Author response to review forum on “The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda”

I have been extraordinarily lucky to have the opportunity to engage with three generous scholars whose work I not only deeply admire, but who have been instrumental in developing and deepening the thematics of urbanism, race, and aesthetics that are central to the book. As Rachel Jean-Baptiste notes, the last two decades have been witness to “one of the most consequential transformations taking place across the African continent,” namely, the unprecedented demographic and physical expansion of urban centers. The book argues for a need to appreciate the aesthetic politics of contemporary city making in Africa as it explores, again as Jean-Baptiste notes: “Who belongs in the city? What forms of built environments, specifically housing, constitute a desirable form of urbanism? Who has the legitimacy to ask these questions and determine the responses? When, how, and why do contestations around these factors burst onto the scene and what is at stake?”

At the heart of my response to these questions is the concept of aesthetics. I approach aesthetics both through the city’s material life as well as theoretical perspectives that understand it as the historically constituted everyday normative judgments of beauty, inclusion, and “the good” rooted in sensorial engagement with the world. As Jean-Baptiste rightly notes, aesthetics and the aesthetic capaciously link a multiplicity of actors, sites, and objects across the book. This is because, in many ways, aesthetics produced the possibility of a public sphere in a politically repressive context. Tracing debates about aesthetics allowed me to recognize conversations taking place between government documents, popular culture, everyday discussions, and official interviews. As people, publications, and pressure groups expressed their views about what kinds of architectures, urban plans, materials, and spatial formations they considered to be “urban” and “desirable,” they exposed a longer history of debate about what it meant to belong, rooted in understandings of urban design and materials. Thus, aesthetics came to mediate understandings of belonging across multiple sites, linking actors who had never actually met and shaping broader structural processes and shared experiences of political inclusion.

An aesthetic lens is also key to what Shakirah Hudani highlights as one of the major contributions of the book, namely, approaching Luanda’s popular neighborhoods, known locally as musseques as “a locus of theory.” Researching what have variously been called “slums,” “informal settlements,” and “self-built neighborhoods” is certainly not new in African studies. What my focus on musseques draws attention to is, as Hudani notes, their existence as a “particular formation of indigenous urbanism.” I argue that unconscious aesthetic judgments regarding what kinds of designs, forms, and materials count as urban have not only limited planners and states in their design of cities, but also scholars in their ability to recognize the histories and politics emerging from the material life and construction practices of areas such as the musseques. In the process, entire material, geographic, and political histories of Black life have been sidelined. By centering the musseques as an Indigenous urbanism, rather than “informal,” the book not only insists on the recognition of these construction practices as urban but suggests that recognition most likely requires a radical rupture of existing imaginations of the urban. As such, the book identifies aesthetic struggles emerging from the musseques—and similar neighborhoods—as central for understanding the contemporary production of political belonging in urban Africa.

Hudani also rightfully points to some of the limits of the book’s focus on material culture. She asks how political consciousness emerging from construction might intersect with “other forms of identity-making, modes of sociality, and projects of solidarity.” The built environment is, of course, not the only location of politics, not even aesthetic politics. As Marissa Moorman has so eloquently shown in her own canonical work on Angola, music has perhaps historically been the most public form of aesthetic politics in the country. More recently, youth groups, taxi organizations, students, and army veterans have all engaged in different forms of protest and challenge to the current Angolan political order. As Moorman points out in her review, however, different kinds of political aesthetics and practice shed light on distinctive thematics. The built environment in particular brings attention to questions of race. Moorman suggests that this focus on race enabled her to rethink her analysis of Angolan music, picking up on political and social subtleties that might otherwise have been overlooked. The discussion of race brings Moorman to a major question for the book as a whole: how might my description of musseques as a “Black Indigenous urbanism” resonate with Angolans themselves? If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that while many people in Luanda would agree with aspects of my framing, the question of how to understand race would be fraught. In a country in which discussions of race and racism have often been discouraged by the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and quashed in the public sphere, there has been a tendency to downplay the ways in which they shape life and politics. My hope is that my book can generate broader interest in how the racial aesthetics underlying contemporary understandings of urbanism have shaped not just Angolan cities, but more broadly African urbanism and scholarly understandings of it. In grappling with the politics of aesthetics, the book hopes to provide a basis for scholars to better understand the formations of power—and the challenges to them—that have shaped contemporary African cities.