Children's magical operations of play: Re-articulating Black life and space in Accra, Ghana
Topics: Black Geographies
, Africa
, Feminist Geographies
Keywords: global Black geographies, Accra, children's geographies, magic, play
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 43
Authors:
Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye, University of Sheffield
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Abstract
In this paper, I trace children’s embodied experiences of community space in the densely populated and structurally under-resourced neighborhood of Nima in Accra, Ghana. I draw on a collaboratively shaped conceptual framework, produced with my research partner Spread-Out Initiative NGO, to position Nima within the interconnected projects of slavery and colonialism (Holsey 2008, Pierre 2012, Pierre 2020), which discipline humanity - including Nima residents - into fully human, less-than-human, and nonhuman (Wynter 2003) in ways that shape Nima’s under-resourced conditions. Through multiple modes of expression, the children articulate how waste, harm, violence, displacement, and everyday accidents circulate through community space. Alongside these circulations, they find means to inhabit seemingly uninhabitable community spaces (McKittrick 2013, Simone 2019) by deploying a vast field of operations, particularly play. Through their own embodied and caring practices of play, I demonstrate, these children produce Black life, and I center the mundane, attentive, and relational modes through which they collectively gather to dance, play football, and hang out. I frame these embodied spatial practices as “magic,” a concept offered by Spread-Out Initiative team member and Nima resident Mallam Mutawakil to describe the everyday human mental creativity and embodied action deployed by Nima residents to survive, act otherwise, and more fully live in impossible environments. I argue that these children’s inventive practices of play re-articulate everyday space, that through playful spatial practices and speculative stories, they plot “alternative modes of life alongside the violence, subjections, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 1-2).
Children's magical operations of play: Re-articulating Black life and space in Accra, Ghana
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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