Bottleneck Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City / Caroline Melly.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Melly, Caroline, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social mobility--Senegal--Dakar.

Social mobility.

Dakar (Senegal)--Social conditions.

Dakar (Senegal).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (197 pages) : illustrations, maps

Place of Publication:

Chicago University of Chicago Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Bottleneck, anthropologist Caroline Melly uses the problem of traffic bottlenecks to launch a wide-ranging study of mobility in contemporary urban Senegal-a concept that she argues is central to both citizens' and the state's visions of a successful future. Melly opens with an account of the generation of urban men who came of age on the heels of the era of structural adjustment, a diverse cohort with great dreams of building, moving, and belonging, but frustratingly few opportunities to do so. From there, she moves to a close study of taxi drivers and state workers, and shows how bottlenecks-physical and institutional-affect both. The third section of the book covers a seemingly stalled state effort to solve housing problems by building large numbers of concrete houses, while the fourth takes up the thousands of migrants who attempt, sometimes with tragic results, to cross the Mediterranean on rickety boats in search of new opportunities. The resulting book offers a remarkable portrait of contemporary Senegal and a means of theorizing mobility and its impossibilities far beyond the African continent.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Embouteillage

ONE. Making Mobility Matter

TWO. Trafficking Visions

THREE. Inhabiting Inside-Out Houses

FOUR. The Adjusted State in the Meantime

FIVE. Telling Tales of Missing Men

CONCLUSION. Embouteillage and Its Limits

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226489063

022648906X

OCLC:

1005015492