Past Event

Speaker:  Professor Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin (Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies, Carleton University)
Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is a feminist scholar who is interested in place-making and subjectivity through the study of African urbanisms and popular culture. In her study of African urbanisms, she is primarily intrigued by how local engagements with the Africa Rising rhetoric and global aspects of the political economy work together to (re)produce spatial and social inequalities and provoke resistance in African cities. Her research focus on popular culture explores the issues of subjectivity and belonging and the use of Afrofuturism and Afropolitan Imagineering in geographic projects that address the colonial politics of difference. Her other research interests include new cities in sub-Saharan Africa, critical race theory, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, postcolonial urbanisms, global political economy of development, gender and urban development planning, social justice and the city, African postcolonial literature, sexuality and urban space in Africa, and gender, development and NGOs.

Abstract
Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world-class cities. But in the past eight years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world-class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio-temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place-making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. In this presentation, I compare the effects of owambe urbanism on low-income adult women and youth. Concerning the low-income women, I argue that they challenge the promise of happiness because they are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance. Concerning the youth, I argue that owambe urbanism presents new opportunities in terms of work and leisure. I examine the types of subjectivities that are being produced and performed as a result of these new opportunities and the types of investments and sacrifices being made to secure a happier future.

See Poster