Global retail capital and urban futures: Feminist postcolonial perspectives

Abstract

Critical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital (GRC). This essay engages feminist postcolonial approaches, grounded in African continental feminist work, to theorize from the urban transformations, displacements, and resistances driven by GRC and emerging in urban East Africa. This framework engages an intersectional understanding of capitalism, and its work driving urban displacement, as always co‐produced through gender, racial, colonial, heteronormative, nationalist, and other power‐geometries. We assert that feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, within and beyond Africa: critical of colonial past‐presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights—intellectual and material—of African women.

Proceeding through Colonial Past‐Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability, Refusal, and Autonomy

“…Massey (1994, 2004) argued that amidst the interconnected spatial and temporal dimensions of how people experience flows of capital there exists a plurality of radical political openings and relations to be made. They enrich her thinking with an intersectional lens that stresses analyses of “gender, racial, heteronormative, nationalist, colonial, and other power geometries” (Faria and Whitesell 2021:4). Following their cues, this article illustrates some of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the colonial histories of academic institutions and disciplines that impacted my research in the present.…”

“…The meeting with Silviano, viewing his list of researchers who have come to Coatlán in the last 130 years, and learning about Starr, provoked me to more deeply analyse the ways that my research in Coatlán is linked to the other researchers who came before me, bound by “colonial past‐presents” (Faria et al. 2021a, 2021b; Faria and Whitesell 2021). That I am on the list alongside other researchers, illustrates how the power geometries of my present research are rooted in colonial pasts (Massey 2004).…”