Rhythm, Disruption, and the Experience of African Roads

Title data

Bize, Amiel:
Rhythm, Disruption, and the Experience of African Roads.
In: Mobility in History. Vol. 8 (2017) Issue 1 . - pp. 28-34.
ISSN 2050-9197
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/mih.2017.080104

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Abstract in another language

This review examines recent writing on roads in Africa that uses them as a lens through which to understand contemporary conditions of life, both phenomenologically and politically. A focus on experience is visible throughout this literature, threading through a diverse body of work in anthropology, geography, and mobility studies. From a range of different perspectives, these works propose that how road users experience roads—how they perceive them sensorially, affectively, and intellectually—is key to understanding why roads are important. Experience works here in multiple ways: it can be mobilized to describe a more general theory around how the perception of space, time, and the everyday is embodied, or it can be linked to what might be called the contemporary “condition” of African states.