On Black Mobilities

Authors: Asha Best*, Clark University
Topics: Urban Geography, Social Geography, Migration
Keywords: Mobilities, Informality, Black Urbanism
Session Type: Paper
Day: 4/10/2018
Start / End Time: 2:40 PM / 4:20 PM
Room: Napoleon D2, Sheraton 3rd Floor
Presentation File: No File Uploaded

This paper outlines a developing research project on migrant run spaza shops in port cities of South Africa, specifically spaza shops that operate out of shipping containers. I understand these container shops as unique sites through which to consider the linkages between global flows of people and capital (mobilities), black habitation and anti-black violence, practices of black place-making and place annihilation. In this paper I depart from a market approach to understanding informal urbanisms. Instead, I am interested in the spaza shop as a point of departure for a broader discussion about how the movement of black people and black life (in the present) illuminates linkages between the scales of the global and the urban.