moving in. People were staying in operating theaters, reception areas, wards, and X-ray rooms after the “landlords” told them that they owned the building and that these arrangements would only be temporary as they were going to be moved to temporary shelter while the building was renovated. However, the city expelled the tenants, and they were left on their own to find alternative accommodation. Amina operates a public phone at the corner of Bok and Twist Streets. This public telephone is not hers. She works for somebody else and she gets paid about R100.00 at the end of every week. “Sometimes I get R150 ($22); it depends on how much I had made that week,” she says. She comes from the Free State and shares an apartment with a woman from Pretoria for R400 per month. She came to the city because she “heard that domestic work pays well here in Johannesburg. I want a place where I can work and stay.” But it is difficult to get a job around here even if you are just a cleaner. Employers have a style they use these days to get new workers. They ask people who are already working for them to bring somebody. Because they say that most employers lost their property because they just hired someone they did not even know. So if they tell you to bring somebody it must be somebody you really know so that when that person steals things from the employer they must know where to get that person, otherwise you are also responsible because you are the one who brought that person . . . There are people who do not have jobs but will want you to pay them to get you one. They go around claiming that they employ people and collect money from unemployed people who want to get jobs. This complicates the situation because they [unemployed people] go to the people they know and borrow this amount of money wanted by the “employer” and promise to give the money back after their first pay. When the jobs they were promised are not even there it becomes more problematic.

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There is a woman who met a guy here in Johannesburg. This man told her that his employer wants to hire more people. So he said he must go and find some more people for him. So he told her that their office is in Market Street and gave her the name of building and an office number. The woman said he wanted her to go with him to the office there and then but said she would go the following day. He then said, “OK, but try to be there early in the morning.” To her surprise when she got there, the following day there was nothing that the man had talked about. She even asked about this man who was sent to find more people. But there at the office they told her that there is no one by that name there and they don’t want more people at that office. There is also this story of a guy who used to target youth in the inner city. He tells them that where he works they want people who will help them with their stocktaking. Yes, they wanted stock takers. Then this man would ask the “potential employee” to go with him to the place where they wanted stock takers. They say that this guy led many people to an isolated place under the highway bridge. There you will find other men like him, some of them very dirty they look like they haven’t bathed for weeks. There they will take everything that you have. They want a cell phone; money and every thing that looks like will fetch some bucks in the streets. One guy told us that some thugs wanted to take some piece of gold that was attached to his teeth. He says these thugs said if they had a proper tool to remove the gold from his teeth they were going to take it off. If you are lucky you will go home with some clothes on but most of the time victims were stripped naked. So that they won’t be able to go and report the case to the police immediately. So by the time you still feel ashamed and naked to approach passing cars and ask for help they get time to run away. Matsobane tells the story of her sister: She was going up and down the streets of Johannesburg inner city one day in February 2003. She was doing some window-shopping. Then she saw these well-dressed guys (in long sleeved shirts and ties) in front of a building in Wanderers Street. They were giving away small pamphlets. She went closer to ask about that. They then told her they are hiring people for different jobs inside the building. One of the guys offered to take her to the office in second floor. There they told her that she needs to bring R6, a copy of her ID document and copies of her qualifications if she had any. She told them that she does not have any qualification. They then told her that there are jobs for every one there. For her they will connect her with a cleaning company. But then she did

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not have the required papers and it was already late and their office was about to close. So she agreed with them that she would come the following day. They asked her to bring her friends along and they will get training on how to use household cleaning soaps and chemicals and thereafter they will be taken where they will start working, the same day. So she invited her friend. When she got there the following day there was no cleaning job instead there was training on how to sell some body soaps. She was angry but feeling stupid at the same time. She regretted why she believed them. She was given three soaps, they said those soaps were free. She said they signed some papers and she thought those papers were for the job she was promised. After three months the letter came to her from this “employment agency.” This letter was a warning. It was written Final warning in bold as the heading of that letter. She was advised to return the properties of this company or to come and pay for them or face legal action. The property they were talking about in the letter was three soaps and the amount to be paid is R24.00. She was scared; she kept on saying, “I am going to be arrested. Eish! These people are cruel. They know I don’t have money. You know I was excited that at last I got some work to do. But now look I got into some trouble.” And I asked her, “Do you still have some of the papers you got there at their office?” She said yes and she gave them to me. As I go through the papers I found this small paper that said they should sell the soaps. The actual price of the soaps was R15 each and she must pay the R24 into the bank and the account details were provided. The paper says that she would then be left with R21 as commission/profit. The soaps, one was for flu, the other one was for the face while the last one was for reducing the protruding tummy. But she said, “No one was prepared to buy the soaps for R15.00. So I decided to use them. They told us the soaps are for free.” Now what are they saying. Besides they play with our feeling telling us there are jobs while there is nothing all they want to do is make money from us. I won’t pay them. Then I said, [but if you don’t pay them you’ll get arrested] She then said, please go and call these people and just hear what they say. I called the number on their pamphlets. A male consultant answered the phone. I told him the story as if it was mine. I told him they told us the soaps were free now they want money. I asked him what is it that they are doing there in their offices. He asked me what do you mean? I said I don’t understand what they are doing, playing with other people’s emotions like that. I ended up saying to him unemployment rate is high in South Africa and they should stop giving people false hope about jobs. Then he asked me which office did I go

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to? I just said the one in Johannesburg. He then said they have many branches in Johannesburg. Which one did I go to? I said the one in Wanderers Street. He said oh ok. I just kept quiet and listened. And then he gave me the direct number and said I should call and ask for “Lisa.” He said Lisa is the manager there and should be able to help me. I called Lisa and she sounded like a white woman to me. She listened to “my” story and said I should come to their office she would see what she could do with “my” problem. I did not go to Lisa but told my sister to go and follow up on this matter. She said she was nervous and I should go with her. I said I would try to find some time to go there with her.

Many South African men complain that, because they have families to feed, it’s difficult to have some extra money to stock up. While the foreigners have the money. For example, Timothy says, Most foreigners came here alone and if they make money it is theirs and theirs alone. That’s why they can even afford to shower women with a lot of money and expensive presents while we can’t. They can afford to buy many different items to sell. On top of that they are the ones who can afford to pay high rentals for stalls in the trader–markets. Most of us can’t afford all that. And this is a serious problem. Our families are broken every day because these women see it as a waste of time to stay with a man who is unable to support her and her kids. So what are we supposed to do? They don’t see us as men anymore. We [South African] men are seen as lazy, stupid, irresponsible, and all those nasty names. It is very painful. And you wonder why many of us kill our kids and wives or girlfriends.

People in the area around the taxi ranks (areas where taxis pick up and let off passengers) and Hillbrow/Joubert Park depend mostly on informal trade. They sell small items such as cigarettes, sweets, fruit, and vegetables in order to make a living. Some move around with what they sell while others set up little stalls just outside the road. As a result, this area is overcrowded and the movement of pedestrians is made very difficult. Others spread their wares on the sidewalks, even where they know that it will disrupt free movement of the people and, according to the city trading bylaws, such people should be evicted and their stock confiscated and arrested. It is not safe for people, even the traders themselves, more especially in times of crime when police

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try to chase and arrest criminals. The criminals know that they can always run into a place where there is no free movement of either people or cars. There they can disappear without trace. One of the pedestrians says, “It is not easy for the authorities in this ‘depressed’ economy to tell people where to and not to trade. Selling in the street is the only source of life for many of them.” The street that is mostly affected is Noord Street, the area in between Claim and Klein Streets. There is congestion there because the constructions are in progress in the new shopping center next to the Jack Mincer taxi rank. This area has been fenced off and the hawkers are pushed northwards in Noord Street. As a result, the pathways for pedestrians have narrowed and people have to move in straight lines in both directions. The hawkers (street sellers) still continue to put up their makeshift stalls in that small passage. Sometimes things get worse when there is someone with big bags because others have to wait until he or she has passed before they can join the line and go to where they are going. There are guys who make a living by transporting people’s luggage from the place where they are dropped by taxis across to the taxi rank near park station where there is long distance taxi facilities. They use the supermarket trolleys to that. These guys do not even wait for other people to pass, they just push in with their trolleys and people run away. There are rumors that these guy sometimes run away with people’s luggage, especially in December when they know that there are children’s Christmas clothes and toys in most of the bags that the travelers are carrying. As a result, sometimes people with heavy bags refuse to let the trolley men carry them for them because they know that chances that they can run away with them are very high. Then these guys usually swear at them for refusing help that they offer. Other stories are that trolley men usually lead bag owners into some places where they rob them of their belongings. So it is not easy to know whom to trust with your bags. They usually target women who are traveling with children. In this area, there are people who cook meat and porridge to sell to people. They start by making coal fire on the braziers, sweep the place and remove the previous day’s ashes and set up. Sometimes I find the men busy cutting the meat with an axe before they cook. The guy selling says they usually buy the meat every day in the morning because they don’t have space or a refrigerator to keep it overnight. As a result they buy the meat that would be cooked and it has to get finished daily. There is also a beer hall nearby. They have a powerful music system

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that they play loud everyday and there is always people dancing to the music and drinking beer even on Sundays. There is also a stall that sells CDs and cassettes and they also have their music system and they also play it loud. So there is always a party mood in this area. But others can still find sometime to take a nap in this loud place. Mt. Zion Projects of the St. Georges parish is a purportedly a church-run, supervised residence for single adults. Two residents, Boiswa and Lorna, indicate that there is a lot of corruption and irregularities in the residence. Lorna says, I work at a restaurant. I come here late sometimes after midnight. At the security gate here at the entrance no one opens for me. One day the security man said I must go back to where I come from. But there is nowhere else that I can go and he knows it. I have a room here. I remember one day some thugs were coming after me. I managed to run fast and entered the main door here but I nearly died because the security guy refused to open for me. I wanted to shout out loud for him to open for me but I couldn’t because I could hear the guys outside shouting to each other, u shone phi? Meaning– where did she go? I was very scared and tired from running I even thought that the guys outside could hear me breathing. I kept quiet and I could hear their footsteps outside when they were passing next to out entrance here. My boyfriend also works at night. He experiences the same problem with the security guys. They sometimes refuse to open for him. On top of that when they know that my boyfriend is at work at night they come and knock at my door. They tell me that they “know that my boyfriend is at work and I must just open the door and stop wasting their time.” They have wives and girlfriends, but they say if they are ignored you will be evicted. And the security guys and some other guys in the building beat up my boyfriend. We tried to complain about this problem but nothing has happened here. There is a group of people here who go around taking law into their own hands here and beating up other people for lousy reasons. For example what do you call it when people beat up my boyfriend because I refuse to have sex with them? They are crazy and something needs to be done about that. The caretaker in this building knows all about what is going on but he won’t act because those people are his friends. Another reasons is most of the time when these things happen he is not even here.

Boiswa says,

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Where I was staying the house keeper/ landlord did not pay for the flat. We paid the money but he used it for his own things. The flat was neglected and it went bad. So the flat was bought and renewed. We had to leave and find accommodation somewhere. So I came here they said I must put my name on the waiting list. I came again to check and they said I got the room. So now I know that they don’t give rooms to men. They give rooms to women so that they can just have them around to have sex with them. For security reasons visitors used to leave their ID books at the security desk. But we [tenants] do not allow that to happen anymore. Sometime ago two women left their ID’s downstairs and when they left they wanted their ID’s the guy there said he can’ find the ID’s. We asked why? There was no answer. And two weeks after that they said they found them. They gave the ID’s to the owners and they found that they were married to some foreign guys. Women’s ID’s get missing in many places and we should be careful all the time. These people have links with those people who organize false marriages. Vusi is a young man of twenty-three years, originally from Soweto, also staying in Mt. Zion Projects. He says he moved out of his home because the situation was not right, it was bad. Things started happening when I was invited to church. That is how I got to know that there is accommodation here. At first I did not want to come to church but the guy who was inviting me said to me just give it a try just for one day. Then I came with him here. It is much better here. I have a place to sleep and a few things of my own. I was sleeping in the streets. I had to move out at home because my parents (especially my mother) were not treating me right. I was not working and my younger brother was working. They took me as is I was a fool. There was a time when I was working and I used to buy things for them and now they forgot all about that. When it comes to food it hard. My mother usually started shouting at me when it was time to dish out food. And she would make me feel guilty and angry so that sometimes I couldn’t even eat. So I thought it was better to go. I did not know where to go. I just went away and I ended up in the street. I used to sleep in a parking garage. I am happy here because I work here and stay here. I work in one of the projects here. My uncle taught me bricklaying and carpentry. I used to work with him. So I was happy when I first arrived here because they do the work I know.

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Aubrey is a student at Wits Technikon who came to Johannesburg to stay with his father, who is a policeman. His two younger brothers also attend high school here. His mother is a teacher back home in Tzaneen. My mother does not want to come here because of crime. She is afraid. She visits sometimes during the school holidays but only for a few days. There was a tree outside next to their balcony. Thieves used it to climb into the balcony and broke into the house. They stole three cell phones. Those thieves were lucky. We left the cell phones here. We usually leave the cell phones at home when we go out. There was nobody in the house it was Sunday and we went to visit relatives in Hammanskraal. We didn’t even spend the night there. We left in the morning around nine and came back at around six. It was very painful even now I don’t have a cell phone. I am still waiting for my parents to buy me another one. Steve comes from Limpopo Province. He worries about the possibility of being evicted from his shared apartment in Mandalay Court because their accounts are in arrears. Actually, they are up to date with their payments, but it is just that the person who is supposed to pay the money into the relevant account number does not do that. So the council says it is going to evict them, renovate the apartment, and put people who are ready to pay for their rates in. They say they have this case going on now and that they don’t even know whether they will be able to afford the payments of their apartment and that of paying for the lawyer who will represent them in their case. He has to send money to family in Limpopo every month. Steve is a member of the house committee at Mandalay Court. He thinks about moving to Soweto or Alexandra but worries that the money for transport is going to be too much for him. So at the moment, he is just waiting for the case to be solved or be evicted and go find another place to stay. Raja stays in a single room on Kapteijn Street in Hillbrow. Today, I heard a gun shot when I was still preparing my self to go to work. By the time I step out into the street I found the body in the street just in front of our place . . . You know I don’t get scared anymore. I shot about four people in the past but all that is behind me . . . I was involved in some criminal activities before I decided to go to university. It was tough in the townships then. I finished matric and there was nothing for me to do anymore. Thanks to the system of apartheid. I started selling sweets on the train. But later I started selling diamonds

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and gold dust. I had a gun. You know it was easy then to obtain a gun and use it as you like. Stealing was part of the struggle then and it has to continue until all of us are free. The people I shot were white. People who kill and steal from black people are stupid and don’t know what they are doing. That is not part of the struggle.

Raja lives in Hillbrow, and for him, everyday safety has become a struggle. You know when you come back to your place you always look around for some broken windowpanes or if there were some break-ins and you always say thanks God, when you arrive home and all your belongings are still there. Anything can happen in Hillbrow. Even the landlords are so corrupt. It is possible that you can come home one day and find that your flat is “clean.” . . . [Besides,] the place is expensive, I pay about R1500 and sometimes it is more than that . . . It took me a long time actually to find this place. Even now I always tell myself that I’ll move out when I get a better place to stay but I’m not getting anything. Johanna comes from a rural village in Mpumalanga. She stays in Sunnyhoek at the corner of Claim and Orkerse Streets in Hillbrow. She says she has two children—a girl and a boy. Her daughter was in the twelfth grade in 2003. She saves money so that she can pay for her tertiary education next year. The room she stays in is what is normally a sitting room or lounge. While she was being interviewed, one guy just walked in without knocking and for him it seemed as if there was nothing wrong. He went to the other room. His room was locked; he unlocked it and closed it after entering his room. Johanna indicated that he was the owner of the room who doesn’t knock before entering her space because he just doesn’t like to knock. When asked if she feared being raped while she slept, Johanna indicates, “I am, but what can I do? I am even better now. At first I could not even sleep. I lost a lot of weight and my family thought I was sick. But now I somehow got used to it.” She measures and cuts material at a clothes factory in Doornfontein. She can pay rent, buy some food, and send money home to her children, who stay with her my mother. She pays R250 per month, and living here allows her to stay only about one-half kilometer from where she works. Sipho is a student at Wits University. He told a story about a girl that he loved so much, he was even thinking of marrying her. The girl always told him that she had a boyfriend. But he kept on telling her

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how much he loved her. One day, he lost all the interest in her after seeing her with a “foreign guy.” Sipho knew this guy and two other women who are his girlfriends. I just felt so empty and the next day I saw her I just said hello and that was it. I felt nothing for her anymore. This is what most of us South African men feel when our sisters and potential lovers play around with foreigners. We develop this bitterness on the ladies because we know that these men don’t love them. They don’t care about them because they can always go somewhere else and get another woman. They say South African women are nice. Do you know why they say that? Because South African women give them what they want, sex and papers. Tumi came to Johannesburg to study at Wits Technikon. She met a Nigerian guy. They got married. They started staying together in an apartment. She got pregnant and had a child. After about two years, the guy said he got a scholarship and had to go and study in Germany. Tumi knew that she had to go with him because she is the wife, but discovered the day before the guy left that her husband was actually married to another woman. He was going to Germany because that wife got a job there and wanted him to come and stay there with their children. This South African woman also discovered that the flight tickets were actually bought and sent by the other woman. It was very painful but she could not stop him from leaving the following day. Tumi could not even finish her studies; she now has a baby and she is now at home in Kwa-Zulu Natal, confused and frustrated. “She is not going to get married; no one will marry her with a kwerekwere (foreign) child.” Sipho says, “If a foreign guy does not want you anymore he sends his brothers and friends to come and propose to you and you won’t even say no. They have you all of them. You know, if you agreed to have a relationship with one kwerekwere guy you will say yes to all of them. Then when the other one dumps you the other takes you, that is it, you circulates amongst them. And they don’t care.” Solly reported staying with a South African woman for four months, and in the fifth month her man came to his place and said to him, “Look man, I don’t want you to give hard time and I won’t give you any hard time. Just let my wife go with me as soon as she comes here.” The woman in question was not at home at that time. The woman arrived; her South African man told her to pack her things and

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get ready to go with him, and she did—no arguments. “So this foreign guy was surprised. How can this woman stay with him for four to five months, her man knowing that and did not come to fetch her all this time? It seems as if this man knew because he came straight to my place knocked and told me the whole story. He even said if you don’t believe me just wait and see when she comes back. That was it—she did not resist or anything. And Solly, the foreign guy, was shocked.” Thierry is from Kinshasa. He is a postgraduate student at Wits University. He has just received a temporary South African passport that will last for two years. He has been in South Africa for three years. “But the official there said if I had a South African woman I would get the permanent citizenship very quickly. And when I left he said I should ‘give it a try.’” Thierry asks Sipho to introduce him to his sister. Sipho says, “No thanks. I won’t even try because I know that you don’t love her; you don’t even know her. I know that you have a wife at home. She is a romantic wife and my sister is going to be your convenient wife. No, my friend, just forget it.” Stanley, Jeff, and Godfrey are hawkers. They sell sweet potatoes in a bakkie at the corner of Twist and Noord Streets. The other selling place is the corner of Bok and Claim Streets. The three of them are originally from Limpopo Province and they go back home every now and then. It is better for them because they have a bakkie that they use to transport their stock from the other provinces to Gauteng. It also helps them to take the stock from the selling area to where they stay. It is difficult for other people because they have to pay people who have bakkies to transport their stock from the other provinces to the selling areas and on a daily basis, they have to pay for the transport of the stock to and from the selling space. The three guys sell mangoes in season and when mangoes are finished, they sell sweet potatoes and when sweet potatoes are finished, they sell peaches and it is a cycle that keeps them rolling. Sometimes they sell clothes but not for a long time. They just do that when they are waiting for the right stock to be ready. They share a one-bedroom apartment in Joubert Park in the Chesterfield. Jeff talks about a friend who has many problems with people he shares a place with. He stays with other two guys. They use pots to boil water they don’t have a kettle. He says he told them to buy the kettle because he is paying rent. No one wants to buy the kettle. He also says that he told them they must see to

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it that there is always food in the house but the problem is the other guy buys food while the other one doesn’t. The guy who doesn’t buy food works as a security guard in a shopping mall. He eats there all the time—“that’s what they think.” So they end up eating bread with canned fish for supper. Sharing does not always work because some people are not prepared to compromise.

