Project summary

This project examines the extent to which urban encounters are marked or mediated by categories denoting dirt (see Curtis 2003). Using in-depth qualitative interviews in local schools and communities in Nairobi and Lagos, alongside archival research into colonial discourses about dirt in Africa, and research into locally produced media, the project will focus on popular and everyday conceptualisations of the body and environment in Nairobi and Lagos. In so-doing, the project will offer an ambitious qualitative, comparative and historical study that asks about the implications of locally situated understandings of dirt in diverse African contexts for current debates about urbanisation, the environment, sexuality and ethnicity. In examining the concept of dirt from the period of the consolidation of colonialism in the 1880s through to the present in two African cities, the project will situate contemporary popular media in relation to Africa’s long history of intercultural encounters and, in so-doing, help to historically contextualise wider policy issues relating to public health, urbanisation and anti-racism in developing countries.

The project has a large number of personnel attached to it—14 people in total, including the administrator, the postdoctoral researchers and the doctoral students. In May 2014 six day-long research methods training seminars tailored to the requirements of the project will be delivered by NatCen (London) in Sussex. In the third year of the project, bespoke top-up training will be provided by the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. In the final year of the project, the East and West African teams will be involved in skills-sharing workshops’ in Nairobi and Lagos, alongside launch events in London, Lagos and Nairobi.

See the DirtPol project website

Project themes

With reference to four key themes—colonialism, the environment, sexuality and ethnicity—my project will situate African popular discourses about dirt in relation to theories and studies of urbanisation in Africa, cultural theories of dirt in the West, and anthropological and epidemiological work on dirt and disgust in colonial and postcolonial locations.

Theme 1: Colonialism
A comparison of responses to dirt among different social and economic groups in the colonial period. This strand will examine how traders, missionaries and colonial administrators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made use of the category of dirt to interpret the African communities they encountered. This strand will also include attention to the rich array of local African words connoting dirt that pre-existed colonialism by many decades in Africa, and the role played by scatological language in African protests against chiefs and figures of political authority in Africa, as well as the ways dirt was employed in other African discourses. This strand will ask: what differentiated colonial traders, missionaries and administrators from one another in their representations of African bodies, and in their efforts to understand local tastes and patterns of consumption? How were African bodies represented in relation to local commodities? In what ways were/are perceptions of dirt connected with African bodily relationships to the global economy? To what extent did African concepts of dirt permeate colonial policy, trade encounters and missionary endeavours?

Theme 2: The Environment
An examination of cultural economies of dirt. This strand will involve a comparative examination of the cultures and economies of recycling, consumption and waste disposal. In a climate where city-dwellers are imminently set to outnumber rural populations for the first time in Africa, African urban subjects often produce ingenious responses to the flows of local and international commodities and resources in their cities. Especial emphasis will be placed on the cultural politics of trash and the rubbish tip. This strand will analyse the cultural significance of the rubbish dump as a symbolic space in Nairobi and Lagos that yields information about creative and distributive practices in local economies. African artistic and commercial uses of recycled ‘trash’ will also be assessed in this strand. What kind of ‘archive’ is represented by trash across cultures? The very concept of trash will be problematised by the cross-cultural dimensions of this strand, which will also address the practical and methodological problems involved in collecting, preserving and cataloguing ephemera or rubbish.

Theme 3: Sexuality
An evaluation of the cultural and historical processes that have produced dirt as a classification for certain types of sexuality. In a climate of increasingly violent homophobia in many parts of Africa, there is a need for situated, localised understandings of how particular bodies come to be regarded as dirty, and for an examination of the cultural and political histories of how these ideas came to influence public opinion. This research strand will examine in particular popular debates about moral ‘filth’ and ‘dirty’ sexualities. Source material will include: African newspapers, popular DVDs, locally published pamphlets, popular music and theatre. This strand asks: what are the connections between ideas about dirt and changing interpretations of sexuality on the continent, particularly in relation to homophobia? By what cultural and historical processes have particular bodies come to be regarded as sexually dirty in Africa? In African languages, what words and phrases are used to conceptualise homosexuality and in what ways do these mediate homophobic prejudice? In what ways do public health workers address negative popular representations of homosexuality?

Theme 4: Ethnicity
An assessment of the importance of dirt-related concepts to postcolonial understandings of urban identities, particularly in relation to ethnicity and race. This strand examines the ways in which local accounts of physical or moral dirt engage with political and economic processes in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and the ways in which indigenous representations of ethnic dirt and cultural otherness resist or contest Western stereotypes. This strand asks: in urban popular discourses, what connections are drawn between dirt and cultural otherness, dirt and violence, dirt and migration, dirt and transgression, dirt and political processes? What are the implications of our findings for the implementation of antiracism policies in Africa and in Europe?

Contact

Prof. Steph Newell
School of English
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton
BN1 9QN,
E s.newell@sussex.ac.uk
T 07876 363777

Banner image by Robert (Lagos, Nigeria) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons