Author:

Keywords:

urban anthropology, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kinshasa, Anthropology of Art, Urban studies, global south

Abstract:

Local tropes of hole and suture tell us something about the changes that have taken place in how urbanity is imagined and lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. More than ever, there is the need to be attentive to new concepts that arise from the ground up to open up or rescale our thinking about a city such as Kinshasa in order to decenter and reframe urban theory more generally. The hole (and its opposite, the mountain/tower), offer topographical meta-concepts that Congo’s urban residents use not only to reflect on the material degradation of their cities’ infrastructure but also to rework the closures and the often dismal quality of social life that has followed in the wake of the material ruination of the colonial city. Even though the library of our knowledge about life in the cities of the Global South has considerably expanded over the last two decades, for anthropologists and others who analyze the state of things in such urban environments, this nevertheless continues to be one of the main tasks at hand: to understand how exactly such ‘reworking’ and reassembling take place, what attempts are being made to fill this postcolonial hole, and what possible answers urban residents come up with in response to the challenges it poses.