Jeff says, “I had a problem with my friend at the beginning. When it is month end he goes home and when he comes back he says, ‘“gentlemen I don’t have money to contribute to buying food. Please bear with me.’” We said ok. But when he did that for the second time I said stop right there. Whose foods are you eating the whole time? You won’t eat the food if you don’t contribute ok. Then he stopped coming up with tricks when it is time to contribute money for food.” Thandi is an ex-university student residing at Constantine Court. I started staying here in December 2002, and I am now moving out to stay in another place because this place is expensive for me. I don’t have a permanent job yet I get part-time jobs and I am not sure I’ll be able to pay the rent here in the next months. I paid an initial amount of R2560.00—the deposit plus one month rental plus lease fee. Monthly rent is R1200 excluding water and electricity. Here they want you to stay for six months before you decide to move out. From there you put a two months notice that you want to move out. It is then that you can get your deposit back. I’m moving to a place where I’m going to pay R1000.00 inclusive of everything and I’ve some people I’m going to be sharing with. I agree that this is a nice place. Most people like this place because it is clean and secure. And other people don’t care about the high rentals. They can afford it. Besides it is difficult to get a place to stay around town so if you get a place to stay you hold on to it no matter what. The only problem is that some of us can’t afford the rates here. I think that water and electricity are charged on estimates because even if you try to save in an attempt to reduce the amount of money we pay for them per month it’s all the same. No change, no difference. I know somebody who was not here for the whole month and she was charged about R400 and something for water and electricity. You will wonder how they’ve arrived at the amount. People share places to stay because it helps to reduce the costs. And here they don’t care how many you are in a room as long as you pay rent at the end of the month. We pay money into an account and bring the deposit slip to the caretaker and then she makes a copy for their records in the office and I keep the original copy. There are people who sublet and they end up

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not paying rent with their own money at the end of the month, but the money they get from the subtenants. There are so many people who are prepared to share, but there is no privacy. One of my relatives stays with about 10 to 15 people in a flat here in Hillbrow. She is embarrassed and doesn’t want us to visit her. They’ve subdivided the room and there is a family staying at each corner of the room. It’s difficult they share with people they don’t even know. She told me the first time she started staying there she wanted to cry. She actually cried but there was nothing she could do anyway. She doesn’t have any choice. Valley stays at Constantine Court and is twenty-six years old. He is originally from Limpopo, Atok Village. He was studying in Middleburg in Mpumalanga, but came to Johannesburg in May. My sisters are staying here as they are attending studies in Parktown. They were staying somewhere else and have heard from their friends that there is a nice place to stay here. Then we came here to arrange the place, paid for the deposit and move in. I stay with my three sisters. Two of them are my sisters and the other one is my sister in Christ. We are all Christians here and live the life of Christians. We know each other well so it’s nice and easy to stay together. We attend the Church of Jesus Christ. We go to church in Soweto every Sunday and during the week we worship at home it may be here or in the homes of other people we worship with. It’s nice to stay with the sisters they cook and take care of me. There are meters here to measure water and electricity; they are in the room so I think they are fair. If you are not satisfied with the amount they charge you, you go and query and it gets sorted out. It is safe here; there are security patrols 24 hours, and every night they come up to the corridors and patrol. They check for noise and any other forms of disturbance. Brother Alex also lives in Constantine Court, was born in the Central African Republic but grew up in Kenya. He does not give his real name because “there are governments who send spies into this country to kill other people and they are good in covering up the evidence. Most of the times they make it seem like an accident or robbery. But we know that there are such cases and they are not investigated.” He manages a tuck shop that is inside the Constantine court, taking it over from his brother who managed to get to Europe. He is suspicious of every one. He is constantly wary and says that the government of South Africa will do much better by protecting the identities of the refugees. Deportation of foreign people is not a solution

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because “most of them get killed the same day that they get home.” However, in South Africa, it is better because there is no refugee camps because camps also increase fighting and killing. The wars in most countries continue in the refugee camps. So most people want to come to South Africa because of the fact that there are no refugee camps. “It is better if people are just scattered around, it’s safer that way.” The tuck shop was started because people were afraid to go outside to buy the small items they needed. The tenants pushed the management to approve the shop that would provide them with some basic things such as bread, cigarettes, and toilet tissue. There are cases of people who get shot outside when trying to find some items, either by stray bullets or when they were robbed and mugged. People here are mostly students. They come here from other places outside Johannesburg and they are scared of Hillbrow. They leave early for classes and come back late in the early evening. By then the shops have closed and they do not have time to do the shopping during the day. Patricia and Gloria are two friends who stay together in a room on the ground floor of Vannin Court. The room they live in is formally a kitchen in a three-bedroom apartment. These women are originally from KwaZulu-Natal and came to Johannesburg at the beginning of 2003. They heard from a man who used to stay in this apartment that there is a place to stay, because you can’t just take bags and come here without knowing where you are going to sleep. The other sister is not working; still looking for a job while the other is working at a restaurant in Randburg. They pay R100 per month to the landlord. Crime rate is high here but the fact that the streets of Hillbrow are always busy makes it less dangerous that it actually is. They both have children. They say their boyfriends are not helpful in meeting the needs of their children. The other one says my boyfriend works but he is very stinch . . . It is very difficult to raise kids on your own. Kids need a lot of things and if you are not working they make it more difficult for you. So to make matters a bit better you must find some work and work for your kids. You know this thing about Xhosa women? When they got a boyfriend they always go around saying “ndi u tholile umsebenzi” meaning “I got a job.” Because they are notorious of moving in with boyfriends and the boyfriend will leave them in the room when they go to work. But one day when they come back they will find that everything in the house has vanished together with the girlfriend.

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Despite these conditions, decisions must be taken. Although there is an accumulating body of knowledge of how the inner city is lived that can be referred to, there are few consensual guides as to how this body of knowledge should or even could be reliably interpreted. Deliberation is needed; a careful reading of signs and experiences, but it is also clear that such deliberation probably does not constitute a greater possibility of security or consistency. And besides, there is the urgency of making moves, of taking opportunities that are available only briefly. There are the seemingly equally compelling imperatives for individuals to do a better job of protecting themselves, narrowing the universe of what they entrust to whom and, at the same time, a need to relinquish such circumscription in gestures of openness to highly uncertain styles of operation with personalities and positions that are difficult to read. Additionally, the proliferation of dissimulation, trickery, and the parasitical means that the efficacy of the conventional uses of the urban environment residents may have relied upon in the past begin to diminish, as individuals have to make new uses of words, objects, living spaces, public domains, gestures, and so forth. At the same time, these new uses of the environment—and the symbolic, infrastructural, discursive, and geographical materials within it—cannot be recognized and deployed without alterations in the ways people reside and operate. The potential to expand the dispositions of everyday materials and the prospective agendas to which they can be put themselves require the very unsettling of the assumed coherence of everyday categories—such as household, public, private, work, licit and illicit, religious and secular.

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Despite the extent to which the dissipation of kin and extended family-based households posits increasing levels of dissimulation and vulnerability, increasingly the mode of residence moves toward more provisional arrangements, even in areas that, while impoverished, are composed of residents with a somewhat higher socioeconomic status, such as Yeoville and Kensington. Households increasingly include residents of different nationalities, genders, ages, and occupations—a tendency that is in line with developments in many African cities (Harts-Broekhuis 1997; Tacoli 2002). As is a frequent citation of

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motivation among youth, decisions must be taken as to how to lead one’s life that, at one and the same time, touch no one and everyone. In other words, decisions whose ramifications do not hold the individual to a series of obligations or commitments to a particular cast of characters yet whose ramifications could potentially extend outward into the stories, circumstances, and opportunities embodied by those whom one barely knows or doesn’t know at all. A common assumption that the family is a potentially dangerous zone of dependencies leaves the individual open to being blamed for a variety of misfortunes. Thus, residential decisions increasingly put individuals in the position of having to concede large measures of trust to engagements with actors to whom there is no clear basis of security— and to which they can be easily victimized. At the same time, these relations could potentially open up unanticipated avenues of connections leading to opportunities that in the individual’s own assessment of his or her skills and history would otherwise never be deemed possible. These dynamics, and not only the albeit desperate search for accommodation, account for hundreds of notices—of rooms for rent, apartment shares—that cover the external walls of the post offices in inner city neighborhoods. In a survey of one hundred households living in apartments undertaken in the Berea and Yeoville neighborhoods of the inner city, it was striking the extent to which almost half of these households were composed of individuals, not only without any prior relationship to each other, but who did not share common nationality, mother tongue, or age classification. While a series of singular complementarities are worked out in each intentional arrangement—with no prevalent patterns in terms of how bills are shared or how household maintenance activities are completed— what is clear is that the conventional gender assumptions of household management are not widely adopted in these newer arrangements. For example, an apartment of four South African women may be shared with a single Nigerian male who may enjoy sexual privileges with his roommates in return for doing all of the shopping, cleaning, and cooking. In another situation, young university students of common ethnicity may share apartments with older women of a divergent ethnic group according to a financial formula where the women may work as hawkers to support the feeding of the household and the student’s bursaries cover the rent. Still other arrangements may have older immigrant women—from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and involved in frequent circular migration pursuing low level cross-border trade—support the accommodation of young

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South African women in return for a wide range of everyday favors, such as securing documents and dealing with landlords. Mr. Bolengu Botondo, a banker in Kinshasa, moved his family to South Africa and bought a block of apartments, Montero Vetero, on Pope Street in Yeoville, that his wife is comanaging with the original owners, Leeco Property (Pty) Limited. The building is four stories high, with twenty-seven apartments of different types. The official criteria for obtaining an apartment is that one needs to produce a valid identification document, a pay slip from work, three months of recent bank statements, and a deposit of R2000. Still, the building is inhabited by mainly Congolese residents, due to the fact that it is easier for the Congolese woman who is managing the apartment to deal with her people since, like she puts it, she at least knows what to expect from them. “When they don’t pay I know what measures to take; I understand that most of them have no real regular income and have to sublet to afford the rent and I can control that. The real issue for me is to find Congolese that will at least keep the building clean.” Yet when flats are subdivided and shares offered, the Congolese residents usually turn to South Africans rather than Congolese. The primary reason cited is one not unfamiliar in many African cities, which is that it is easier to deal with persons not of one’s own nationality or ethnicity because the relationship can be maintained as a business one, without additional obligations and favors. But increasingly, shared residence is the incipient stage of exploring other reciprocities. Black South Africans know little about trade and moving goods around; Congolese know little about the urban civic culture— the cultures of unionism, community organizing, and local activism that even if largely attenuated in the postapartheid era continue to constitute an important ethos and series of practices that are translated into navigating access to social resources. Additionally, conjoining different nationalities in domestic management begins to take the edge off the constantly referred to “wound” that constitutes much of the overt expression of South African xenophobia to African foreigners— that is, that better resourced foreign African men “eat into” the pool of available South African women. As households increasingly turn toward more heterogeneous compositions, the “taming” of this dispute over women becomes an object of more overt deliberation. A larger influx of unattached foreign African women on the surface starts to balance out the gender disparities. But more importantly, the emphasis in mixed national and

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mixed gendered households on neutralizing any prospective sexual exchanges within the household, makes the household a site for building up a certain familiarity and history of coordinated action without, hopefully, having to deal with the politics of overt sexual relations. In part, this is backed up by the important role the proliferation of small churches play in helping to enforce particular social mores across these mixed households. Within the inner city alone, there are sixty-seven Congolese initiated churches. At least one-half of these churches presently have substantially mixed Congolese and South African congregants ranging from forty to seven hundred members. While these churches often serve as surrogate extended families and chart out a circumscribed social universe where transactions might acquire a greater sense of predictability in an urban environment full of sexual, physical, and social dangers, they also constitute a point of reference and problem-solving for mixed households who can then have a sense of themselves not as a singular exception but part of a larger and increasingly normative way of inhabiting the city. Given the still predominant assumption that xenophobia directs all aspects of South African and non-South African relations, this building up of familiarity and coordination via household management opens up households onto possibilities immanent in the articulation of economies and networks embedded in local domains and the transnational circuits still largely plied by non-South Africans. This articulation is in the initial stages of providing new markets and managers for the distribution of clothing, cell phones, computers, and other electronic goods in scores of black townships across the city that have been accessed through various, sometimes licit, sometimes illicit transnational trading circuits. Various commercial spaces in the inner city, long abandoned of their former functions and avoided because of the difficulty ethnically territorialized proximate neighborhoods had trying to incorporate them within their ambit are rendered more accessible as sites of storage, relay, retail, and artisanal production for cross-national networks that are increasingly viable but still under strong pressures to remain largely invisible to a larger public.

C ONCLUSION The inner city of Johannesburg is an urban space that has placed highly diverse peoples in close proximity to each other under conditions

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where familiar modalities of solidarity and social support either find themselves dysfunctional or have limited basis to really work. The fluid and provisional recombination of household structures, livelihood practices, security arrangements, and social support rearrange everyday social cognition enabling people to see and engage their environment—and the people, objects, and resources within them— in different ways, and thus become subject to different uses. For governance systems that rely upon the clear delineation of subject identities, spaces, functions, and lines of accountability, these social fields built on economies that use people, objects, infrastructure, and resources in multiple ways without clear rules or boundaries become increasingly ungovernable. In response, the attraction increases for dismantling problematic aspects of the built environment in which such an economy grows. There is serious sentiment, for example, within the city council, to simply demolish large areas of the inner city to deter further “slummification.” In the interim, the use of the inner city as a way to extend such “economies of piracy” or informalize larger swathes of the city also grows. This process occludes the efforts on the part of the majority of inner city residents to make modest, yet viable livelihoods within the framework of conventional propriety and efficacy. While many livelihoods are rooted in unconventional trade and collaborations among diverse national actors, they are most often criminalized by default and not by intent. The inner city is potentially a powerful incubator of transnational medium scale trade and of new modalities of economic generation throughout the region. Intensifying mobility is reinforced by the diversity of strategies employed to secure basic needs, for example, simultaneous participation in formal and informal economies, dispersion of dependents across different localities, and diversifying sources of borrowing and evasion. Such mobility, in turn, cultivates particular economic and social practices that can weaken customary modalities of social affiliation and support. Policy efforts to constrain the mobility of domestic private capital and to attract and maintain mobile external capital have had the effect of intensifying the mobility of the poor. This, of course, is not an upward but rather a lateral mobility—within and between townships and informal settlements, cities, and regions, in an incessant hunt for livelihood. In some areas, such as the inner city of Johannesburg, the extent of demographic shifts is certainly unprecedented in contemporary urban history. Also unprecedented is the degree to which social boundaries

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are marked by spatial arrangements in high-density quarters and the ways in which the physical trappings of wealth and security can be penetrated by “roving bands” of “opportunists” taking whatever they can. The intense levels of contestation over who has the “right” to do what in South African cities produces a situation where things can happen very quickly. Urban dwellers don’t, as a result, feel constrained by the sense that specific places and resources belong to only certain kinds of uses or identities. There are constant and often violent arguments in apartment blocks, on streets, in taxis, in schools, and in stores about who can do what where. Such argumentation can open up places to greater flexibility as to their use, but it also can break down the integrity of places and a sense of propriety, which in turn, makes them vulnerable to incursions and distortions of all kinds. Drawing on urban survival strategies used during apartheid to avoid pass laws (the legislation used to limit where blacks could move in the city) and other forms of state surveillance, populations proficient in sending the “wrong” signals can continue to do so in order to “win” spaces of autonomous action. Who is and isn’t a “real” police person, security guard, domestic, gardener, or deliverer is not only increasingly hard to discern, but in many cases doesn’t matter, as levels of complicity between the real and the “pretender” intensify. At other times, things move slowly, since urban residents know that many people are paying attention to what they do, and they then try to conform to some sense of what can pass as conventional in order not to stand out. So in South African cities, spaces can change very quickly and also not at all. The sheer rapidity of demographic and economic changes in the inner city creates uncertainty as to what is possible to plan for and do (Reitzes 1999). The uncertainty has caused sudden and substantial divestitures of all types. These divestitures further impede adequate monitoring by adding a large volume of transactions to the quick pace of change. Insecurity is intensified and, with it, the practice of getting rid of property and position at a cheap price. So, the inner city largely represents a process of “running away,” where the inside and the outside make ambiguous any definitive sense of where residents are located, and what their identities and interests “really” are. Black South Africans are running away from the implosive sociality of township life—of a life for too long situated in a “nowhere,” that is, places arbitrarily configured to be apart and to embody the essence of a culture long uprooted from the chance to continually remake itself. Foreign

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Africans are running away from the impossibility of being at home, that is, to do whatever is possible to maintain the sense (and often, the illusion) that they can have a home. This all takes place is an urban area that, however fleetingly, once hinted at the possibility of a more cosmopolitan urban South Africa. But the country has long repressed what that cosmopolitanism might look like. Instead, it is reimagined primarily in politically vacuous, “rainbow nation” terms and thus misses its real possibilities.

N OTES 1. Based on work conducted by AbdouMaliq Simone as part of conjoint Planact/Foundation for Contemporary Research project on unconventional economic networks in the inner city of Johannesburg between 1994 and 1996. Also see Rogerson and Rogerson 1996; Urban Market Joint Venture 1999. 2. See for example Rogerson 1998.

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Habib, Adam, and Vishnu Padayachee. 2000. Economic policy and power relations in South Africa’s transition to democracy. World Development 28 (2): 245–63. Harts-Broekhuis, Annelet. 1997. How to sustain a living: Urban households and poverty in Sahelian town of Mopti, Africa. Africa 67: 106–31 Jiménez, Alberto Corsin. 2003. On space as a capacity. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 137–53. Kadima, Denis, and Gaston Kalombo. 1995. The motivation for emigration and problems of integration of the Zairean community in South Africa. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand. Latham, Alan, and Derek McCormack. 2004. Moving cities: Rethinking the materialities of urban geographies. Progress in Human Geography 28: 701–24. MacKenzie, Alan. 2002. Transductions: Bodies and machines at speed. New York: Continuum. Maffesoli, Michel. 2004. Everyday tragedy and creation. Cultural Studies 18: 201–10. Massumi, Brian. Sensing the virtual, building the insensible. In Deleuze and Guattari: Critical assessments of leading philosophers. Vol. 3, ed. G. Genosko, 1066–84. London: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2004. Aesthetics of superfluity. Public Culture 16: 373–405. Multiplicity. 2003. Uncertain States of Europe. Milan: Skira. Narula, Monica, and the Raqs Media Collective. 2004. Notes of practice: Stubborn structures and insistent seepage in a networked world. In Immaterial labour: Work, research and art, ed. M. Vishmidt and M. Gilligan. New York: Black Dog. Nattrass, Nicoli. 1994. Economic restructuring in South Africa: The debate continues. Journal of Southern African Studies 20 (4): 517–31. Oucho, John. 1998. Regional integration and labour mobility in Eastern and Southern Africa. In Emigration dynamics in developing countries. Vol. 1, ed. Reg Appleyard, 264–300. Aldershot: Gower. Reguillo, Rosanna. 2004. The oracle in the city: Beliefs, practices, and symbolic geographies. Social Text 22: 35–46. Reitzes, Maxine. 1999. Patching the fence: The white paper on international migration. Johannesburg: Centre for Policy Studies. Reitzes, M.axine, Zico Tamela, and Paul Thulare. 1997. Strangers truer than fiction: The social and economic impact of migrants on the Johannesburg city. Johannesburg: Center for Policy Studies. Robinson, Jennifer. 2002. Global and world cities: A view from off the map. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26: 531–54.

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Rogerson, Chris. 1997. African immigrant entrepreneurs and Johannesburg’s changing inner city. Urban Forum 27: 49–70. Rogerson, Chris, and Jayne M. Rogerson. 1996. Manufacturing location in the developing metropolis: The case of innner city Johannesburg. Washington, DC: World Bank. Rogerson, Chris. 1998. Formidable entrepreneurs: The role of foreigners in the Gauteng SMME economy. Urban Forum 9 (1): 143–53. Sidaway, James, and Michael Pryke. 2000. The strange geographies of “emerging markets.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25 (2): 187–201. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 1998. Globalization and the identity of African urban practices. In Blank____architecture, apartheid and after, ed. H. Judin and I. Vladislavic. Rotterdam: Netherlands Archiecture Institute. Smith, Richard. 2003. World city actor-networks. Progress in Human Geography 27: 25–44. Swatuk, Larry, and David Black. Bridging the rife: The new South Africa in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview. Tacoli, Cecilia. 2002. Changing rural-urban interactions in sub-Saharan Africa and their impact on livelihoods: A summary. Working Paper Series on Rural-Urban Interactions and Livelihood Strategies 7, International Institute for Environment and Development, London. Thrift, Nigel. 2000. Afterwords. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 213–55. Urban Market Joint Venture. 1999. Inner city street trading management strategy. Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council. Weber, Samuel. 2003. Streets, squares, theaters: A city on the move—Walter Benjamin’s Paris. boundary 2 (30): 17–30 Williams, V. 1999. The green paper on internal migration. Development Update 2: 56–73. Wise, J. MacGregor. 2004. An immense and unexpected field of action: Webcams, surveillance, and everyday life. Cultural Studies 18: 424–42. Woodward, Wayne. 2003. Technologized communications as artifact/discourse/relation: The case of the technological city. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 3: 330–54.

