Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels : African Cultural and Economic Landscapes Book

How do Africans conceive space? How are places constructed and imagined? How do the conceptions, constructions, imaginings of spaces and places affect, and in turn are affected by, social, economic and political change? There are some of the questions this book seeks to answer. It is the first book of its kind in African studies to address itself systematically to the themes of space and spatiality.

The book begins with a lucid and engaging introduction on the concept of spatiality and its emerging centrality in the formulation of social theory. The rest of the book is organized into four parts. The papers in the first section titled "the changing morphology of urban spaces" reconceptualize African cities, their sustainability and development, and interrogate the impact of economic crisis and structural adjustment programs on the organization and reproduction of urban life, including the social dynamics of gender roles and economic change in urban Africa.

Papers in the second section titled, "the construction of landscapes as ritual, therapeutic, symbolic and aesthetic spaces" examine in various ways the constructions of therapeutic and ritual spaces, cultural and medical geographies, ecological knowledge, and the spatial dynamics of the social ecologies of gender and disease.

The third section is on "narrating and imagining spaces" and contains papers which explore the question of spatiality and artistic production, specifically relations between art and space, texts and contexts, autobiography and space. The chapters in the last section on "spatiality of nations, communities, and identifies" focus on the political economy of territoriality and identify formation, especially hownationalistic, ethnic and gender identities are constructed and transformed in the context of struggles over structures of power and access to political, economic and symbolic resources, including land.