Becoming and Coming Undone on the Streets of Dar es Salaam

Abstract

We examine how young men who have spent years living on the streets of downtown Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have used urban spaces, as well as particular kinds of spatial "flights" and "fixes," to navigate the process of growing into adulthood. We argue that places called maskani have provided them with a powerful sense of forward momentum, engendering more immediate and future-oriented forms of becoming. As time has passed, however, life at these places has also generated a sense of stagnation and engendered forms of coming undone, which have necessitated particular kinds of spatial flights and fixes. Some men have left maskani and the city altogether, despite limited prospects elsewhere.

A black man is a cornered man: migration, precarity and masculinities in Johannesburg

“…Drawing on the Deleuzian line of thought regarding space and identity, we argue that this particular enclave of cornered masculinity arose from the desires of men to belong in the city and to assert themselves as men in spite of the limitations they faced. Our findings regarding the importance of space, particularly the street and street corners, for shaping masculine identity resonates with those of Fast and Moyer (2018) who demonstrated the ways young men in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, used the streets to conjure a sense of forward momentum to counter the precarity that characterized their everyday lives.…”

“…In this space, men consider, discuss and debate definitions and localized codes of how to be a man in Johannesburg. Similarly, Fast and Moyer (2018) draw on Biehl and Locke (2017) anthropology of becoming, to illustrate the ways young men use urban space to navigate and negotiate precarious realities through establishing relations and imagining future possibilities elsewhere. Building on this theoretical trajectory and drawing on our research at Uncle Kofi's Corner, we understand masculinities as a set of practices and ideas resulting from unstable subjectivities that are in the process of being and becoming (Fast and Moyer 2018;Hall 1993).…”

“…Our findings resonate with studies showing that migrant men adapt to new circumstances and negotiate new identities in post migration contexts (Montes 2013;Batnitzky, McDowell, and Dyer 2009;Datta et al 2009). Masculinities are challenged, reaffirmed and reconfigured by a post migration context in which public space is of critical importance (Pasura and Christou 2018;Fast and Moyer 2018).…”

Stress and the ecology of urban experience: Migrant mental lives in central Shanghai

“…While this kind of approach is evident in geographical writing on the lived experience of psychosis (Duff, 2012(Duff, , 2016Parr, 1997Parr, , 1999Söderström et al, 2016;Winz, 2018), here we ask if there is something about the lived city that prevents the states of mind of its most precarious subjects from being pushed to their limits, despite the acknowledged "pressures" of urban existence. Echoing recent geographical work on the emotional experiences of urban precarity in the West (Anderson et al, 2019;Wilkinson & Ortega-Alcázar, 2019a, 2019b and beyond (Fast & Moyer, 2018;Pettit, 2019), we draw on fieldwork conducted as part of a broader research project on migrant lives and mental health in Shanghai, to focus on how lived experience in distinct spaces mediates everyday pressures. We look at how embodied encounters within the urban environment intervene in the making of anxious thoughts and troubled feelings, but also their endurance, complicating depictions of the affective and psychological tonalities of modern city living as choices between "stress," "comfort," or "animosity" (Brighenti & Pavoni, 2019).…”