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THE RACIALIZATION AND SPATIALIZATION OF VIOLENCE IN POSTCOLONIAL (SUB)URBAN FRANCE1 Paul A. Silverstein

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n this chapter, I explore the historical construction and everyday sitedness of the multiracial, postindustrial, Parisian and Lyonnais suburban housing project complexes—known collectively as la banlieue and recently known as the site of the October-November 2005 “riots” (see Silverstein and Tetreault 2005)—arguing that their racialized boundaries and identity are largely demarcated through the violent practices associated with French (internal) colonialism and late capitalism. By interrogating the larger context and history of violence as productive of the very social groupings (“tribes,” “races,” “ethnicities,” “classes,” etc.), which anthropologists have historically studied, I fathom the limits of standard ethnographic methods for approaching violent incidents. With a particular focus on the production of the ethnoracial category of the male Franco-Maghrebi banlieue residents, I argue that violence—both physical and symbolic—informs the ways “race” in France is spatialized, and banlieue space racialized. Beginning with a concrete instance of violence—a mugging of which I was the victim—I aver that such violence, as both a historical precondition and an indelible immediacy to the banlieue as a racialized space, exceeds and defies direct ethnographic description. As Pradeep

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Jeganathan (2000, 61–65) has provocatively argued, violence outlines a “limit of anthropology” insofar as that the “space for violence” cannot be known a priori from a set of cultural categories or social locations, but rather is continually produced in a shifting set of micropolitics and discourses.2 This chapter thus constitutes a rejoinder to and critical engagement with a number of highly informative French ethnological and sociological studies of the social organization and cultural patterns of particular working-class suburbs (see Althabe 1985; Bouamama et al. 1994; Dubet and Lapeyronnie 1993; Duret 1996; Jazouli 1992; Lepoutre 1997; Petonnet 1982; Wihtol de Wenden and Daoud 1993). The chapter draws productively from the rich theoretical literature at the intersection of urban space, “race,” violence, and gender (cf. Appadurai 1996; Davis 1990, 2006; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Harvey 1990; Jameson 1988; Lefebvre 1991; Simone 2004) in an interrogation of the construction of the banlieue as a space of violence and exclusion in France. While it has become commonplace to translate banlieue as “suburb,” and la banlieue and les banlieues interchangeably as “suburbs,” the banlieue in contemporary France is more closely associated with a direct translation of banlieue as “limit-place,” the place on the outskirts of society to which people were historically exiled. Legal banishment in France today obviously has transcended mere transportation to the suburbs,3 and yet the working-class Parisian and Lyonnais banlieues continue to be classified in popular cognitive mappings as somehow outside of the limits of French society, if not French civilization. Understanding the contemporary banlieue requires a genealogical method that traces the elaboration of French categories of “race” and space in the colonial settings (particularly North Africa) where, through education policies and urban planning projects, architects of the French colonial edifice and their indigenous évolués experimented with the norms and forms of French modern (see Çelik 1997; ClancySmith 1998; Colonna 1975; Conklin 1998; Lorcin 1995; Rabinow 1989; Silverstein 2002; Stoler 2002; Wright 1991). During the waning days of the empire, such a racialized colonial modernity was imported, alongside immigrant laborers, to France, and how it was altered and modified to meet metropolitan conditions.4 In postcolonial France, “race” remains a salient category in the making of identity and citizenship (see Fassin et al. 1997; Ndiaye 2005; Peabody and Stovall 2003; Stoler 2002). While largely illegitimate as

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the discursive basis for public claims or actions by “immigrant” or other minoritized groups in France (except in the form of “antiracist” movements), “race”—as a presumed naturalized attribute based in geographic origins, somatic features, and cultural behaviors—remains prevalent in popular expressions, social expectations, and modes of informal collective organization (such as during the October-November 2005 “riots”) that serve to define and contest “Frenchness.” This chapter explores how such (racial) boundaries of Frenchness comes to be defined and performed violently, with banlieue identity itself taking on an ascribed racial character with presumed naturalized traits of its own that supercede others based on familial origin, skin color, or religion. Moreover, following Michel de Certeau (1984) and AbdouMaliq Simone (2004), I discuss how various lower-class groups (“immigrant” or otherwise) living in the banlieues have hijacked and/or transgressed such racial and spatial orderings in the creation of infrastructures of everyday survival, and how in doing so they have largely transformed French modernity. While generally following such a genealogical method that traces colonial innovations to postcolonial realities, this chapter proposes a slightly different approach to issues of racialization and spatialization in order to avoid the dichotomous roles that tend to be ascribed to the colonizer and the colonized, to the “haves” and the “have-nots,” to the state as the producer of the forms and discourses of modernity, and to the banlieue resident as the consumer. Rather, I contend that production and consumption are reciprocal and ongoing. Categories of “race” and space not simply as separately traceable historical products, but rather as intimately related and dynamically negotiated aspects of everyday French reality. One of the fundamental practices—though by no means the sole practice—that mediates this ongoing formation and reformation of “race” and space is violence, and particularly violence of a masculinized sort. For, while both male and female banlieue residents have proved effective “poachers” of the racial and spatial orderings that they inhabit, spectacular, mediatized expressions of male violence (demonstrations, “riots” [émeutes] confrontations between rival “gangs” [bandes], etc.) have largely dominated the public imaginary of the banlieues. Learning from the work of feminist scholars who have drawn out reciprocal links between violence, femininity, race, and postcoloniality (see Brownmiller 1976; Das 1997; McClintock 1995; Menon 2000), I focus here on how violence in the banlieues

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outlines a particular forms of racialized masculinity. This fundamental productivity of violence was poignantly made clear to me in an experience that I would come to live and relive repeatedly, as so often happens with experiences of violence.

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Late one Friday evening in the Spring of 1996, I was returning to my home in the Parisian suburb of Pantin. As this was the next-to-last metro for the night, the car in which I was traveling was sparsely populated, and became even emptier as the train moved further along its trajectory to the outskirts of Paris. Following the hexis of metro riding, I had my eyes fixed on the newspaper I was reading, with my backpack full of archival notes pressed between my legs. Indeed, it was not until I glimpsed a figure moving toward me that I realized that the metro car, which had just crossed the border into Pantin, had nearly entirely emptied out, leaving only myself and a group of five young men seated a few benches behind me. As he approached, the young man, dressed in what was popularly known in France at the time as le look Beur (baseball cap, name-brand sports vest, jeans, and gym shoes associated with the North African youth [i.e., the “beurs”5] of the French suburbs), formed his hand in the shape of a gun, and pointed it at my head. Misrecognizing his action as humor or as some form of address associating weaponry and masculinity, I performed the same gesture, directing my hand-as-gun at him. Only when he reached for my bag and I began to feel the blows from his companions striking the back of my head did I realize that his gesture was neither a joke nor an ironic greeting, but a clear sign and opening act of aggression. In the minute-long mêlée that ensued, during which I futilely attempted to maintain a grasp on my notebooks, suffering countless blows for my efforts, not a word passed between myself and my attackers. Finally, the train entered the next station, and the group forcefully ejected me onto the platform, minus one backpack and a pickpocketed passport. As the train pulled away, the young man who had begun the attack and I replayed the opening gambit, once again directing handgun signs at each other. Contrary to what such an introductory, ethnographic vignette might indicate, this chapter is not an attempt to explain the attack as such. Rather, I maintain that events like this one are inseparable from

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a history and structure of violence in postcolonial France, and that they are integral parts of dynamic processes of racialization and spatialization from which they derive and to which they add. As such, the attack can neither be encapsulated as a “mugging”—although it did follow in part a logic of economic gain (of the unknown contents of my bag)–––nor as a neat reversal of an anti-immigrant attack, although it did reenact, as I will discuss later, the symbolism, location, and process of countless other incidents of racist violence directed at minority populations in France. In other words, while “race” was clearly at issue in the attack, one must not regard the event as emblematic of the French nation-state’s dysfunctional “race relations,” of its inability to solve the “immigrant problem.”6 Rather, in this chapter, I argue that the nation-state is itself the product of violent encounters that produce its space(s) and its “race (s)” in which such an attack could occur. In discussing this history of violence through an attack in which I was directly involved, I am raising serious questions about the limits of anthropological knowledge production, of one’s ability, as a participant-observer, to produce a “thick” reading of a cultural event. Such epistemological concerns are not only relevant for the microevent described above, but need to be extended to acts of violence more generally, from anti-immigrant attacks to large-scale unrest as occurred most recently in France in October-November 2005. In analyzing these instances, it is, on the one hand, necessary to avoid a discourse of victimhood generally utilized by the nation-state and its discontents to underwrite narratives of loss and suffering and provide political justification for redress, retribution, and revenge. On the other hand, one must simultaneously acknowledge that violence does indeed play out through shifting positionalities of victimizers and victims whose stories and voices call for representation and narration.7 And yet it remains uncertain who, if anyone, is the victim in either the story just told, or in the suburban “riots” replayed in the popular media. What I have been forced to recognize, in reflexively coming to terms with my own attack and understanding it as a moment within a longer history of violence, is that the bases for collective victimhood are the very acts of violence themselves. “Race” and ethnicity are the products, not the underpinnings, of such confrontations in the dialectical constitution of the nation-state and its immigrant other. Beyond this retroactive assessment of relative subject positions, I cannot impute any intentional agency to my attackers or to myself. I cannot, in other words, read the story of the attack over the shoulders of my

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would-be informants any more easily than I could read the expressions on their faces as the train pulled off into the night.

E XPLAINING V IOLENCE However, others have not shared my reluctance to offer explanations. In the weeks following the subway confrontation, informants presented me with a number of different possible interpretations as to what had transpired. For many of my Parisian friends, the attack was simply inevitable; indeed, they had previously expressed concern for my safety living in the banlieues in general and “93” in particular, an area associated in the minds of many Parisians with a history of violence, both personal and collective.8 The event likewise had a ring of normalcy for the security forces who happened to be waiting at the following station and to whom I reported the incident five minutes after it occurred: “They were Black and Arab, right? Damn! We just saw them five minutes ago. I knew we should have stopped them!” Indeed, as I will discuss below, such stereotypes dovetail with an elaborated representation of the northeastern Parisian suburbs as “dangerous” and their immigrant populations as “criminal,” constituting part of the nation-state’s own racialized geography. For many local residents of Pantin, by contrast, the attack seemed a distinct aberration, in both its form and content. An aberration because, for them, Pantin, in spite of its many public housing projects, was still a “safe” place, unlike the more distant, well-known “hot areas” (quartiers chauds) of Bobigny or Aulnay farther down the metro line. An aberration also because the mixture of blacks and beurs in the group seemed to them to violate the rules by which “gangs” (bandes) were formed—this in spite of the fact that those offering this explanation generally had close friends and acquaintances from across ethnic and racial lines. In the end, the general belief among Pantinois was that I had “fallen badly” (mal tombé), that I had simply been unlucky, as violent incidents such as the one I experienced were not part of “Pantin life” (la vie pantinoise). What these folk theories of violence underline is both the centrality of tropes of the “natural” to all discourse on violence, as well as the notion that violence is tied to place, that it resides somewhere. The latter comments by Pantin residents actually correspond quite closely to a larger governmental interpretation of “race violence” (or even

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“racism”) as an aberration to the republican nature of French society. In successive constitutions since the 1789 Revolution, the French state has explicitly denied racial and ethnic categories as official criteria of national belonging.9 Indeed, the French government has in the past used this official ideology as an excuse in refusing to report to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (General Assembly 1977, 38), citing the first paragraph in article two of the present constitution: “France is an indivisible . . . Republic. It guarantees the equality of all citizens before the law.”10 When confronted nonetheless with the continuous growth of racism and violence against immigrant populations since the 1970s, apologists for the Republic have generally sought to direct the blame at extremist fringe groups, including the National Front (FN), and their supporters. Despite the implicit adoption of many of its xenophobic tendencies (including a variety of heavy-handed laws designed to criminalize as terrorists those who provide shelter or financial support for illegal aliens), the French state has consistently sought to distance itself publicly from the National Front and even to criminalize its leader, JeanMarie Le Pen. Further, a growing number of media and academic circles have similarly sought to present racialized violence as a deviation from republican norms by recourse to Tylorean notions of “cultural survival.” For several decades, and again most recently in response to the 2005 unrest, journalists have portrayed the banlieues as areas unpenetrated by liberal humanist values, subject instead to fundamentalist cultural and religious ethoses brought over from other places by “immigrants,” or, more generally, to the supposed violent tendencies of the underclass.11 The encounter of such essential cultural-religiousclass differences, it is often argued, can only lead to ghettoization, tribalism, and even, under the right political conditions, terrorism (cf. Lambert 1995; Pujadas and Salam 1995; Vié 1995). In the paradigmatic case of residents of North African ancestry, banlieue “Arabs” (or “Muslims”) become designated, given their purported propensity for blood feuds or their ritual slaughter of lambs for Aid el-Kebir, as a “violent culture” along the lines of Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanomamo (1983).12 For these republican ideologues, racialized violence testifies to the unachieved “civilizing project,” to the failure of the French Republic to “integrate,” if not “assimilate” its lower class and/or immigrant inhabitants.

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However, this representation of racialized violence as aberrant to French organic society, as part of either a rareified faction or a cultural prior, runs counter to a more critical line of discourse that views racialized violence as endemic to the French state’s handling of its ethnic and racial minority populations. On the one hand, borrowing heavily from the 1920s Chicago School of Sociology, some sociologists have outlined the growth of a “culture of violence” among the marginalized populations of the banlieues stemming from a more general situation of “social disorganization.” This functionalist/cultural ecological argument claims that socioeconomic marginalization within France has produced conditions (unemployment, mental illness, school dropouts, crime, drug abuse, etc.) whereby traditional family and group structures have broken down, leaving a vacuum for the appearance of new, gang-like organizations based on cultural (read racial, ethnic, and religious) identities, responsible for the maintenance of local authority and well-being (cf. Wieviorka 1996, 1999).13 In the most extreme cases, scholars and pundits have made reference to a “tipping point” (seuil de tolérance) of “immigrant” or lower-class population after which the “majority” population will feel itself threatened by the growth of these alternate spheres of economy and justice, and will respond violently (MacMaster 1991). In this perspective, ethnic enclaving serves as a response to socioeconomic marginalization that, in a statistically predictable manner, necessarily produces an explosive situation. Violence, as such, is endemic to any minority situation, French or otherwise. On the other hand, other French observers have focused on the direct participation of the French state in the generation of such societal dysfunction. A 1995 film, La Haine (Hate), directed by Matthieu Kassovitz, provides perhaps the most powerful description of the endemic nature of banlieue violence through a horrific day-in-the-life account of three multiracial, lower-class antiheroes buddies—Hubert, Vinz, and Said—from a fictional but very realistic suburban Parisian housing project, the Cité des Muguets. Loosely based on the April 6, 1993, death of Makome M’Bowole while in Parisian police detention, the film details the “vicious circle” (cercle vicieux) by which the “accidental” killing of a banlieue youth in the course of an arrest can touch off an antipolice riot and lead to further deaths—a scenario that has been repeated in the suburbs of Lyon and Paris in periodic “riots” since 1981 (Grassin and Médioni 1995, 7). As such, it presents a grim critique of portrayals of police brutality as an aberration.14 After confronting

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police at the hospital where their friend Abdel, the victim of police violence, lies in a coma, Hubert and Vinz are driven to the police station by a beur cop, Samir, who addresses them as an “older brother” (grand frère),15 as one who has lived through a number of crises in the cité. “You mix everything up. The bastards who beat up Abdel will be put away . . . Those [at the hospital] are there to protect Abdel and his family. Most of the street cops aren’t there to hit you, but to protect you.” To which Hubert, Kassovitz’s voice of reason in an unreasonable world, replies, “But who protects us from you?” (Kassovitz 1995, 63). As a whole, Kassovitz’s world is one of absolute powerlessness, where the possibilities of redress remain an empty illusion, where violence and hate, in the words of Hubert, only beget more of the same. Abdel’s brother, looking for vengeance, shoots Samir, but only succeeds in getting himself roughly arrested. Indeed, the central force of tension in the narrative revolves around Vinz, who has found a policeman’s pistol lost in the riot the night before and who vows to kill a cop “if Abdel dies.” In spite of Hubert’s pleas for calm, Vinz maintains that such an action constitutes the only “means of gaining respect . . . or, in any case, of reestablishing the balance” (Kassovitz 1995, 59). For Vinz, the gun has a symbolic connotation beyond its possible use as a weapon (for, as Hubert rightly claims, “It’s not guns which are lacking” in the cité). It represents a threat, an icon of power doubled by its police origin that produces a pragmatic effect of fear (or even a symbolic reversal of power) when presented to a menacing or authoritarian figure (in the form of a riot cop or a racist skinhead), even in the mimetic form of the hand-as-gun (performed at least three times in the film).16 In the final scene of the film, Vinz renounces his quest for revenge and surrenders the gun to Hubert, but, in a moment of brutal irony, he is killed while being harassed by a police officer he had previously insulted. Hubert, drawn to the scene as if by some premonition, raises the gun to the officer’s head, to which the officer responds in kind. As the screen fades to black, a single shot is heard, and the “vicious circle” of violence both closes and begins anew. The release of La Haine in the spring of 1995, as part of a larger multimedia event that included a photography exposition, the published screenplay, and a CD including songs by French gangsta rap artists not included on the soundtrack, produced what one might call a “social drama” throughout France. Its black-and-white, documentary-like realism, combined with its absolute pessimism, contributed directly to the renewal of popular concern about the “problem” of the

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banlieues. While banlieue residents attempted desperately to disassociate themselves from the “gangsters” (cailleras) portrayed in the film (Kerchouche 1995), the movie nearly single-handedly gave birth to a successful cinematic genre (including Raï, directed by Thomas Gilou in 1995 and Ma 6–T va crack-er, directed by Jean-Francois Richet in 1997, among others) attempting to capitalize on the violence of northeastern Paris, much as Hollywood has for south-central Los Angeles.17 At the same time, police officials publicly criticized La Haine for “turning hate into a religion” (Poli 1995), while the media sought to link the film to a number of seemingly copycat confrontations throughout suburban France, where police killings had touched off riots in similar fashion as that portrayed in the film (Charles 1995).18 More than ever, the French media portrayed the banlieues as hopeless environments where one’s only chance for survival, as Hubert articulates but fails to achieve, is escape.19 It is to a great extent the confluence of such a media blitz and perceived security threat to the republican order that prompted the prime minister Alain Juppé, beginning in November 1995 and continuing through June of the next year, to unveil a series of far-reaching banlieue “Marshall Plans”20 directed at 546 “sensitive urban zones” (zones urbains sensibles) with particularly high immigrant populations. Like the original Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, but with a neoliberal twist, Juppé’s plans released huge monetary sums to rebuild suburban infrastructures through the investment in municipal internship programs for local youth and the creation of tax-free zones (zones franches) to attract corporate investment. Moreover, the plans increased police surveillance in areas that the president of the police labor union had bemoaned as “lawless zones [zones de non-droit] in which the law of the Republic is totally absent” (interview in Le Monde, September 7, 1995).21 Unfortunately, the capital investment quickly dried up, as the French state was forced to embark on fiscal austerity measures as part of its 2002 entry into the European Monetary Union.22 In the meantime, successive governments—particularly in the wake of France’s renewed “war on terror” following the September 11th attacks—have increased the number of municipal police, riot cops, and military gendarmes patrolling these same areas, in an attempt to eliminate “no go areas,” resulting in the de facto militarization of the banlieues.23 As Mike Davis (2006, 202–6) has provocatively averred, such “low-intensity” wars have led to the “categorical criminalization of the urban poor . . .

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[which becomes] a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war on the street.” In these ways, martial representations as diverse as film, sociological theory, and urban planning measures have spatialized racialized violence to the banlieue landscape, whether, following Kassovitz’s and Wieviorka’s portrayals, as an endemic, functional result of structural changes and socioeconomic marginalization particularly affecting these immigrant-populated areas, or, in the case of security discourse, as an aberrant feature of unassimilated tribalism outside of the purview of republican institutions. All of these genres share a common set of discursive rules that delimit how Parisian and Lyonnais banlieues come to be publicly represented as violent spaces of other races in contemporary France. Further, as overdetermined discourses, they feed back into the ways actual violence in these banlieues comes to be enacted, providing a seemingly endless script for a variety of masculine violent performances.

V IOLENCE

AND

(N EO -)C OLONIALISM

The principal problem with the types of emic analysis outlined earlier is that their arguments (violence as a primordial, unevolved expression of mechanical solidarity or as an instrumental response to marginalization) present a narrow historical frame that presumes a structural opposition between (male) immigrant “difference” and French “sameness,” between banlieue residents and unmarked national citizens as socioeconomically—if not culturally—irreconcilable subjects. As such, these analyses end up reiterating the French Republic’s arguments for greater (socioeconomic and police) involvement in the banlieues (as instantiated by the neoliberal Marshall Plans) and reconfirming the need for an expanded “integrating (read civilizing) mission.” To combat this logic, it is necessary to reevaluate the historical relationship of the French nation-state and violence, and particularly to focus on the colonial period as a particularly charnel moment for the development and problematization of ethno-racial difference. The colonial encounter in North Africa was to a great extent a history of violence. Colonizer and colonized were locked in what Frantz Fanon (1963, 88) has famously called a “circle of hate” that defined their encounter from the first days to the last. He wrote, “The violence

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which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms . . . that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when . . . he surges into the forbidden quarters” (1963, 40). Fanon’s observations, deriving from his first-hand experience as a colonial psychiatrist and later a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the 1954 to 1962 Algerian War of decolonization, imply two robust premises: that ethnoracial subjectivities are to a large extent the products and not the causes of violence, and that these subjectivities are written in space and time. If the settler comes into being through the rape of native soils and bodies, “for the native, life can only spring out of the rotting corpse of the settler . . . The practice of violence binds [the colonized] together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning” (1963, 93). Moreover, this violent dialectic manifests itself spatially as “a world divided into compartments”: the settler’s town and the native’s town—the former is a place of modernity, of technology and sanitation, the latter a place of backwardness, of poverty and filth (1963, 38–39). Existing in “reciprocal exclusivity,” these two areas, in Fanon’s Manichean assessment, come to be inhabited by “two different species” (1963, 39–40), with high walls, sanitary belts (cordons sanitaires), and colonial armies maintaining their absolute difference. As we know from more recent academic studies of colonial urbanism, urban policy in North Africa directly maintained this spatial “apartheid,” establishing “modern,” European cities at a safe distance from the “traditional,” native medinas. Or, more exactly, French military officials (notably the Maréchal Lyautey in Morocco) effectuated building programs and surveillance measures in order to increase the ease of movement within each city (and thus allow for armed intervention in the case of unrest), but limit the circulation between them (Abu-Lughod 1980; Çelik 1997; Rabinow 1989; Wright 1991). From these Fanonian insights into the racialization and spatialization of violence in the colonial setting, we can return to postcolonial France. The transposition of the colonial urban experiments to Paris followed a similar ambivalence of circulation and containment, of mobility and management, leading to the production of particular spaces represented in similar Manichean terms: as “native” and “settler,” “French” and “immigrant,” and, more generally, bourgeois and

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proletarian—all of which came to map on each other (Çelik 1997, 193). As the Haussman reforms and their successors widened Parisian streets, poorer populations were progressively expelled to the city’s outer districts (arrondissements) or to the impoverished shantytown “zone,” which surrounded the capital. Likewise, the public housing projects in the Parisian and Lyonnais banlieues, built originally as utopian experiments in self-contained communities (much on the model of the colonial European cities) for a middle class fleeing the congestion of Paris, became over the years occupied by proletarian workers (many of whom were of immigrant origin) in the local automobile industries.24 Through corruption, poor management, and the more general economic downturn since 1973, the infrastructure of these communities has collapsed, leaving its current inhabitants largely unemployed or forced to commute great distances for daily work.25 Even when employed, labor circulation has been made particularly difficult by the paucity of public transportation connecting the housing projects to workplaces in neighboring suburbs or in Paris. Whereas factories previously ran shuttle buses to Val-Fourré and other such cités where their workers inhabited, today, a Val-Fourréian must trek thirty minutes on foot (or by a bus running every half hour) to the local station in Mantes-la-Jolie, from which he or she can catch an infrequent train to Paris (forty minutes transportation time), and then there transfer to another train or metro destined for the workplace. And the Val-Fourréian is actually lucky, for only about 40 percent of the 546 communities targeted by the recent Marshall Plans actually have local train stations (Daoud 1993, 77).26 Transportation, a subject to which I will return, is but one example of how a contemporary urban apartheid (in which class is racialized, and race classed) is maintained, how compartmentalized space is produced in and through movement. In the absence of a working infrastructure, a set of informal institutions has developed in the banlieue. As residence in certain suburbs (as much or more so than having an “Arab”-sounding name) is often the source of employment discrimination, residents use relatives’ or friends’ home or business addresses in Paris whenever possible.27 Local cultural and religious associations have constituted themselves as a parallel education system, attempting to make up for the depressed learning conditions (poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms, teachers unknowledgeable of or inflexible to the students’ multicultural needs) in the local schools through after-school tutoring, preparation for the baccalaureate exam, or cultural/religious

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training. Daily open-air markets operate in the shadow of boarded-up shopping centers, providing the quotidian requirements of food, clothing, and school supplies. And those residents with vehicles have created an informal taxi service to carry neighbors to and from transportation centers or places of work/commerce/entertainment (Silverstein 2004, 92–120). As such, the racial and spatial compartmentalization of colonial Algeria finds itself to a large extent replicated along the border of working-class banlieues and bourgeois metropolises in postcolonial Île-de-France (i.e., the general Parisian region). Salubrity and dilapidation, wealth and poverty, plenty and paucity continue to define juxtaposed spaces represented as inhabited by “different species”: “settlers” (i.e., today’s banlieusards, whether “immigrants” or not) and “natives” (i.e., white “French-of-stock” or français de souche from Paris or its bourgeois suburbs), though with the moral valence and privilege of these racialized categories inverted. Where high walls, open spaces, and the colonial army maintained the ideological and spatial distance between native and settler, today this ethno-spatial divide is constituted by péripherique ring-roads, controlled transportation schedules, and, above all, an ever-increasing security force of national, municipal, riot, military, and private police. As Paul Gilroy has aptly noted for Britain, “The ‘thin red line’ of troops in the colonial front line, standing between us and them, between black and white, has been translated into the ‘thin blue line’ of police, personifying the law” (1991, 110).

S UBJECT F ORMATION

IN THE

B ANLIEUES

For, in France as in Algeria, it is violence itself, simultaneously monopolized and diffuse, that draws the proverbial lines on the pavement between “us” and “them,” between Parisians and banlieusards, “French-of-stock” (français de souche) and French-of-color (or, in other formulations, “French-of-paper” [français de papier], in that they are legally, but not licitly “French”). One place to explore this intersection of “race,” space, and violence in the French cités is the historical process of subject formation of one particular set of banlieue residents, male beurs. Violence has to a great extent defined the history of North African immigration to France: not only the violence of colonization and decolonization that Fanon describes, but a longer

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violent engagement between a Christian North and a Muslim South, a history of successive crusades and reconquistas. If Charles Martel, as French history textbooks proclaim, pushed back the Saracens in the Battle of Poitiers in 732 CE, immigration from North Africa today has been reconstrued by certain apocalyptic writers as the Saracens’ revenge, whether as a “peaceful invasion” (invasion pacifique) or armed with Kalashnikov rifles (Figueras 1983; Raspail 1973).28 Such martial representations have been formalized in actual attacks that, in particularly ritualized fashion, have sought to repel the “immigrant” armies. Intermittent “murderous summers” (étés meurtriers) claimed the lives of nearly fifty North African immigrant men and their children between 1973 and 1983 (Aïchoune 1985). In the summer of 1973 alone, fifty Algerian workers were attacked and fifteen were killed in and around Marseilles, in a style of assault known locally as a ratonnade (“rat hunt”). In sport-like fashion (resembling, perhaps, the aristocratic tradition of the fox hunt), a group of white beaufs (short for beaux-frères, or “brothers-in-law,” the French equivalent of “good ol’ boys”) would set upon the “rat” (raton), beat him up, destroy his identity papers or pay-slips (thus making his stay in France illegitimate),29 and leave him for dead. However, by the early 1980s, the attack ritual had transformed somewhat, with the principal prey changing from male immigrant workers to “immigrant” children (irrespective of their actual place of birth) playing in the courtyards between public housing buildings. Rather than being hunted down by packs, the children were shot at, sniper-style, by (mostly elderly, white male) neighbors from their apartment windows using .22-caliber rifles, primarily employed for hunting purposes (Aïchoune 1985, 141–43).30 Moreover, the .22-caliber rifle (serving as an icon for the attack as a whole), like that of the handgun, has become a recurrent image in banlieue literature and film throughout the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Charef 1983). It is important to note the articulation of racism, nationalism, and sports in the attacks just described. Bill Buford, in demonstrating the interface between the British National Front and football hooliganism, has evincing the carnal exhilaration (the “animal intensity”) of violent masculinity (1990). Like for British hooligans, masculinized pleasure appears to be a central component of racist violence in France,31 and likewise, the attacks described above do seem to constitute exclusivist enactments of the French nation (Stolcke 1995). While the intentions of individual attackers are largely inscrutable, the attacks participate in a larger symbolic history and structure. Identity

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papers torn up reconstitutes legal expulsion; the targeting of children (and, in Germany, homes) signals acts of exclusion from the national family and legitimate means of social reproduction. However, the social base of such violent expressions of nationalism in France differs from what Buford describes for Britain, with French beaufs emerging from the lower rather than the middle classes (Wieviorka 1996). As Terence Turner has argued, racist attacks are as much acts of inclusion as of exclusion (1995). Marginalized (often unemployed) “white Frenchmen” act violently as if to reinsert themselves socially as the ideological defenders of the racially circumscribed “nation” on whose behalf they appear (and sometimes claim) to act. An exclusive male citizenship is thus violently enacted through racist attacks. This enactment of beauf, male nationalist agency through violence relies on, to borrow the words of Allen Feldman, “novel subject positions [that] are constructed and construed by violent performances” in postcolonial France (1991, 20). However, it is not only the beauf male subject that is elaborated through violence. Indeed, Beur male subjectivity is likewise engendered in the course of these same racist attacks. However, to understand this production thoroughly, it is necessary to focus directly on the “thin blue line” noted above and so central to contemporary representations of the immigrant banlieue as evidenced in La Haine. Indeed, the .22-caliber rifle shootings in the early-1980s developed a second attack ritual, that of the unnecessary use of force by police and security officers against young “immigrant” banlieue men.32 The attackers included male private guards and security forces assigned to local supermarkets and train stations, compartmentalized spaces of the French state within the housing projects. As in the case of the .22-caliber rifle attackers, the perpetrators often succeeded in pleading guilty to lesser sentences, if not being acquitted altogether (Aïchoune 1985). Largely in response to such unpenalized, “legitimate” violence, young beur men and women began in 1980 to mobilize collectively in opposition to the police.33 The first independent movement of beurs borrowed the English name Rock Against Police (RAP) and organized free concerts to increase public awareness of the murder of three North African teenage boys by police during the four months prior. The second concert, held on May 15, 1981, took place in the public housing complex Couzy in the Parisian suburb of Vitry, on the exact site where one of these victims, the young Kader Lareiche, had been killed by a night watchman three months earlier (Aïchoune 1985,

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127–28; Jazouli 1992, 28). Likewise, the .22-caliber rifle assassination of a community organizer, Abdenbi Guemiah, precipitated the November 1982 foundation of the Association Gutenberg (named for the suburban Nanterre housing project in which it was founded; Boubekeur and Abdallah 1993, 65). Interestingly, the first French cultural association of North African women was formed in March 1981 in the Busserine outlying quarter of Marseilles under similar conditions. The association was founded by the sister of Zahir Boudjlal, who with Lahouari Ben Mohammed, had been killed the previous month. While the association had the explicit goal of documenting racist assassinations, its first action, however, was to organize a protest against the deportation of Djamila, a young resident of Busserine who had been arrested during the demonstration following the assassination of Lahouari. In other words, the constitution of a female beur(ette) political subjectivity was itself historically predicated on male violence and its prevention. This movement of beurette women to protect their beur “brothers” (frères)—lineal or fictive—from the French state actually inverts standard gender relations in the banlieues. Drawing on their own idealization of North African domestic life and Muslim mores, beur men generally adopt the role of being the protectors of women; which is to say, they protect their own honor by regulating their sisters’ (and other female kin’s) sexuality. Moreover, beurettes as protectors of men contrasts with a masculine beur political subjectivity: the violent avenger of his fallen “brothers.” Such “novel subject positions” underwrote the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (known colloquially as the Marche des Beurs), the historical touchstone and unifying event for the “Beur Movement.” The march was to a great extent response to the “murderous summer” of the previous months.34 For one participant, Ahmed Ghayet, the march formed the beurs as a particular political and generational subjectivity: “The history of the youth, which one has baptized today as the ‘banlieue youth,’ which had been baptized ‘Beurs,’ I would date from the 1983 March” (cited in Bouamama et. al. 1994, 40). The event was organized by the Association SOS Avenir Minguettes, whose twenty-year-old president, Toumi Djaidja, had been seriously wounded several months earlier while attempting to intervene when policeman had unleashed their dogs on a group of young residents of Les Minguettes (Lyon). Male and female marchers displayed banners commemorating the young men killed during the

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summer and were greeted along the way with local memorials in suburban Vaulx-en-Velin (Lyon) and Nanterre (Paris) for residents assassinated during the previous year (Jazouli 1992, 60). In this way, the forging of the beurs as a transsuburban political generation corresponded to assassinations of young banlieue men who were seen by community organizers as “brothers” (frères), whether actual, as in the case of Zahir Boudjlal, or fictive kin (Bouamama et. al. 1994, 50). If many beurs participated in nonviolent actions like the march, others felt such displays of passive solidarity to be ineffectual and demanded a “blood-price” (prix de sang) to be paid (Bouamama et. al. 1994, 51). However, as the actual attacker, under police custody if not a police officer himself, could not be directly punished by the victim’s male kin, the community as a whole took action, directing their “rage” at the police forces as a whole, as well as at the symbols of their economic exclusion in the cités. In the summer of 1981, following a police raid in the Cité de la Cayolle in Marseilles in which a number of women, children, and elderly residents were injured, young male resident fire-bombed the shopping centers and police stations throughout the area. During the same period, in Lyon, when a hunger strike protesting the expulsions of young North African immigrants failed to overturn the responsible legislation, and when shortly thereafter a young woman from neighboring Saint-Dizier was extradited to Algeria, Les Minguettes exploded in a series of violent confrontations between young men and the police. In an estimated 250 separate incidents, groups of mostly beur (but also other banlieusard) boys would steal a car, engage police in a chase, and then abandon and burn the vehicle. While clearly having a pleasurable, if not sporting, quality, these “rodeos” (as they were locally called) were often (though certainly not always) understood by their participants as exercises in a particular agency delimited by the violence of the banlieues. According to one local resident and community activist, Djamel, “It was from the moment of police provocations that the youth began to become aggressive, because they didn’t under the police’s aggressions towards them. The rodeos were to respond to everything they had undergone, they and their parents . . . The rage they had in themselves was directed at the cars” (cited in Jazouli 1992, 21–22). Two years later, similar confrontations occurred in neighboring Venissieux (Lyon), leading to the weeklong occupation of the housing project by a regiment a four thousand police officers. During the same year, young men of the Monmousseau cité of Les Minguettes engaged police in a violent

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struggle after the latter had broken into an apartment suspected of harboring stolen goods. The demonstrators accused the police of not only being racist, but, moreover, of violating their privacy and, above all, of showing a “lack of respect” for their parents (Jazouli 1992, 48). Similar such confrontations would occur throughout the 1990s, and most recently in October-November 2005, when they uniquely spread across a large swath of impoverished outer-city housing projects. In this engagement with the police, and the French state as a whole, beur male subjectivity became premised not only on their status as the objects of violence, but also on their role as the subjects of violence, as the avengers of their “brothers” and defenders of their “parents.” The point of this discussion is not to substantiate Kassovitz’s portrayal in La Haine of an endemic “vicious circle” of suburban violence, nor is it to claim that all violent acts are intentionally political in their enactment, but rather to argue that male and female banlieue subjectpositions (beur, beauf, and banlieue resident more broadly) are constituted themselves in and through masculinized violence, and that this violence organizes suburban space. Further, this history of violence and spatialization determines how future responses, violent or otherwise, can be conducted. Given the compartmentalization of racespace, it is of little wonder that antipolice “riots” should target not only police stations, but also gymnasiums, shopping centers, schools, and other such institutions associated with state economic, political, and cultural dominance. As much as acts of destruction, these attacks entail occupation and appropriation, as local residents inscribe the sites, through graffiti and tags, as their own. Or, in the case of the growth of parallel grassroots services in the shadows of these defunct institutions, residents simply replace these sites with their own. To return to Fanon’s spatial understanding of colonization and decolonization: “What [the natives] demand is not the settler’s position of status, but the settler’s place. The immense majority of the natives want the settler’s farm. For them, there is no question of entering into competition with the settler. They want to take his place” (1963, 60–61).

T RANSPORTATION , E XCLUSION , AND E MBODIED A PPROPRIATION Within this history of exclusion and appropriation, I would like to locate one particular site for the violent production of space and

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“race”: the transportation network. As I have noted, France’s transportation network is a paradigmatic space for the ambivalent play of discourses and practices of circulation and containment. Public transportation both delineates racialized compartments and violates them, enables mobility and delimits the possible avenues through which such mobility can occur. As such, public transportation, along with corporate institutions like supermarkets, serves as a locus of contestation and, consequently, of violence. In July 1983, nine-year-old Tawfik Ouanes was shot and killed by a subway security officer in the northern Parisian suburb of La Courneuve. In another, now infamous incident of that same year, four Foreign Legionnaires cast an Algerian resident, Habib Grimzi, to his death from a moving train bound for Marseilles.35 These two incidents point to how a technology that in many ways has come to represent French modernity holds the potential to exclude certain categories of person from it. Moreover, these two examples mark the centrality of circulation in a more generalized state of official low-intensity, racialized warfare along the borders of French urban metropolises. For, in the late 1980s, the directors of the National Rail Corporation (SNCF) began publicly complaining that they had “lost control” of their suburban transportation network. According to railway division commissioner Guy Puchon, in addition to increasing “problems” of vandalism, graffiti, and muggings, “we found we had become unwilling participants in the drug scene. Our trains were transporting poor suburban youth to the city after school to make drug deals” (Rivière-Platt 1993, 26). In 1989, the SNCF, with direct support from local and national governments, initiated a comprehensive “security plan” and spent over 600 million francs over the next three years on a policy of “rapid intervention and increased surveillance” along the suburban network. This plan included the hiring of six hundred new security agents and the assignment of another 380 policemen to patrol the suburban lines. In addition, the SNCF installed video cameras in all of its banlieue train stations (Rivière-Platt 1993, 26).36 Rather than redefining the railway network as a neutral space, these measures have only contributed to the elaboration of what Allen Feldman in a different context has called an “interface,” a “spatial construct preeminently linked to the performance of violence” that serves as a “topographic ideological boundary sector that physically and symbolically demarcates ethnic communities” (1991, 28). Not only have aggressions of various sorts continued apace, but the system

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became a targeted site for political terror, such as the 1995 to 1996 bombing attacks in the Parisian regional railroad (RER) stations of Saint-Michel and Port Royal. The government’s response, in the form of the Vigipirate emergency security plan, centered specifically on the suburban rail network, as the assumption held that these attacks resulted from the ability of banlieue youth (concluded to be a pivotal part of the responsible Islamist terrorist network) to enter Paris undetected.37 In addition to hiring additional private security agents, roving patrols of riot police and military infantry (armed with submachine guns) were assigned to every SNCF and RER station. This added security resulted in nearly three million identity checks of beurs and North African-looking riders. Furthermore, police were assigned to the metro authority (RATP) in order to analyze the security risk of those individuals caught without a paid fare. Finally, as of September 1996, metro and train employees were directly empowered to make arrests. One felicitous anecdote underlines the racialized nature of these “random” verifications and incarcerations. One evening, I was walking through an outlying Parisian metro station with two others, a recent immigrant from Senegal and a young beur from the Parisian suburbs. When we encountered the security detail, the Senegalese friend stopped dead and took an alternate route, as his residence permit was not in order, and hence he feared deportation.38 Giving him only a sidelong glance and my own white-skinned face no notice at all, the security agents stopped my beur friend and demanded his papers. Although he was a legitimate French citizen (born in France to parents born in Algeria under French rule), he had yet to update his national identity card to his recent move to the southern Parisian suburb of Châtillon, and hence there was a discrepancy with his other papers. On this basis, the security guards detained him for thirty minutes, before writing him an injunction requiring him to present an updated version of his national identity card to the central police station within two weeks. In later conversations with him and other beur friends, we discussed local strategies used to sidestep these confrontations, from using alternate routes to avoiding certain stations at certain times to using mocked-up train passes. One friend asserted that by eschewing the “look beur,” he had succeeded in never being questioned. What such experiences indicate is the close link of categories of space, violence, and the body in security discourse and practice. Or, from another perspective, they point to the ways in which regimes of

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surveillance naturalize particular gendered bodily features (such as the “look beur”) as markers of identity and, consequently, of allegiance, and thus provide after-the-fact justification of policies of exclusion.39 Within this disciplinary system that racializes bodies and spaces, banlieue residents of all “races” have appropriated (taken possession of) various aspects of the transportation system as their own, engaging in what de Certeau has generally termed “poaching” (1984, xii). In individual, artistic expressions, they have inscribed train cars and stations with graffiti, from elaborate pictorial displays to personalized signatures (or “tags”). These renditions serve not only as acts of intragroup bravura (among age or artistic peers), but also as a means by which suburban groups reclaim municipal institutions located on a territory constituted as their own. Likewise, certain banlieue residents use the transportation network as a site for economic gain—as an entrepreneurial space—in terms of gray market vending, mendacity, or even drug sales. One talks of “doing a metro” (se faire un métro) to indicate a type of petty theft involving using the sudden crowds of the subway as interference in a pick-pocketing scheme. The same practice, as Mehdi Charef has shown in novelized and film form, can also utilize racialized notions of criminality, with multiracial pickpocketing groups using a clean beur member as a fall guy (1983, 103–8). However, it is important not to overemphasize the criminal utilization of the metro and thus underwrite a set of racialist (or spatialist) discourses about banlieue criminality. Indeed, the more everyday form of symbolic violence against public transportation authority is an elaborate system of fare dodging, from jumping gates to distracting ticket takers to forging monthly passes. To combat this tendency, the RATP has developed ever more complicated and intricate ticket systems. However, the more enterprising bricoleurs have always found ways around such technological innovations. One Algerian friend in Paris, who had trained as an engineer during his military service in the navy, even succeeded in adapting a tape recorder to duplicate the magnet strip on monthly metro passes. Rather than profiting from this innovation, he donated these forged passes to suburban acquaintances unable to afford the official, escalating prices. When asked about his motivation, he described an incident he witnessed of a RATP agent’s discrimination and inflexibility with regards to a beur companion of his who had wrongly filled out the ticket number on her metro pass. From that moment, he decided never again to pay for a single subway ticket. Through practices such as his, banlieue residents have mobilized

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within the racialized disorder of the suburban transportation network and have developed their own “illegitimate” practices of respatialization (De Certeau 1984, 96) in their embodied attempts to take possession of spaces defined violently (Silverstein 2004, 109–15).

C ONCLUSION The attack in which I was an unwilling participant can thus be situated within a confluence of genealogies of colonialism, immigration, suburban space, and violence, as a particular moment within the dialectical fashioning of the nation-state and its various (banlieusard and beur) others. Occurring within the “interface” determining the racialized compartments of city and suburb,40 within the transportation system—an ambivalent, liminal space of contact and mobility, and hence of impurity and disorder—the violence served to reinscribe the thin line between a racialized “us and them”; between my “black” and “beur” attackers as colonial “natives” turned postcolonial “settlers” retransformed by their spatializing practices into banlieue “natives,” and “I” constituted violently as a “colonial” settler turned postcolonial “native” reconfigured as a new “settler” in their banlieue. Sharing many characteristics of the racist attacks discussed earlier (such as the murder of Habib Grimzi), the violence can be understood retroactively as simultaneously an act of my exclusion (symbolized by me being cast from the train), as well as of their inclusion (in the banlieue of Pantin) and of their appropriation (of the subway lines passing through this locality). As in a ratonnade (or, for that matter, a “rodeo”), the violence appeared to be less about economic gain as such than about destruction as male sporting pleasure—as the ritualized conclusion to a Friday night on the town. And like the raton, my identity papers were taken, thus complicating, if not fully de-legitimizing, my stay in France. The use of the prosthetic handgun represented, in this respect, not a mimesis of La Haine itself mimicking and satirizing Hollywood’s fetish of weaponry, but rather a mimesis of the state and those who act in its name—be they pistol-toting police officers or beaufs armed with .22-long rifles. However, in emphasizing these connections, I do not want to suggest that such symbolically laden violence represents some “revenge of the repressed” mistakenly played out on an American anthropologist. Rather, I regard this act, within a history of discourses and practices,

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as constitutive of and constituted by the particularly violent ways in which “race” is spatialized and space racialized in postcolonial France. Beyond this historical contextualization, beyond arguing that the attack reenacted and reconstituted the racial ordering of suburban spaces (in its simultaneous subversion of such hegemonic orderings), beyond, in other words, approaching the attack from the standpoint of its effects, I cannot claim to explain it. The social categories (of “race,” space, class, ethnicity, gender, etc.) I have to resort to for an ethnographic explanation are themselves reconstituted and transformed in the subway attack. My attempts at detailing a historical genealogy or symbolic analysis of the attack only succeed in lending an aura of stability to social categories that are, by their very nature, unstable, subject to micropolitical and historical processes. As problematically, although I can try to place them structurally and historically, I cannot begin to impute the intentions of my attackers. And, as such, my desire to portray myself as a victim remains unfulfilled. As, I fear, do my desires as an ethnographic observer of violence.

N OTES 1. Research for this essay was generously funded by the National Science Foundation, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the U.S. Institute of Peace Jennings-Randoloph Program, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation, University of Chicago. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the following individuals for providing invaluable comments and suggestions on various drafts of this essay: Kamran Ali, Brian Axel, Genevieve Bell, Robert Brightman, Paul Brodwin, Partha Chatterjee, Tom Conley, Nicholas Dirks, Marco Jacquemet, Pradeep Jeganathan, Brian Larkin, Brinkley Messick, Martina Rieker, David Scott, Rupert Stasch, and all the participants in the Workshop on the Cultural Study of the Middle Eastern City. 2. This argument extends the classic observation that violence and pain defy and unmake language and social life (see Scarry 1985). 3. During the nineteenth century, legal banishment often took the form of transportation to the colonies. Many of the Paris communards of 1871 were among the early colonists of France’s South Pacific territories, where they were interestingly joined by similarly exiled Kabyles who had participated in the 1871 insurrection in eastern Algeria (see Bullard 2000; Lallaoui 2001). While such methods are no longer in effect for French citizens, resident foreigners are subject to a similar fate. Most

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infamously were the “charter flights” of the mid-1990s on which arrested illegal aliens (les sans papiers) were forcibly expelled to various countries in Africa. Increasing attention has been paid to the ideological and material effects that colonization and decolonization had on French metropolitan life (see Apter 1999; Lebovics 1992, 2004; Ross 1995; Woodhull 1993). Zeynep Çelik (1997, 192–93), in particular, has argued that France’s contemporary banlieue housing projects must be viewed as the lineal descendents of indigenous workers’ housing experiments produced in colonial Algeria. For a parallel argument about how “polarized patterns of land use and population density recapitulate older logics of imperial control and racial dominance” in today’s “Third World” slums, see Davis (2006, 96). The ethnonym “beur” likely derives from a double syllabic inversion of arabe (Arab), according to the rules of the street language game known as verlan. While likely used since the mid-1970s, the term became popularized by the media during the cultural demonstrations and activism that constituted the “Beur Movement” of the early 1980s. In more recent years, banlieue Franco-Maghrebis tend to refer to themselves and others with a further syllabic inversion, rabeu, thus producing a parallelism between that ethnonym and others—renoi (Black), çéfran ([white] French), feuj (Jew)—used in everyday banlieue parlance. For a linguistic study of verlan, see Lefkowitz 1991. The “immigrant problem,” its symbolic localization in the banlieues, and its attendant implications for French “race relations” has been the subject of a vast amount of state-sponsored sociological attention in France. Recent studies have focused on gangs (Fize 1993; Lepoutre 1997), gangsta culture (Bazin 1995; Louis and Prinaz 1990), drug abuse (Duprez and Kokoreff 2000; Jazouli 1994), religious recrudescence (Kepel 1991), juvenile delinquency (Braun and Lakrouf 1993; Wieviorka 1999), among other problematized modalities of the “culture of the cités” as functional responses to a general condition of social marginalization or, in more recent parlance, “exclusion” (see Begag and Delorme 1994; Dubet and Lapeyronnie 1993; Wieviorka 1996). This concern has underwritten a number of anthropological works on violence that caution against “porno-troping” violence, representing violence via pornographic voyeurism. See Daniel 1996 for one attempt to address issues of writing and violence. See Nagengast 1994 for a general review of anthropological literature on violence. On the relation of language, narrativity, and violence, see Das 1997; Scarry 1985. “93” (usually pronounced on the street as neuf-trois rather than quatrevingts treize) refers to the general postal code (93xxx) for the administrative state (département) of Seine St.-Denis that abuts Paris to the northeast. Historically—and particularly during the French post-war

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economic boom—it was a site of vast industrial production, and hence of working class politics; indeed, in spite of recent gains by the xenophobic Front National, the district has long been considered part of the banlieue rouge, the fiefdom of the French Communist Party. Beginning in the 1950s, Seine St.-Denis became a privileged site for the construction of large public housing complexes (cités HLM) designed in large part to relieve the congestion of working-class Parisian neighborhoods and provide more salubrious housing for those (mostly Algerian) families living in the shantytowns (bidonvilles) in Drancy, Nanterre, and St.-Denis. In more recent years, since the closing of many of the factories in the region, 93 has become virtually synonymous in the popular spatial imagination with immigration, unemployment, dilapidation, drugs, gangs, and violence. 93 and other banlieue postal codes have been more recently appropriated by local hip hop groups for the names of their posses, tags (St.-Denis-based Suprême NTM’s “93 NTM”), and albums (Sarcelles-based Ministère Amer’s “95210”). For a history of public housing in the Seine St.-Denis banlieues, see Bastié 1964; Daoud 1993; Soulignac 1993. 9. This by no means should imply that “race” is completely outside French public discourse, but rather that arguments over social justice tend to be generally framed in terms of “citizenship” rather than “community.” Since the late-1980s, and particularly in response to social dramas like the 1989 “Headscarf Affair” (l’affaire du foulard islamique) in which three Moroccan girls were expelled from public school for refusing to remove their hijabs (cf. Auslander 2000; Beriss 1990; Silverstein 2000), mainstream public sentiment from across the political spectrum has tended to defend the “republican” system of state secularism and universal citizenship against all incursions of (“Anglo-American”) multiculturalism (cf. Debray 1998). This contrasts to the United States, where ethnic and racial categories are officially established by the Office of Management and the Budget, with direct material consequences for the collection of census data, the direction of Affirmative Action programs, and the zoning of elections. For a contrasting and polemic view on the situation of racial equality and multiculturalism in France, see Amselle 1996. 10. More recently, the French government has used the same argument to claim exemption from article twenty-seven of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—“In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language”—on the basis of the fact that it de jure has no “minorities.” The same argument was also used to veto the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages that would have granted broad recognition of communal linguistic rights in Europe.

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See the September 2001 report, “Racial Discrimination: The Record of France,” prepared by the Human Rights Documentation Center (http://www.hrdc.net). It must be emphasized that “immigrants” (a term which is generally used in France to connote first-, as well as 1.5- and second-generation migrants) make up a significant minority, though rarely a majority, of banlieue inhabitants (cf. Daoud 1993). This criminalization of North Africans has its roots, as Frantz Fanon suggests, in the conjoined elaboration of colonial juridical and medical biotechnologies. Psychiatrists in colonial Algeria affirmed that the Algerian native suffered from the mental disorder of “homocidal melancholia” (translated architectonically as an underdeveloped rational cortex), which led him to congenital violence (Fanon 1963, 296–301). Wieviorka, a student of Alain Touraine, bases his understanding of the rise of racist violence in a theory of “destructuration of social life,” by which challenges of globalization and post-Fordism have made “classical modes of socialization . . . inoperative” (1996, 336). In this schema, “social demands” are transformed into “cultural statements,” as deprivation forces actors “to assume an identity which ensures them of the collective reference points which they do not have” (1996, 344). As these identities are often posed in essentialized forms, ethnic nationalisms and xenophobia, with their concomitant racialized violences, often ensue. Note that this functionalist perspective parallels Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of “social disorientation” as the motor force of diasporic ethnic politics and contemporary racism (1992), as it does Chicago School’s foundational studies of “social disorganization” in Chicago’s heavily immigrant neighborhoods (cf. Burgess 1925; Park 1925; Zorbaugh 1929). According to Kassovitz, “La Haine derived from a simple question: What does it take to wake up one morning and be done in [buté] that evening by a cop [keuf]” (Grassin and Médioni 1995, 7). Indeed, the plot of the film essentially follows this trajectory, with the character Vinz playing the role of Makome. The character reinforces this parallel toward the end of the film by claiming, “My name is not Malik Oussekine,” in an attempt to allay his friends’ concerns that he would end up with the same fate as the young beur killed during a 1986 student demonstration by Parisian motorcycle police. For an ethnographic study of les grands frères as an ambivalent social category of authority in the cités of Lyon, see Duret 1996. Kassovitz clearly establishes the origin of this obsession with weaponry in the consumption of Hollywood cinema by banlieusards. In an early scene, teenagers debate the make of the lost police gun by referencing Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson movies. Further, Vinz performs his first handgun gesture in front of a mirror, replaying Robert De Niro’s

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PAUL A. S ILVERSTEIN “Are you looking at me?” speech from Taxi Driver. Later, seeking refuge from the police in a movie theater, he finally settles down in front of Bambi, after having passed briefly through several violent action films playing in the same multiplex. Silently imitating his earlier gesture, he points his hand-as-gun at Bambi and shoots—only to have his actions further imitated by a young child seated next to him. However, given Kassovitz’s explicit debt to the American cinema of Brian De Palma and Spike Lee, this same critique of Hollywood as the agent for the reproduction of violence, can arguably be addressed at La Haine itself. Indeed, the mimicry of the gun by my attackers was arguably mediated by Kassovitz’s film, in which case the actual firearm becomes doubly distanced mimetically. A similar process of cooptation can be seen in the American and French rap industries. Indeed, record companies in France have recently rushed to sign local rap stars, responding both to an increased consumer demand and to the current legal climate governing the French airwaves that (according to the 1994 loi Carignon, which went into effect on January 1, 1996) requires 40 percent of all musical programming to be in French, and 20 percent to be by “new talents” (with less than two gold records). On the nights of June 8 to 9, 1995, while La Haine was being shown in the theaters, young residents battled riot troops and destroyed a gymnasium and three schools in Noisy-le-Grand in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, responding to the killing of Kacem Delhabib in a motorcycle chase with police (CRS). This same incident was later recirculated in JeanFrançois Richet’s 1997 film, Ma 6–T va crack-er, as the film’s afterword. However, one must remain skeptical, both of the immediacy of cinematic influence on social action, and of the reporting of these incidents, as journalists often rely on police reports that tend to inflate the number of participants and the magnitude of the violence. In one instance described by Françoise Gaspard (personal communication), a localized conflict between a handful of residents of two neighboring housing projects over the use of a local facility in Dreux became reconstrued by the newspaper Libération, relying solely on police reports, as an antipolice “riot” (émeute) involving at least a hundred participants. A similar perspective of desperation can be seen in the film work of one of Kassovitz’s recognized influences, John Singleton, particularly in Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991). These “Marshall Plans,” so named by the French media, included the National Urban Integration Plan and the Urban Revival Pact. President Jacques Chirac had previously promised a “plan Marshall pour les banlieues” during his April 1995 election campaign. Kassovitz’s original film title, Droit de cité (“Cité Law” or “Right of Residence”), employed primarily for fund-raising purposes, played on these notions of a particular legal identity of the banlieues, as well as on the distinction

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between the “legitimate” and “illegitmate” (“legal” and “non-legal”) violence of police and banlieue civilians respectively. Economist Bernard Salanié (2006) estimates that the zones franches only created twenty thousand jobs throughout France. For example, in February 1999, the socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin mobilized thirteen thousand riot police and seventeen thousand military gendarmes for the banlieues. In the wake of September 11, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy added thousands more to these same areas. Note that France was already the most policed country in Western Europe, with one officer for every 265 inhabitants (as opposed to one in 296 for Germany and one in 380 for Britain; Tourancheau 1999). See Gilroy (1991, 97) and Davis (1990, 223–322) for an analysis of similar heavy-handed police practices in Britain and Los Angeles. The history of this transformation involves a complex intersection of separate histories of urban planning, industrialization, public housing, decentralization, and immigration. In brief, a certain percentage of the apartments in the new cités built during the Trente Glorieuses period of rapid industrialization (1945–73) were designated as low-rent (HLM), many of which were subsequently sold to automobile corporations who then disbursed them to their employees, many of whom were North Africans employed on short-term labor contracts. See Bastié 1964; Soulignac 1993; Wihtol de Wenden and Daoud 1993. Unemployment for younger residents in many of these areas can reach anywhere from 30 percent to 85 percent, or two to six times the national average. The unemployment rates are particularly high for children of immigrant parents (Daoud 1993, 75) This is particularly problematic given recent estimates that by the year 2015, given current rates of population growth, travel between noncontiguous suburbs will represent over three-quarters of the total daily commutes in the capital region of île-de-France (Soulignac 1993, 129). While plans were developed in 1992 to build an intersuburban Orbitale network, no construction has of yet begun. In fact, if anything, recent government actions have impeded rather than promoted circulation to and from the banlieues. This reflects an ambivalence over the boons of circulation within urban planning measures since Lyautey, and a general fear of transportation promoting disorder alongside modernity. The resulting informal postal system replicates that developed by (both internal and external) migrant workers a generation earlier, in which they used local cafés (often run by compatriots) through which to send and receive mail. Martial tropes are standard fare for migration discourse. This militarized portrayal of immigration in France has a long history, stretching back to at least the 1880s media reactions to Italian migration. The 1930s, in

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PAUL A. S ILVERSTEIN particular, witnessed the transference of the trope of “invasion” to North African migrants, though the threat was generally considered, in the end, innocuous (Wihtol de Wenden 1991; cf. Damase 1937). In the recent period, the threat to both the French nation and state has taken on a far more immediate dimension. While Extreme Right scholars warn that the “Islamic subversion [may] win the new Hundred Years’ War and deliver us to Islam” (Hollender 1989), the French military, in recent White Papers, has targeted suburbs with high immigrant populations as potential threats to civil security. As if to prove the point, conservative media sources linked the 1995 to 1996 bombings in Paris and Lyon with an underground Islamist movement that had supposedly taken root in certain suburban cités, recruiting terrorists from among marginalized beurs (cf. Gozlan 1995; Imbert 1996; Oberlé 1995; Pujadas and Salam 1995). See Silverstein 2000 for a detailed discussion of the amalgamation of Islam and terrorism in mid-1990s France. Pay-slips (fiches de paie) were the sign of an immigrant’s legal employment in France, and hence his right to remain. Abdelmalek Sayad has discussed the centrality of these documents to the life and identity of the first generation of immigrants (1977). For a more general account of the history and cultural political stakes of North African immigrants in France of multiple generations, see Assouline and Lallaoui 1996; Noiriel 1988; Sayad 1991; Tribalat 1991; Weil 1991. In one month, July 1983, at least seven incidents of this kind occurred in suburban housing projects, including two young North Africans injured in La Courneuve, fifteen-year-old Kamel killed in Tourcoing, twelveyear-old Badiane Massamba injured in Aulnay-sous-Bois, and nine-yearold Djennane Salah killed and two other children injured in St.-Denis. Pleasure, as Brian Larkin (personal communication) has emphasized, is an underemphasized aspect of violence, primarily due to the tendency of academic accounts to attribute political agency to the attackers and significant meaning to the attacks. Such cases include the death of nineteen-year-old Moussa Merzogh in Livry-Gargan (suburb of Paris) at the hands of a Radar supermarket security officer, the shooting of twenty-year-old Toumi Djaija in Venissieux by a police officer, the killing of nine-year-old Tawfik Ouanes by a subway security officer in La Courneuve, the serious injury of twenty-four year-old Layachi Kader in Tourcoing by an off-duty police officer, and the killing of nineteen-year-old Itim Djamel and twenty-three year-old Kherko Djamel in Montreuil by a former security officer (Aïchoune 1985, 141–43). Successive Amnesty International reports (1994, 1998) have cited French public forces for violating human rights in their use of deadly weapons, extended detention periods, and torture.

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33. In this sense, as Partha Chatterjee (personal communication) has suggested, one could characterize the banlieue predicament as a conflict between two different sets of legal norms, with the categories of “violence” and “governance” at stake. By drawing public attention to police brutality as “violence,” beur banlieue residents question the location and processes of authority and thus the state’s monopoly of legitimate force. 34. The event mobilized thousands of beur youth to march from Marseille to Paris, with one hundred thousand demonstraters greeting the arrival of the cortège in Place de la République. This event was followed in subsequent years by similar public civil rights demonstrations (including Convergences 84 and the 1985 IIIe Marche pour les Droits Civiques) 35. This event was novelized by beur writer Ahmed Kalaouz in Point kilometrique 190 (1986), a title that refers to the mile mark at which Grimzi’s body landed. 36. In this sense, I am implying that De Certeau’s conception of a train as a “bubble of panoptic and classifying power” (1984, 111) needs to be expanded to the station, and the transportation network as a whole. 37. The terrorist attacks occurred along the RER B line connecting the northern banlieue (including the housing projects in La Courneuve and Aulnay-sous-Bois) to Paris. A further attempted bombing, attributed to the young beur, Khaled Kelkal, of the Lyonnais suburb of Vaulx-enVelin, targeted the Paris-Lyon TGV line. 38. Given bureaucratic requirements, processing delays, and frequent changes in “regularization” procedures, it is nearly impossible to actually have one’s papers in order, leaving most immigrants and their children in a constant state of, as Nicholas De Genova (2005) has termed for the Mexican-American case, “deportability.” 39. See Axel 2001 for an elaborated discussion of the relation between the body, subject formation, and state terror. 40. This city-suburb interface constituted by the transportation network in fact violates local understandings of symbolic borders—as separating Pantin from Bobigny. According to one Pantinois friend, “[Such attacks] never used to happen here. The problems started when they extended the metro lines to Bobigny [in 1981].”

R EFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1980. Rabat: Urban apartheid in Morocco. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Aïchoune, Farid. 1985. La beur génération. Paris: Sans Frontière/Arcantère. Althabe, Gérard. 1985. Urbanisation et enjeux quotidiens. Terrains ethnologiques dans la France actuelle. Paris: Anthropos.

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C O S M O P O L I S TA N CULTURE, COSMOPOLITANISM, AND GENDER IN KARACHI, PAKISTAN Oskar Verkaaik

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ne afternoon in the mid-1990s, when the army used to heavily patrol the campus of the University of Karachi to prevent violent clashes between student organizations associated with various ethnically organized political parties, I had a conversation with four students about culture. All four—two girls, two boys; one student of history, two of business administration, one of mathematics—were Muhajirs, that is, children of families who had migrated from India to Pakistan after independence in 1947. All of them described their family background as “modest,” the common term for families who were not overly rich nor overly poor, living in one of the fast-growing and overpopulated neighborhoods that had been built in the barren desert lands along the small and often dry Lyari river; families who valued formal education as highly as they valued Islam as the road to improvement and development, both in concrete personal matters and more abstractly in terms of the nation’s progress. All of them spoke Urdu and some English, all of them were jealous of me because of the opportunities I had to travel abroad and meet foreign people, and all of them cherished practical, middle-class ambitions such as a

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job with some security and a reasonable salary and a family life that combined the best elements of both the extended and the nuclear family system. None of them had political ambitions and they all had carefully stayed away from the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). Established in the mid-1980s, this political party had been involved in large-scale ethnic violence in the years when the country was ruled by the military dictatorship led by General Zia-ul Haq. Later, after the return of democracy in 1988, it had won municipal and national elections with large margins in most of Karachi’s districts. Nor did any of the four students want to have anything to do with the All Pakistan Muhajir Student Organization (APMSO), the student wing of the MQM, infamous for its violent methods in student politics. They agreed with the MQM and the APMSO that Muhajirs, the largest section of Karachi’s rapidly growing population, had been discriminated against by various governments in favor of other ethnic groups such as the Sindhis. However, they considered politics in the 1990s too risky and violent and disliked the arrogant attitude of the MQM rank and file. As young Muhajirs, living in an ethnically divided city with few, if any, opportunities to leave, they had no option but to relate to the MQM in some way or the other. And so, they said, they supported the party by voting for it and abstaining from criticizing its methods and policies, hoping that this would enable them to keep the party out of their lives as much as possible. All the same, they stressed that ethnic divisions were wrong and should not occur in Pakistan, which was created for all Muslims, regardless of ethnic background or language. They repeated the argument of the first Muhajir generation, prior to the MQM, when ethnic identity was generally seen as incompatible with Islam and patriotism. The MQM had changed this, arguing instead that Muhajirs were an ethnic group (qaum) like other ethnic groups, which, apart from Islam and patriotism, also had its own distinct culture that distinguished Muhajirs from Sindhis, Punjabis and the Pakhtun. Interested, then, in the production of Muhajir ethnicity, I asked the four students to describe to me Muhajir culture. At first they responded with a long silence, then one of the girls, whom I considered the brightest, started to giggle, desperately trying not to be rude while at the same time unable to hide how absurd the question appeared to her. The others now soon followed in making fun of this—to them—silly concept of “Muhajir culture.” They jokingly repeated the few examples that MQM spokesmen had come up

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with—the kurta pajama, kebabs, chewing pan (beetle nut)—agreeing that these were ridiculous examples: the kurta pajama was not a cultural dress, the combination was only normal. “Imagine the kurta pajama displayed in a museum!” one of them laughed. No, they concluded, Muhajirs had no culture; to find culture one had to go to a Sindhi village or a Baluchi tribe. Only there could one find local dresses and traditional music instruments. This light-hearted rejection of Muhajir ethnicity was more than the incapability to sense the cultural relativity beneath one’s own ways of doing. It also articulated a much wider understanding of the concept of culture as folklore or a set of traditions to be displayed in a museum. During our conversation, the four students elaborated on their understanding of culture as somehow opposed to a range of other concepts that mattered to them, such as modernity, Islam, being a Pakistani, being a Muhajir, and living in a metropolis. But most of all, they agreed, culture contrasted with cosmopolitanism. For them, cosmopolitanism was a generic term for all these other concepts— modernity, Islam, being a Muhajir, etc.—and therefore the notion of a “Muhajir culture” appeared to them as a contradiction in terms. Moreover, they felt that culture had to do with ethnicity, with being a qaum (ethnic group), so it was in a way only logical that the MQM, when claiming that Muhajirs were a separate ethnic group, also insisted on a distinct Muhajir culture. But at the same time, they said, one had to admit that the contents of the Muhajir qaum were empty. In cultural terms, there was nothing typically Muhajir. What they could think of as aspects of the Muhajir way of life—the Urdu language, qawwali music, cricket—were shared by others and were therefore national rather than Muhajir values. More importantly, those aspects in life in which they felt Muhajirs really differed from other groups, such as a yearning for education, the appreciation of city life, or endless discussions on the meaning of Islam, had little to do with culture and tradition. They were rather aspects of a cosmopolitan way of life in which culture was absent. “Muhajirs,” one of them said, “had freed themselves from culture.” They all agreed that this had to do with the experience of migration. “We have left behind culture in India,” one of the boys said, relating how nostalgic his parents could be about the trees and colors and graves and evenings in India. This loss of culture, the four students concluded with a touch of melancholia, was the tragic faith of the cosmopolitan.

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I found this piece of conversation remarkable because to me it illustrated how the concepts of culture and cosmopolitanism have become part and parcel of identity formation in Pakistan. Both English terms are used in the vernacular to denote differences between various sections of the population. Although it is possible that in conversations with me, people in Karachi used these terms more often than usual, anticipating that I, as an anthropologist, would be interested in these concepts, it remains telling that the same concepts often came up even if I did not mention them at all. Karachi is not unique in this; the concepts of culture and cosmopolitanism have entered discourses on social differences elsewhere in the world. As for culture, many—from Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture to Gerd Baumann in Contesting Culture—have argued how this concept has come to play an important discursive role in ethnic politics and multiculturalism in the late twentieth century. The appropriation and reification of this concept, once developed by anthropologists to locate and define the socalled premodern societies of the colonized world, have made culture a highly popular concept to create and politicize differences of identity. However, there has thus far been less attention for the ways in which the concept of cosmopolitanism has been appropriated and refashioned in specific political contexts. In this chapter, I will look at the interplay of both concepts in the politics of ethnicity in mid-1990s Karachi, starting with a discussion on the local meaning of both terms, continuing with the question as to how both are used to produce and consolidate ethnic boundaries, and concluding with some remarks about the relation between ethnicity and gender. My starting point is the concept of cosmopolitanism and the ways it is discursively linked to culture within the Pakistani context. Without wanting to deny the forces of globalization and the global diffusion of ideas and discourses, I would like to make a plea for the notion of situated cosmopolitanism. Rather than assuming that all cosmopolitanism is the cosmopolitanism of today’s metropolitan postmodernist mulitculturalist, I suggest a more ethnographic perspective on the term and its meanings.

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However, since the local understanding of both terms is of course not unrelated to the perhaps less localized and more global anthropological

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meaning of the terms, let me first have a look at how they are defined in anthropology. As the concept of culture has been analyzed and discussed often before, I will concentrate on the concept of cosmopolitanism. In recent anthropological writing, cosmopolitanism is often defined as the rejection of strict cultural boundaries and disrespect for rigid cultural categorization. An example of this can be found in the work of Jonathan Friedman. Friedman distinguishes between modernist and postmodernist cosmopolitanism. Whereas, Friedman argues, the cosmopolitan in the modernist ideal was a rationalist and a universalist who had liberated himself from the fetters of culture and tradition, the present-day cosmopolitan’s desire is not to free oneself from culture, but to encompass the whole of the globe’s cultural variety. This is “postmodernist” rather than “modernist” cosmopolitanism (Friedman 1997, 73–74). What I like about this understanding of the concept of cosmopolitanism is that it is not beyond temporality. Anxious not to define cosmopolitanism in an essentialist manner, Friedman discusses how the meaning of the concept has gradually changed. It is, however, questionable whether the transition from “modernist” to “postmodernist” cosmopolitanism is indeed the only, or even most important, trend that can be discerned from present-day practices that all have one thing in common: the rejection, discursive or in practice, of strict cultural boundaries. In other words, parallel to the trend described by Friedman as moving from the ideal of universalism to the celebration of cultural bricolage and relativism, another trend that moves in the opposite direction can also be observed. This development has been analyzed by, among others, David Lehmann. In his article entitled Fundamentalism and Globalism (1998), which is primarily concerned with trends in global religion, the concept of cosmopolitanism stands opposed to the notion of globalism. In this case, cosmopolitanism is defined as a way of dealing with cultural and religious differences in a manner that combines respect, or even admiration, for cultural variety with the notion of cultural and religious hierarchy. The example given by Lehmann is the cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church in Latin America after the colonial conquest. In its attempt to make good Christians out of the native population in the colonies, the Catholic Church allowed popular and syncretic forms of Christian practices up to the point of benevolently approving and fostering these practices, without of course compromising on the hierarchical relation between the official Catholicism of the church and the popular Christianity of the new

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converts. Cosmopolitanism in Lehmann’s terms is “a response to cultural differences which recognizes those differences, legitimizes rather than denigrates them and responds to them by creating mechanisms of accommodation and coexistence” (1998, 610). This definition of cosmopolitanism to some extent resembles the notion of today’s multiculturalism, which also encourages cultural differences in order to be able to respect them, thereby creating cultures and communities that are considered to have an all-encompassing impact on the lives and minds of those associated with them. For the cosmopolitan, in contrast, supposedly relating to these cultures and communities from a more aloof perspective, these cultures may become sources of aesthetic, spiritual, and recreational pleasure. Lehmann contrasts this hierarchical relativism with what he calls the globalism of fundamentalism. What various recent forms of religion—be they born-again Christians, Muslims concerned with the universal brotherhood of Muslims (umma), or still others—have in common is their rejection of the relevance of differences of race, class, or culture. Fundamentalism, Lehmann insists, is global in the sense that cultural differences in understanding and practicing religion is downplayed in favor of the literal word of God that speaks to everybody in the same way. In their renunciation of cultural differences, fundamentalists are as universalist as Jonathan Friedman’s modernist cosmopolitanism. The difference, of course, lies in the understanding of what it is that overrules all cultural differences. For modernist cosmopolitans, this universal principle is rationalism, for global fundamentalists, it is the sovereignty of the religious texts, the religious dogma, or the religious community. Despite these differences, from both standpoints, it can and has been argued that “culture” creates false loyalties, that the universal principle is a better basis to build a nation on than ethnicity and culture, and that education and missionary activities are good ways to help people appreciate the liberating impact of the universal principle. The difference between these two distinct notions of cosmopolitanism—the postmodernist that celebrates the relativity of culture versus the universalist that privatizes cultural variety and takes public life as governed by an assumed culture-free universal virtue (rationalism or religion)—can be understood in terms of the distinction between postfoundationalist and neofoundationalist understanding of politics. Political theory in the late twentieth century is largely postfoundational. Postmodernists who argue that universal principles simply do not exist outside or beyond language and political interest, as well as

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liberal thinkers who postulate that a democratic society does not need to be founded on a transcendent conception of the good, can both be called postfoundational. Justice and truth are either seen as the products of history or the outcome of negotiation, compromise, and practice. Parallel to this, however, we witness a revival of political theories and ideologies that are self-consciously foundational as they are presented as inherently following from given truths from beyond culture and history. Again, such foundationalist political programs are of two types, and both can be seen as reactions to postfoundationalism. On the one hand, we see various kinds of religious political ideologies that can be called “fundamentalist,” not only because they are preoccupied with the founding religious texts, but also because they take these texts as the basis for politics. On the other hand, we have a new, post1989 understanding of liberal democracy as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” (Fukuyama 1989, 4). This liberal neofoundationalism has most recently become quite influential in Western societies. The country where I work and live, the Netherlands, is a good example. In the context of September 11, the murder of the right-wing populist politician Pim Fortuyn in May 1992, and the assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004, a new foundationalist understanding of liberal democracy has emerged that wants to be a fortress against the feared invasion of radical Islam. It is also presented as an alternative to a postfoundational form of democracy that is considered weak, permissive, naive, and outmoded. This liberal neofoundationalism is universalist, not so much in the sense that it sees democracy as universally the most just way of government, rather, it takes democracy as the political realization of the fundamental human quest for freedom. Freedom—understood in the liberalist sense as primarily freedom from the internalized oppression of culture and religion1—takes prevalence over other values such as solidarity or human equality. In practice, this leads to a new formulation of the nation and its strangers. The Dutch are those who are nursed in freedom, while the others are bound by culture or religion. It follows that, according to neofoundationalists, to become Dutch requires something of a conversion to the universal principle of freedom. In sum, postmodernist cosmopolitanism finds itself under attack from two sides: the universalist globalism of religious fundamentalism as well as of liberal neofoundationalism. These two understandings of “universalism”—a more precise term than cosmopolitanism, which, as we have seen, postmodernists and multiculturalists also use for themselves—are

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of particular interest for my purposes because they can be used to disentangle the rather complex notion of cosmopolitanism as it is predominantly used by Muhajirs in Karachi. My main argument will be that the dominant Muhajir understanding of cosmopolitanism is a combination of both forms of universalism. That is to say that for many Muhajirs, cosmopolitanism does not only connote the modernist and neofoundationalist ideal of freedom from traditional culture. The modern is indeed important for many Muhajirs, but probably for that very reason, it is not a one-dimensional concept. To be modern in Karachi is perhaps best understood in terms of a dilemma as to how to bring together the supposedly universal principle of rationalism and freedom on the one hand and the notion of universal Islam on the other. By contrasting Islam to ethnicity and culture, Islam can be seen as the way to rationalism and freedom.2 Cosmopolitanism in Karachi is the attempt to combine both universalist desires. Paradoxically, however, cosmopolitanism has also become the basis for a new Muhajir ethnicity.

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In Pakistan, as elsewhere, ethnic categorization comes with stereotypes that say relatively little about the actual practices of the people labeled as such. Such labeling may also take the form of self-categorization, but even in this case, the ethnic label with which one defines oneself does not necessarily reflect actual behavior or thinking. Hence, to say that in Pakistan, Muhajirs are widely associated with modernist Islam, even among Muhajirs themselves, does not entail any claim about the nature of religious practices among individual Muhajirs. Still, Muhajirs are commonly seen as the most dogmatic when it comes to the notion of Islamic universalism as opposed to the particularism of ethnic loyalty. The juxtaposition of Islam versus ethnicity goes back to the early days of independence, when the leaders of the Muslim League already felt the need to resist the threat of provincial fragmentation. “With the coming of Pakistan,” first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan said the day after the day of independence, “‘a great deal of misapprehension seems to have been aroused in the hearts of many living in Pakistan. They seem to think in terms of Sindh for Sindhis and Bengal for Bengalis.” However, he said, “Pakistan is the very opposite of provincialism and racialism.” The roots of

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the discursive separation of Islam and ethnicity go back to the very beginning of Pakistan. As I have described elsewhere (Verkaaik 2004a, ch. 1; Verkaaik 2005; see also Jalal 1995), nation-building not only discouraged the promotion of cultural variety under the umbrella of Islam, but also included the purification of Islam from syncretic or “folk” religious practices associated with ethnic culture. At the root of this was what Katherine Ewing (1997) calls “the tradition-modernity dichotomy as a hegemonic discourse.” On the one hand “Sufism” was constructed as local religious tradition, whereas on the other hand this tradition served as the counterpoint to the imagination of a modern and universal Islam, which was subsequently seen as the binding force of the new Pakistani nation. This modern and universal Islam built upon the work of various Muslim reformers, most importantly of Muhammad Iqbal, who is generally seen in Pakistan as the ideological father of the nation. Especially influential was his conceptualization of ijtehad, or independent interpretation of the holy sources, as an individual, creative, and rational endeavor that challenged what he saw as the collective intellectual and spiritual passivity of “traditional Sufism.” In the 1950s and 1960s, this ideal of modern Islam was put into practice by state policies directed against the impact of so-called backward, traditional, and superstitious religious practices of the supposedly “uneducated” people. The veneration of shrines of holy men (pir) was particularly discouraged. In Karachi of the mid-1990s, Muhajirs were generally seen, also by themselves, as the heirs of this legacy of early nation-building, notwithstanding the fact that I met with plenty of Muhajirs who engaged in religious practices that were seen as contradictory to modern Islam such as visits of shrines. Personal experience did not contradict nationalist discourse. For many migrants from India, the arrival in Pakistan signified a kind of liberation from tradition immediately filled with the Islamic concept of a new beginning (hijra). A shared Muhajir memory remembers arrival in Karachi as an experience of freedom and opportunity in a city unburdened by tradition. Indeed, in 1947, Karachi’s largest newspaper, Dawn, welcomed the refugees in a city “supremely blessed in not having a long history.” It also called Karachi “the cleanest city of the subcontinent,” implying that it was free of the dirt of history. “Karachi is in fact, and thank God for it, a modern city,” Dawn concluded. In the same vein, the novelist M. A. Seljouk, in a short story called The Bandit, described Karachi as the city of freedom: “Even the

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slums looked like paradise for me. For here I was at least free.” From personal interviews with former migrants, I got the impression that the early migrants were often young men alone who went to Pakistan as pioneers, sometimes bringing over their families at a later stage. For these young men, migration meant a sudden and radical freedom from the family and the neighborhood (mohallah). It sometimes also meant freedom from social stigmatization: quite a few families with low-caste Muslim names adopted a “noble” (sharif) family name in a new environment of strangers. The influx of a large number of migrants from various parts of India, however, did not lead to the disruption of city life, social unrest, or widespread anomie. The commonality of the migrant experience found its discursive expression in the very term Muhajir, which refers to the partakers of the Islamic exodus or hijra, signifying the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Initially, when in the early months of independence, the accommodation of so many refugees became a problem of considerable concern, the term was used as a model for Muslim solidarity, referring to the hospitality of the people of Medina (ansar) to the followers of the prophet (muhajir). The religious and national solidarity people experience upon arrival was indeed a muchcherished memory for several Muhajirs I knew. At the same time, however, the hijra could also be referred to as a religious invitation to leave behind the traditional ties of family, tribe, and ethnic group in favor of the universal community of Muslims. Used as such, the hijra did not express religious solidarity between locals and newcomers but rather became an incitement to stay away from political parties defending ethnic culture. Karachi, then, meant something to most Muhajirs I talked with. In their memory, Karachi was a city full of light and open spaces; “a city that never sleeps”; a city whose impressive administrative buildings, inherited from colonial times, were still new; “a city near the sea which made one feel connected to the world”; a city that felt like personal property as everyone felt entitled to a plot of land to build a house on; a city “where no one could tell me what to do.” It was a matter of pride to live in what was then the capital city of Pakistan. Pakistan was not only ruled from Karachi, Karachi was in a way also seen as a shining example for the country as a whole, a notion facilitated by a lack of knowledge about other regions of the country. The villages and rural areas were far away. To reach them, one had to travel for hours through the desert area, separating Karachi from the fertile Indus Valley. In

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Karachi itself, the migrants soon formed the majority of the population, outnumbering the pre-partition Muslim population with a large margin. The Hindu population had largely gone to India. From a city that still had a Hindu majority population when it became the capital city of the new Muslim state of Pakistan, Karachi was transformed into a predominantly Muhajir city within a few years. The notion of Karachi as a cosmopolitan city is primarily rooted in those early years after independence when Muhajirs had the city largely to themselves. Symbols of the city’s cosmopolitanism included the coffeehouses, the bookstores, and the cinema halls in the city center or Saddar. Many also mentioned the lively bazaars where “the whole of the subcontinent came together.” Another outstanding feature of the collective memory of cosmopolitan Karachi of the 1950s and 1960s is the trope of youth and newness. The city was as fresh and youthful as people remembered themselves to be in those days, and the youth of the city and its people reflected the newness of the nation. As Karachi was the Muhajir city par excellence, the image Muhajirs paint of Karachi is in some ways a self-portrait and in the first decades of Pakistan’s existence Karachi could still be seen as representing the future of the nation. The notion of Karachi’s cosmopolitanism includes the memory of youth and future-oriented change and turbulence.

“I NTERNAL D IASPORA” When new migrants started to arrive in Karachi, however, the cosmopolitan colors of Karachi gradually started to fade. That was hardly seen as a contradiction. For most Muhajirs, like the four students I talked with on the campus of Karachi University, cosmopolitanism was not primarily about the cultural competence to appreciate and live with people from various walks of life, including those of recent migrants from rural areas. Cosmopolitanism rather denoted the cultivation of an urban lifestyle that is threatened by the influx of too many people who are unfamiliar with such a lifestyle and often unwilling to learn and adopt it. Starting in the 1960s, new settlers from the rural areas of Sindh, the mountainous areas of the North West Frontier Province, or the towns of the Punjab, built their own communities on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding city, a process that accelerated from the 1980s onwards. “Urban villages” appeared, a term that

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articulated the Muhajir discomfort with city neighborhoods that “feel, smell, sound, and look like” the villages of the Pakhtun or the Sindhis. For Muhajirs, the arrival of new migrants felt like an invasion of their city by the rural, the tribal, the backward; by, indeed, culture. “Encroachment” was another term that expressed the urban uneasiness with the influx of new city-dwellers. “Encroachment” connoted the illegal or semi-illegal takeover of the city and its public spaces by architectural expressions of lifestyles and mentalities seen as foreign to a cosmopolitan city life. Concretely, the term was used to denote the occupation of public space by self-made shops, tea stalls, or huts, which sometimes caused major traffic jams, but by using the term “encroachment” these practices were not only condemned as illegal and against the law, but also as illicit and against the norms and values of modernity. As I have elaborated elsewhere (Verkaaik 2001, 2003), the dual process of nation-building and modernization can be perceived as a form of liberation from tradition, which inevitably implies the imagination of a suppressed tradition spreading insidiously from dark, concealed, often private spaces, from where it continues to corrupt and weaken the norms and values of the modern nation. For Karachiites, the newly arrived migrants embodied such a difficult to control tradition. Their improvised constructions at the side of the road or on empty playgrounds literally took away parts of the city from them. These informal structures were visible proof of how tradition illicitly but irreversibly encroached upon the city. At the same time, as new migrants took their share of the city, Muhajirs lost Karachi, in its capacity as capital city of Pakistan, to the Punjab, where the new capital city of Islamabad was built. Islamabad was itself an expression of a new type of modernization that was less cosmopolitan and more authoritarian. It was a new city, the product of the regime of General Ayub Khan during the 1960s, built against the backdrop of the Himalayan foothills. Like Karachi in 1947, the capital city was not of the people, but rather designed as an example for the people. It was self-consciously distinct from the style of surrounding towns and villages. But the vision for the nation’s future given shape in the new city was different from the cosmopolitan ideal of Karachi. With its broad boulevards, rectangular layout of streets, and neo-Moghul architecture, Islamabad was a mixture of elements from Paris, New York, and Lahore. Karachi’s cosmopolitanism, however, was popular rather than pompous. It included the mass culture of cinema and the north Indian feel of mohallahs and bazaars. Whereas

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Karachi’s newness had to do with the speed and turbulence of hectic city life, Islamabad looked dull and sterile from a Karachi point of view. And yet, the new capital city of Islamabad came to play an important part in the self-image of Muhajir Karachiites. Unlike Karachi, shaped by Muhajirs from all over the subcontinent, Islamabad was seen as the result of a designed and authorized modernism, a modernism of the military. To describe Karachi and its Muhajir population, people contrasted the solemnity and rigidity of Islamabad with a sense of humor and self-irony and a talent for improvisation and tumult typical for Karachi. But all these elements of what constituted Karachi’s cosmopolitanism had lost momentum. No longer was Karachi the shining example for the nation’s future; rather, it was under threat of the nation’s suppressed tradition, while the vision of the modern had been taken away and transformed beyond recognition by the newly built Islamabad. There was a sense of “internal diaspora” among Muhajirs in Karachi in the 1990s, that is, a widespread feeling among Muhajirs that they had become strangers in what they perceived of as their own city. People had their own personal stories of how and when this sense of alienation had begun. Businessmen had lost their property when it was nationalized during the regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1971–77). Women feared the possibility of a “Talibanization” of Karachi as symbolized by Pakhtun women wearing the burqah in a city where women used to wear fashionable saris on special occasions. Students lamented the fact that white-collar jobs were scarce and partly distributed on the basis of a job reservation program that divided jobs according to ethnic background. Muhajir bus drivers and construction workers complained about the tough competition with new Pakhtun and Afghan migrants who were satisfied with long working hours and low salaries. There were many other complaints and concerns among Muhajirs, but all of them could be made sense of by framing them with the help of the notion of internal diaspora that portrayed Karachi as a lost city. Understood as such, all these worries and grievances fed into the notion of a beleaguered cosmopolitanism, that is, the notion that the Muhajir way of life, intrinsically linked up with Karachi as the main city of the new Muslim nation, was not appreciated by new city dwellers. With new groups becoming more vocal from the 1970s onwards, opposition against Muhajirs was increasingly explained in terms of bad faith rather than ignorance. An attitude of benevolence towards those who were considered less educated was

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replaced by downright mistrust and fear for ethnic others. Waves of violence between Muhajirs on the one hand and Sindhis or Pakhtun on the other—first in the early 1970s, again in the period between 1985 and 1990—of course accelerated this process. The feeling of becoming a stranger in one’s own city reinforced the notion of Karachi as an essentially Muhajir city. Probably more than ever, Muhajirs identified with Karachi as a city that belonged to them and had to be defended against foreign intruders. Most radically, this led to the idea that Karachi would be better off without Pakistan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called Singapore or Hong Kong option became popular among young Muhajirs associated with the MQM. These city-states flourished, one thought, because as modern, cosmopolitan, commercial centers, they did not carry the burden of being tied to a backward and rural hinterland that did not only take away the hard-earned profits in the form of taxation, but also weakened the city’s potential by letting its surplus of people pour into the city. The former missionary attitude of bringing progress and modernity to the uneducated was replaced by a desire to isolate oneself and defend oneself against the rural infiltration of the city. Several names circulated for such a future Muhajir city-state, like Jinnahpur and Muhajiristan. The latter was felt as somewhat paradoxical: how on earth could a homeland ever be called after the hijra, the exodus? In a conversation I had with some young MQM members, a third name was invented. Agreeing that the name of a future Muhajir state should express an essential characteristic of the Muhajir people, they consented that Muhajirs were distinguished from other Pakistani because of their cosmopolitan lifestyle. Therefore, one of the boys jokingly suggested the proper name for a Muhajir homeland would be Cosmopolistan, indicating the homeland (stan) of the cosmopolitan. The sense of absurdity was not lost on them. For how could a concept denoting an open and broadminded mentality ever be a principle of primordial loyalty and exclusion?

E THNICIZED C OSMOPOLITANISM The Cosmopolistan paradox can be understood from the various responses to the feeling of internal diaspora. These responses can be grouped together into two trends that ultimately fed into each other. One reaction was a return to the notion of Muhajirs as the defenders

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of the universal message of Islam, understood as the religion of reason and ijtehad, that was to be the spiritual foundation of the Pakistani nation. A second reaction, which found its expression in the MQM in the 1980s and 1990s, was a turn to ethnicity and culture. The latter, however, could not overcome the public sentiment as articulated by the four students I met at Karachi University that Muhajirs did not have culture. The MQM had therefore to fall back upon the former— the notion of Muhajirs as universalists—in order to create an understanding of Muhajir ethnicity (qaum) that made sense. In this way, cosmopolitanism came to serve the cultural uniqueness of Muhajirs. The unprecedented turn to Muhajir ethnicity by the MQM can largely be explained as a response to the ethnicization of politics in the 1970s. Although ethnicity had been downplayed in the early decades of nation-building, the first democratic elections of 1970 resulted in political mobilization along the lines of ethnic culture and language, culminating in the 1971 war over East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). To prevent further fragmentation of the nation, a new definition of national identity was propagated by the regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that incorporated ethnicity along with Islam. Ethnicity was particularly important in student politics. It was therefore on the campuses that Muhajir students founded an exclusively Muhajir student organization, the AMPSO, in 1978. The same people would establish the MQM six years later. Not only did they adopt the hegemonic political logic of that time, but they also explicitly criticized other Muhajir politicians for being naive in solely relying on the unifying potential of Islam. The urban-based, mostly Muhajir-dominated Jamiat-i Islami in particular, which had always propagated a universalist reading of Islam in which ethnic or nationalist sentiments had no place, was attacked for turning a blind eye to political realities in Pakistan. The concept of a Muhajir qaum, a Muhajir people, as the cultural foundation of a new Muhajir political movement was a clear provocation of any sort of Islamic universalism popular among Muhajirs, be it the “fundamentalist” universalism of the Jamiat-i Islami or a more rationalist and Iqbalian reading of Islam. The turn to ethnicity and culture enabled the MQM to enter into new coalitions with other ethnically organized parties, notably Sindhi parties, in opposition against the military regime of the 1980s and what was seen as Punjabi domination. Such a coalition was unthinkable before the MQM. Sindhi political mobilization since the 1960s had resulted in a well-developed sense of Sindhi culture, including a

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distinct type of Sindhi Islam antithetical to Islamic universalism.3 During the 1988 elections, however, Muhajirs and Sindhis jointly celebrated the victory of their parties, the MQM and the Pakistan People’s Party. This even led to flirtations with Sindhi culture among the MQM youth. This can be seen as an expression of a sudden political friendship, but also as an attempt to give meaning to this new concept of Muhajir ethnicity. Because of the long-standing ethnic mobilization among Sindhis, they were seen as protagonists of ethnic culture as such. That is to say that in a discursive context in which Islam was juxtaposed to ethnicity, Muhajirs were considered the champions of Islam, while Sindhis cultivated ethnicity. To construct a Muhajir ethnicity, then, it was in a way only logical to borrow from or imitate the Sindhi experience. The sudden popularity in the late 1980s of the Sindhi batiked shawl among young urban Muhajirs, for instance, can be seen as a reaction to the feeling of uncertainty about the meaning of a Muhajir ethnicity as propagated by the MQM. To cope with this uncertainty, Muhajirs for the first time copied Sindhis. The old antagonism between Muhajirs and Sindhis was revived only several years later. These flirtations with culture, notably Sindhi culture, enabled the young MQM generation to create a space of its own, independent from earlier generations of Muhajirs, but for mass mobilization, the party had to fall back upon the notion of Muhajirs as the founders of Pakistan. Mixed with this was a strong sense of victimization that argued that Muhajirs were punished for the very sacrifices with which they had had to pay for creating a place of refuge for South Asian Muslims. Especially in times of crisis—ethnic riots, state oppression— this theme became very popular. Commemorating the victims of ethnic violence in 1989, for instance, one MQM spokesman publicly stated that “two million Muhajirs have given their lives for the sake of Pakistan, a country which was achieved in the name of God. We left our homes and hearths for Pakistan, our entire cities were destroyed, but we are being killed for it.” In statements like these, Muhajirs were portrayed as people who were oppressed and victimized not despite, but because of their sacrifice of migration. Perceived injustice against Muhajirs was no longer seen as the result of ignorance; rather, Muhajirs were being persecuted because their enemies feared and detested their goodness. Muhajirs alone defended the original Pakistani ideal of Muslim solidarity. This was their crime. “Urdu-speaking people are being persecuted for making Pakistan,” another MQM spokesman said.

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The two perceptions of Muhajir distinctiveness came together in a new understanding of the migration experience. The solidarity upon arrival between the migrants and the hospitable local population of which the hijra tradition speaks was no longer stressed. Migration was rather seen as a unique experience, a second birth, a life crisis that generated a new mentality, made possible by the sacrifice of primordial attachments to one’s homeland and culture. Migration was seen as a prerequisite for truly appreciating the universalism of Islam, without which true cosmopolitanism and patriotism were impossible. In other words, such virtues were no longer seen as the result of the gradual process of education and therefore within reach of everybody, but rather as inherently belonging to those who had made the sacrifice of migration. This mentality, moreover, was hereditary and passed on from one generation to the other. Cosmopolitanism, then, could indeed be considered an ethnic trait of character. In this line of thinking, the new name of Cosmopolistan was absurd only to the extent that no one had ever thought about it before.

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What remains to be done, then, is to indicate the role of gender in the imagination of ethnicity in Pakistan. For this, I rely upon the work of Thomas Blom Hansen on masculinity in the Hindu nationalist movement in India as well as on the work of Richard Kurin on the ontological framework of the self that informs ethnicity in Pakistan. As Hansen has argued for the case of India, the politics of gender in religious nationalist movements has to be placed against the background of Orientalist descriptions of Hindus and Muslims as, respectively, relatively feminine and masculine. With the exception of some “castes,” “ethnic groups” or “races” known for their martiality, such as the Rajputs and the Gurkhas, Orientalist writing portrayed Hindus in feminine terms as passive, submissive, soft, or nonviolent. In contrast, building upon the notion of Islam as the religion of the sword, Muslims were seen as more manly. Hansen furthermore explains striking features of the Hindu nationalist movement, such as an emphasis on martiality, the aestheticization of aggression, and the sexual degradation of Muslims, as an attempt to “recuperate” masculinity from the Muslims (Hansen 1997). Although the Karachi context is slightly different since the conflict is framed in terms of ethnicity rather than religion,

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these conclusions are also relevant for Pakistan where ethnic differences are similarly informed by the longstanding imagination of particular “ethnic groups” or “races” as masculine or feminine. The Pakhtun and the Punjabi in particular are believed to have a long tradition of martiality, which partly explains their overrepresentation within the Pakistani military. In contrast, the Sindhis, commonly believed to be nursed in a distinct kind of Sufism, are considered more peace-loving, tolerant, passive, in short, more feminine by nature—again, with the exception of some atypical sections of the Sindhi population.4 To appreciate the position of Muhajirs within this gendered hierarchy of ethnic groups, it is important to look at the work of Kurin, who tries to understand the “culture of ethnicity” (Kurin 1988) in relation to notions of the self and its connections with the natural and supernatural world. Two concepts are particularly important: nafs and aql. Nafs, Kurin explains, covers biopsychological powers such as physical strength and sexual desire. Aql is the human capacity to combat animal instincts and to achieve the sublimation of the self. In the writings of nineteenth-century Muslim reformers in India, aql was primarily seen as the source of reason, justice, and normative order (Metcalf 1984, 189). In Pakistan, these concepts have become associated with a range of other dichotomies, notably the ethnicity-Islam dichotomy, the rural-urban dichotomy, the tradition-modernity dichotomy, and, in a dynamic fashion, the feminine-masculine dichotomy. Hence, nafs resonates with the primordial attachment to the people and the homeland, the love for the countryside, and to the purity of tradition, while aql connotes to education, rationality, and religious discipline. Depending on one’s standpoint, the ethnic other can be seen as unbalanced, that is, as either rootless and detached or too attached to tradition and primordial loyalties. These different evaluations on the ideal equilibrium between nafs and aql are also related to different gender distinctions. Generally speaking, it allows for an understanding of masculinity as disciplined and aql-based, according to what femininity resembles the dangers of unbridled sexuality, but also for an understanding of masculinity as primarily physical and rooted in nafs, according to what femininity is defined as a lack of physical prowess. It speaks for itself that Muhajirs, as predominantly city dwellers, have largely imagined themselves according to the former understanding of masculinity, fearing ethnic others for their uncontrolled physicality, even though the MQM, like the Hindu nationalist movement in India, has also offered opportunities for young male Muhajirs to recuperate a more

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physical sense of masculinity from the Sindhis and the Pakhtun. Indeed, as it was often said, one of the greatest wonders of the MQM was that the Muhajir goat had bravely and successfully pitted itself against the Sindhi buffalo and the Pakhtun ram. The importance of these gendered notions of ethnicity lies in the fact that they allow for a hierarchical ordering of different sections of the population. I understand gender as a language of hierarchical categorization that enables the naturalization of cultural notions of superiority and inferiority. That is to say that gender makes cultural notions of ranked differences appear as natural and biological. In the context of Karachi, gendered understandings of ethnic differences facilitate a ranked distinction between the modern and the traditional or the cosmopolitan and the backward. In a patriarchal concept of gender, to associate Muhajirs with discipline and reason means positioning the urban vis-à–vis the rural as man versus woman, the parent versus the child, or, for that matter, the colonial master versus the native. This also has implications for the concepts of culture and cosmopolitanism. Not only is cosmopolitanism seen as the result of migration interpreted as a chastening life-crisis, but it is also linked with the sublimation of self-made possible by aql-related concepts such as discipline and reason. Gendering these concepts means perceiving a cosmopolitan mentality as superior and more advanced than a supposedly more instinctive loyalty to “culture.”

C ONCLUSION To conclude, then, I briefly return to the discussion on cosmopolitanism and universalism with which I started this article. I have made a distinction between a postmodern, postfoundational cosmopolitanism that celebrates cultural variety and neofoundational forms of universalism that reject the particularism of political communities of culture. What does the Karachi case have to say about these distinct conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism and its relation to culture? It seems to me that the main conclusion to be drawn from this case is that, in a paradoxical way, the gap between cosmopolitanism and culture is bridged. Although in a dominant Muhajir worldview cosmopolitanism and culture are as distinct as Islam and ethnicity, by linking cosmopolitanism to the purifying life-crisis of migration, an exclusive Muhajir ethnicity is produced on the basis of this particular

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reading of cosmopolitanism. That, I think, is an important comment on Friedman’s argument, especially where he juxtaposes cosmopolitanism with what he calls “the ethnification of the nation.” In his own terms, the ethnification of the nation is “an aspect of a declining hegemonic order in the global system, in which—in lieu of a declining modernism, an identification with an upwardly mobile for self, society, and world—we find a return to roots, to fixed identifications that are immune, in principle, from social change” (Friedman 1997, 71). Such roots and fixed identifications, however, are not necessarily linked to various imaginations of primordial culture. The Muhajir case is but one example of how discourses of communal loyalty and exclusion are extracted from sets of religious or philosophical traditions that are transnational and universalist, and in that sense cosmopolitan. This is in line with Lehmann’s argument that, although fundamentalist religion has universalist claims, fundamentalist religion may be ethnicized, for instance by way of strict rules on how to dress, eat, or organize family life. What the Muhajir case suggests, however, is that forms of universalism other than fundamentalist religion may also become the basis for new imaginations of ethnicity or nationhood. For the dominant Muhajir rejection of the particularism of culture is not primarily informed by fundamentalist Islam, but is better understood in the rationalist tradition of, for instance, Muhammad Iqbal and other Muslim reformers. In a similar vein, transnational concepts like “Enlightenment,” “modernity,” “Western civilization,” or indeed “cosmopolitanism” may feature in the construction of exclusivist and parochial discourses of identity and community as much as culture or religion. Alongside the ethnification of the nation, then, we can observe a parallel trend that may be called, somewhat paradoxically, the ethnification of universalism, or, with thanks to the young kid from Karachi who invented the term, the production of Cosmopolistans.

N OTES 1. See, among others, Saba Mahmood (2001) for a critique of the universalist claims of liberalist notions of freedom and agency. 2. This view harks back to the work of Muslim reformers such as Jamal alDin al-Afghani (1839–97) and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) who conceptualized Islam as a religion of reason (Euben 1999, ch. 4).

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3. This interpretation of Islam can perhaps best be characterized as a form of rationalized mysticism (see Verkaaik 2004b). 4. The most famous example would be the Hur from Upper Sindh, a group of people led by a spiritual leader known as the Pir Pagara, who rose against British colonial occupation twice: in the 1890s and the 1940s (see Ansari 1992).

R EFERENCES Ansari, Sarah F. D. 1992. Sufi saints and state power: The pirs of sind, 1843–1947. Lahore: Vanguard. Baumann, Gerd. 1996. Contesting culture: Discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Euben, Roxanne. 1999. Enemy in the mirror: Islamic fundamentalism and the limits of modern rationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ewing, Katherine P. 1997. Arguing sainthood: Modernity, psychoanalysis, and Islam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Friedman, Jonathan. 1997. Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity, and intellectual porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus locals, ethnics and nationals in an era of de-hegemonisation. In Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, 70–89. London: Zed Books. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. The end of history? National Interest 16: 3–18. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1996. Recuperating masculinity: Hindu nationalism, violence and the exorcism of the “Muslim Other.” Critique of Anthropology 16 (2): 137–72. Jalal, Ayesha. 1995. Democracy and authoritarianism in South Asia: A comparative and historical perspective. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Kurin, Richard. 1988. The culture of ethnicity in Pakistan. In Shariat and ambiguity in South Asian Islam, ed. Katherine P. Ewing, 220–47. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lehmann, David. 1998. Fundamentalism and globalism. Third World Quarterly 19 (4): 607–34. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. Feminist theory, embodiment, and the docile agent: Some reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival. Cultural Anthropology 16: 202–36. Metcalf, Barbara. 1984. Moral conduct and authority: The place of Adab in South Asian Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Verkaaik, Oskar. 2001. The captive state: Corruption, intelligence agencies, and ethnicity in Pakistan. In States of imagination: Ethnographic explorations of

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the postcolonial state, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, 345–64. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2003. The nation and its shadow: Imagining subversion in post–”911” Pakistan and Holland. Ethnologia Europaea 33 (2): 45–56. ———. 2004a. Migrants and militants: “Fun” and urban violence in Pakistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004b. Reforming mysticism: Sindhi separatist intellectuals in Pakistan. International Review of Social History 49: 65–86. ———. 2005. Ethnicizing Islam: “Sindhi Sufis,” “Muhajir Modernists” and “Tribal Islamists” in Pakistan. In New perspectives on Pakistan: Contexts, realities and visions for the future, ed. Saeed Shafqat. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S

Susanne Dahlgren is a fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Helsinki in 2004 with a thesis entitled “Contesting Realities. Morality, Propriety and the Public Sphere in Aden, Yemen.” Dahlgren has published on legal history in Southern Yemen, and on everyday notions of morality, sexuality, and the urban space. She is currently engaged in a research project entitled “Making a Good Muslim: Contested Fields of Religious Authorship in the Age of Global Islam.” Driss Maghraoui is an assistant professor of history at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. He received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in European studies and North African colonial history. He has taught courses at the University of California and was a visiting professor at Yale University. His research focus is on social and cultural history in North Africa with a concentration on Morocco and Algeria. He is interested also in questions around history, memory, subaltern studies, orientalism, and world history. His publications are found in international academic journals and edited books in Morocco, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the United States. He is currently working on a book titled History, Memory and the Culture of French Colonialism. Thomas Blom Hansen is professor of anthropology, University of Amsterdam. His research interests are violence, the anthropology of the state, the cultural consequences of democracy, religious identities, and questions of the city and the senses. He has worked extensively in India and is currently working on a book on the meanings of freedom and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. His publications include The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, 1999); Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, 2001). He has coedited Compulsions of Politics (Oxford University Press, 1998) with C. Jaffrelot; States of

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Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Duke University Press, 2001) with F. Stepputat; and Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton University Press, 2005) with F. Stepputat. AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist in the broad sense that his work focuses on various communities, powers, cultural expressions, governance and planning discourses, spaces, and times in cities across the world. His work has centered on how urban practices—such as the ways in which different groups, communities, and social networks negotiate the city, interpret and organize daily activities—engage different institutions. Simone is a professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College and a visiting professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand. He has taught at the University of Khartoum, University of Ghana, University of the Western Cape, and the City University of New York, as well as working for several African NGOs and regional institutions, including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. Key publications include In Whose Image? Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago Press, 1994) and For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Four African Cities (Duke University Press, 2004). Oskar Verkaaik is currently assistant professor at the Research Center for Religion and Society at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, he has worked as research fellow at the Globalization Project at the University of Chicago, as assistant professor at the Free University Amsterdam, and as head of the Amsterdam Branch of the International Institute for Asian Studies. His field of interest includes nationalism, ethnicity, and transnational religion in South Asia and Europe. His publications include Migrants and Militants: “Fun” and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton University Press, 2004). Paul A. Silverstein is associate professor of anthropology at Reed College and an editor of Middle East Report. His research and writing focuses on issues of urban violence, postcoloniality, and transnational politics in immigrant France, and more recently on the intersection of ethnic activism, racial projects, and land rights in southeastern Morocco. He is author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (2004) and coeditor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (2006).

INDEX Abuja, 8 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 28, 180 Adam, Andre, 22, 23 Aden, 4, 6, 13, 64; Adenis, 52; British military outpost and colony, 47; sexual segregation, 45; society of contractors and brokers, 48; typical Adeni young women, 57 Aden University, 57, 64 Afghanistan, 87 Africa, 2, 4, 8; urban, 138 African, 1, 101, 106, 119; African National Congress (ANC) 101, 105, 109, 112, 125; Afrikaans, 110; sexualization of the teenage culture, 122; workers, 109; Zulu-speaking majority, 104 Ahmar, Tasneem, 88 Ahmed, Nazir, 74 Aïchoune, Farid, 183 Aid el-Kebir, 175 Al-Bıdh, Ali Salım, 54 al-bigha. See prostitution Alexandra, 143, 152 Algeria, 72, 182 Algerian War, 180 Algiers, 4 Ali, Kamran Asdar, 6; story narrations, 80–87 Ali, Monica, 6 Ali, Salım Rubaya, 54 All India Muslim Ladies Conference. See Anjuman-eKhawaten-e Islam

All Pakistan Muhajir Student Organization (APMSO), 208, 220 al-Mansu¯ra, 50 Althabe, Gérard, 170 al-zina. See prostitution Amin, Ash, 136 Amman, 13 Anderson, Jon W., 46 Anjuman-e-Khawaten-e Islam, 75 apartheid era, 7; “compression” and racialization of Indians, 113 Appadurai, Arjun, 13, 90, 170 aql, 224 Arabo-Muslim world, 17 Arabs, 10 Arrif, Abdelmajid, 22, 37 Asad, Talal, 89 Asfi, 39 Association Gutenberg, 185 Association SOS Avenir Minguettes, 185 Atok Village, 157 Aulnay, 174 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 72 Baluchi, 209 Bandit, The, 215 Banégas, Richard, 136 Banerjee, Sumanta, 72, 75 Bangladesh, 6, 77 Battle of Poitiers, 183 Baumann, Gerd, 210 Beall, Jo, 142 Beck, Ulrich, 138

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INDEX

Bengal, 214; Bengali nationalists, 73 Benjamin, Walter, 84, 92, 129 Berea, 143 Berque, Jacques, 18, 26 Berry, Sara, 138 Bhabha, Homi, 210 Bhutto, Zulfiquar Ali, 78, 219 Bishop, Ryan, 137 black South Africans, 164 Blanc, Dr. 20 Bobigny, 174 Boer War, 107 Bok Street, 145, 155 Bordels Militaires de Campagne (BMC) 24 Bouamama, Saïd, 170, 186 Bousbir, 18, 30, 41 Boyer, M. Christine, 136 Bozzoli, Belinda, 7 Bremner, Lindsay, 142 Brick Lane, 6 Britain, 51, 182, 184 British: colonial agenda, 73; colonial power; colonial rule, 49; government, 107; India, 11; National Front, 183; officers, 26 Brown, Wendy, 14 Brownmiller, Susan, 171 Bureaux Municipaux d’Hygiène (BMD), 28 Busserine, 185 Butler, Judith, 89 Butt, Razia, 76 Cairo, 6 Calcutta, 72, 75 Caldeira, Teresa, 13 Cape Town, 108 Caplan, Cora, 88 Cartesianism, 46 Casablanca, 4, 13, 18, 22; French colonial urbanism in, 19; geographical origin of immigrant

labor in, 3; industrialization, 23; prostitution in, 41; prototype of colonial urban transformation, 233 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 46 Cato Manor, 104, 108, 114; “Cato Manor Stories,” 108 Celik, Zeynep, 4, 170, 180 Central African Republic, 157 Central Asia, 87 Centre des Hautes études sur l’Afrique et l’Asie Moderne, 38 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 73 Chaouia, 23, 32 Charef, Mehdi, 183, 191 Chatsworth, 103, 114, 119; Community Policing Forum, 125 Chatsworth High, 121 Chatterjee, Partha, 73, 90 Chesterfield, 155 Chicago School of Sociology, 176 Christian North, 183 Chughtai, Ismat, 76 Cité des Muguets, 176 Claim Streets, 149, 153, 155 Clancey, Gregory, 137 Clancy-Smith, Julia, 170 colonial era, 48; colonialism, 18; politics, 21 Colonna, Fanny, 170 coloureds, 101 Community Policing Forums (CPFs), 125 Congolese, 161 Conklin, Alice, 170 Constantine Court, 156 Contagious Diseases Acts, 25 Contesting Culture, 210 Corbin, Alain, 25–27 cosmopolitanism, 210, 223; Cosmopolistans, 226 Couzy, 184

INDEX Crankshaw, Owen, 142 Crater, 51 Crush, Jonathon, 141 Dahlgren, Susanne, 4, 6, 55 Danish cartoon controversy, 10 Daoud, Zakya, 170, 181 Das, Veena, 171 Davis, Mike, 138, 170, 178 Dawn, 215 Day I became a Woman, The, 14 De Campredon, Dr. 20 De Certeau, Michel, 171 De Landa, Manuel, 137 Democratic Party, 119 Deobandi Ulema, 74 Derb Bousbir. See quartier resérvé de Bousbir Derrida, Jacques, 137 Dhaka, 6 Dicken, Peter, 136 Diken, Bülent, 137 Direction des Affaires Indigenes (DAI), 21 Djebar, Assia, 72 Djerdoubi, Mokhtar, 170, 186 Doornfontein, 153 Dube, Rev. John, 107 Dubet, François, 170 Durban, 7, 11, 13, 102, 107, 109, 112, 118, 143 Duret, Pascal, 170 Durkheim, Emile, 21 Dutch, 213 East Africa, 3 East Asia, 5 Ehsan Manzil, 71 Eickelman, Dale F., 46 El Guindi, Fadwa, 59 English, 207 Europe, 10, 157, 178

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European; anxieties, 10; businessmen, 50; European Monetary Union, 178; immigration, 27 Ewing, Katherine, 215 Family Law Ordinance, 78 Fanon, Frantz, 35, 179 Fantasia, 72 Farah, Nuruddin, 1 Farnell, Brenda, 59 Fassin, Didier, 170 Fedderke, Johannes, 141 Feldman, Allen, 184, 188 Female Cabby in Sidi Bel-Abbés, A, 14 Ferguson, James, 170 Fez, 22, 25 Figueras, André, 183 Fine, Ben, 141 For A Place Under the Heavens, 5 Fortuyn, Pim, 213 France, 170–91; Franco-Arab underemployed immigrants, 10; Franco-Maghrebi, 169; French architect, 56; French civilization, 170; French colonial apparatus, 18; French colonial authorities, 21; French colonialism and late capitalism, 169; French colonial military establishment, 24; French colonial policy, 10; French ethnological and sociological studies, 170; French modernity, 171; Hollywood’s fetish of weaponry, 191; hygienic conception of urbanism, 29; media, 178; nation, 181–83; racist movement, 170–74; transportation, 188 Free State, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 105, 132 Freund, Bill, 105 Friedman, Jonathan, 211, 225 Fukuyama, Francis, 213

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INDEX

fundamentalism, 212 “Fundamentalism and Globalism.” See Lehmann, David Gandhi, 107 Gandy, Matthew, 136 Gastrow, Peter, 141 Gauhar, Feryal, 88 Gauteng, 155 Germany, 154 Gilfoyle, Timothy J., 18 Gilou, Thomas, 178 Gilroy, Paul, 182 Goch Streets, 145 Gogh, Theo Van: murder of, 10 Göle, Nilufer, 46, 60 Govender, Ronnie, 108 Gregory, Derek, 139 Grimzi, Habib, 191 Group Areas Act, 104, 114 Guha, Ranajit, 19 Gupta, Akhil, 170 Gurkhas, 223 Habib, Adam, 141 Hadjadj, Belkacem, 14 Haider, Qurutul ain, 76 Hamza Luqman, 49 Hanks, William F., 62 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 7, 120, 131, 223 Haq, General Zia-ul, 79, 208 Harlequin romances, 72 Harrison, Mark, 21, 26 Harts-Broekhuis, Annelet, 159 Harvey, David, 170 Hasan, Arif, 12 Hatem, Mervat, 46 Haussman reforms, 181 Hillbrow, 143, 148; crime rate, 158 Hindu, 126; nationalist movement, 223 Holston, James, 13 Huguet, Dr. 20

Hussain, Neelam, 88 Hussein, Intezar, 71 Hyat, Kamila, 88 Hydrabad, 87 hygiene, 29 Inanda, 112 Indian Ocean, 5 Indus Valley, 216 Ingrams, Doreen, 50 Inkatha, 112 Iqbal, Muhammad, 215 Islam, 116, 207, 214–25; Deobandi interpretation of, 127; Islamic awakening, 60; Islamic family law, 78; Islamic laws (see Muslim); Islamic universalism, 222; Shari’a Islamization, 53 Islamabad, 218 Ismat, 75, 80 India, 11, 26, 207, 224; Indian, 8, 101, 106, 112, 119, 218; Indian community, 50; Indian identity, 131; Indian schools, 121; Indian teachers, 121; modernizing Indian elite, 73; reform of Muslim domestic space in colonial, 73 Jahan, Rashid, 76 Jalal, Ayesha, 75, 79, 215 Jameson, Frederic, 90, 170 Jazouli, Adil, 170, 185 Jeganathan, Pradeep, 169 Jews, 50 Jiménez, Alberto Corsin, 138 Johannesburg, 8, 13, 135, 140, 143; foreign African and Asian immigrants, 142; Housing Partnership, 144; language that developed in the mines of, 110; nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 141 Jole, Michele, 21

INDEX Joseph, Suad, 61 Joubert Park, 144, 148, 155 Juppé, Alain, 178 Kadima, Denis, 142 Kadivar, Mohsen, 59 Kalombo, Gaston, 142 Kapteijn Street, 152 Karachi, 5, 77, 87, 208, 216–20; ethnic politics and multiculturalism, 210; rise of Mohajir nationalism, 11 Kassovitz, Matthieu, 176 Kensington, 159 Kenya, 157 Khan, General Ayub, 218 Khan, Liaquat Ali, 214 Khatoon, A. R., 76 Khatun, 75 Khormaksar, 50 Khouribga, 27 Kinshasa, 155 Klein Streets, 149 Knots, 1 Knox-Mawer, June, 50 Kurin, Richard, 223 Kwaito bands, 120 Kwa-Zulu Natal, 123, 154 Lacapère, Dr. G., 20, 38 L’Afrique Galante, 38 Lagos, 8 La Haine (Hate), 176, 184 Lambert, Paul, 175 Lapeyronnie, Didier, 170 La Prostitution Surveillée de Casablanca: Le Quartier Réservé, 38 Largueches, Abdelhamid, 18 Laroui, Abdallah, 23 La Syphilis Arabe, 38 Latham, Alan, 138 Leeco Property (Pty) Limited, 161 Lefebvre, Henri, 170

Lehmann, David, 211 Le Monde, 178 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 175 Lepoutre, David, 170 Les Minguettes, 185 Le Tourneau, Roger, 22 Liberia, 8 Limpopo Province, 152 Little Aden, 50 Liu, W., 141 Location of Culture, The, 210 London, 6, 10 Lorcin, Patricia M. E., 170 Luqman, Farouk, 52 Lyari river, 207 Lyautey, General, 26 Lyon, 176 Lyonnais, 169, 181 M. A. Seljouk, 215 M’Bowole, Makome, 176 Macalla, 49 MacKenzie, Alan, 137 Macmaster, Neil, 176 Madrid, 10 Maffesoli, Michel, 136 Maghraoui, Driss, 4 Maghreb, 18 Mahmood, Saba, 46 Malawi, 115 Mandalay Court, 152 Mantes-la-Jolie, 181 Maputo, 143 Maréchal Lyautey, 180 Marrakech, 32 Marseilles, 183 Marshall Plan, 178 Marshall-Fratani, Ruth, 136 Masroor, Hajra, 76 Massumi, Brian, 136 Mastur, Khadija, 76 Mathieu, Jean, 34–38 Maury, P. H., 34–38 Mauss, Marcel, 61

235

236

INDEX

Mbembe, Achille, 139 McClintock, Anne, 171 McCormack, Derek, 138 McDonald, David, 141 Meknes, 25, 39 Menon, Nivedita, 171 Meshkini, Marzieh, 14 Metcalf, Barbara, 224 Middleburg, 157 Middle East, 2–4, 46; cultural, 59; public spheres, 60; studies, 60 Minault, Gail, 75 Minority Front, 119 modernization, 55 Modleski, Tania, 73 Mogadishu, 1 Montagne, Robert, 21, 22 Montero Vetero, 161 Morice, A., 170 Morocco, 21, 27, 180; al-qahba, 17; French involvement in, 19; Moroccan peasant society, 23; Moroccans, 5; Moroccan society, 20; Moroccan soldiers, 38; pacification du Maroc, 23; syphilis, 29 “Mourning and Melancholia,” 105 Mpumalanga, 153, 157 Mt. Zion Projects, 150 Muhajir Quaumi Movement (MQM), 12, 208, 220 Muhajirs, 77, 87, 207; ethnicity, 208; in Karachi, 214; “Enlightenment,” “modernity,” “Western civilization,” 226; Singapore or Hong Kong option, 220; worldview cosmopolitanism and culture, 225 multiplicity, 136 Mumbai, 13 Mumtaz, Samiya, 88 Muslim, 10, 12, 60, 115, 208, 214, 223; Arab/Muslim migrants, 10;

domestic realm, 76; elite, 74; merchant elite, 108; Muslim League, 214; Muslim Personal Law, 78; Muslim South, 183; nationalism, 5; refugees, 11; religious reformers, 74; Shari’a, 74; women’s education, 75; women writers, 76 nafs, 224 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 73 Nanterre, 186 Narula, 137 Nasser, Ali, 54 Natal, 107 National Front (FN), 175 nationalism, 183 National Liberation Front (FLN), 180 National Rail Corporation (SNCF), 188 Nattrass, Nicoli, 141 Ndiaye, Pap, 170 Noord Street, 149, 155 North Africa, 19, 170, 183; cities, 28; colonial and postcolonial period, 17; youth, 172 North India, 75; middle-class Muslim life in, 71 North West Frontier Province (NWFP), 87 North Yemen, 50 Officiers des Affaires Indigenes (OAI), 21 orientalism: orientalist descriptions of Hindus and Muslims, 223 Orkerse Streets, 153 Oujda, 23, 34 Ouled Frej, 40 Padayachee, Vishnu, 141 Pakeeza, 80 Pakhtun, 12, 218, 225; culture, 86; issue of homosexuality, 87

INDEX Pakistan, 5, 88, 207, 214, 223; independence, 76; Pakistani English language press, 88; social life, 11; Zia regime, 90 Pantin, 172 Paris, 3, 10, 11, 31, 172; Parisian, 169; Parisian regional railroad (RER), 189; riots in Paris suburbs, 10 Parnell, Sue, 142 Patriot Act, 10 Peabody, Sue, 170 People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), 47, 51 People’s General Congress, 54 Petonnet, Colette, 170 Philani Hospital, 145 Pietermaritzburg, 108 political theory, 212 Pope Street, 161 Port Royal, 189 postmodernist, 211 Prakash, Gyan, 74 Pretoria, 145 Prost, Henri, 28 prostitution, 17, 18, 24; “colonial prostitute,” 18; geographical origin of the prostitutes, 33; Jewish prostitutes, 35; prostitutes, 122; prostitutes addicted to cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, 37 Pryke, Michael, 139 Pujadas, David, 175 Punjab, 218; ethnic group, 77; Punjabi domination, 221 Purdah Nashin, 75 quartier resérvé de Bousbir, 31 Quiminal, Catherine, 170 Rabat, 39 Rabinow, Paul, 26, 170, 180

237

racial: discourses and practices, 113; marriages, 114; race groups, 101; racism, 183; racist ideology, 112 Radway, Janice, 73 Raï, 178 Rajgopal, Arvind, 89 Rajputs, 223 Randburg, 158 Raqs Media Collective, 137 Raspail, Jean, 183 Reguillo, Rosanna, 138 Reitzes, M.axine, 142, 164 Remingler, Dr., 20 Robinson, Jennifer, 136 Rock Against Police (RAP), 184 Rogerson, Chris, 142 Rouse, Shahnaz, 78 Rustomjee, Zavareh, 141 Sabiha Sumar, 5 Saddar, 12 Sad-Saoud, Hadjila, 170, 186 Safdar, Huma, 88 Saigol, Rubina, 88 Saint-Dizier, 186 Saint-Michel, 189 Salam, Ahmed, 175 Salardenne, Roger, 24, 38 Salvatore, Armando, 46 Sanc¯a ’, 53, 64 Saudi Arabia: Gulf crisis, 52 Scott, Joan, 14 segregation, 53 Senegal, 189 Serhane, Abdelhak, 17 Shaykh cUthman, 49 Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network, 2 Sidaway, James, 139 Sierra Leone, 8 Silverstein, Paul A., 3, 10, 169, 191 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 7, 13, 170 Sindh, 214, 225; Sindhi, 209 Smith, Julia-Clancy, 18, 20

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INDEX

Smith, Richard, 136 South Africa, 3, 6, 9, 107, 131, 140, 158; AIDS pandemic in, 123; economy, 105; Indians in, 113; sexual and domestic violence, 102; South African, 9, 149, 154, 161 South Asia, 2, 4; Muslims of, 77; South Asian, 103 Soweto, 143, 152 Stallybrass, Peter, 84 Stolcke, Verena, 183 Stoler, Ann Laura, 112, 170 Stovall, Tyler, 170 subalternity, 18 Sufism, 215, 224 Tablighi Jamaat, 127 Tacoli, Cecilia, 159 Tadla, 23, 32 Talibanization, 219 Tamela, Zico, 142 Taraud, Christelle, 18, 30 Tawahi, 51 Taylor, Charles, 45, 55, 65 Taza, 40 Tetreault, Chantal, 169 Thrift, Nigel, 136, 138 Thorn Birds, The, 88 Thulare, Paul, 142 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 3 Tswana, 110 Turkey: veiling movement, 60 Twist Street, 145, 155 Umlaas River, 103 Umlazi, 103, 120 UN declaration on women’s rights, 78 United States, 10; September 11 attacks, 10 University of Karachi, 207, 217 urban organization, 18; forms of virtuality136; politics, 137; soci-

ology, 22; villages, 217; urbanism, 29 Urdu, 207; digest, 72–81, 88; fiction, 72; literature, 76; multiethnic-multilingual literate readership, 87; representational norms of literary production, 84; -speaking households, 76 Val-Fourré, 181 Van Gogh, Theo, 213 Vannin Court, 158 Vaulx-en-Velin, 186 Verkaaik, Oskar, 11, 215, 218 Vié, Jean-Emile, 175 Vitry, 184 Weber, Samuel, 139 Weekend Lift-Off, The, 131 West Africa, 8 West Atlantic Plains, 23 Western Indian Ocean, 2 Western romances, 72 West Pakistan, 81 White, Allon, 84 White, Caroline, 142 whites, 101 Wieviorka, Michel, 176 Wihtol de Wenden, Catherine, 170 Willis, Clair, 72 Wilson, Elizabeth, 1 Wise, J. MacGregor, 136 Wits Technikon, 152, 154 Wits University, 153 Woodward, Wayne, 137 World War I, 21 World War II, 49 Wright, Gwendolyn, 170, 180 Xhosa, 110 Yanomamo, 175 Yemen Republic, 3, 47; Yemenis, 52 Yeoville, 143, 159 Young, Robert, 112

INDEX Zaidi, Akbar S., 11, 77 Zaman, Mohamad Qasim, 77 Zambia, 160 Zang, Li, 13

239

Zanzibar, 115; Zanzibaris, 115, 121 Zia’s Hudood Ordinance, 79 Zimbabwe, 160 Zulu, 110; Zulus, 107