By Francis Nyamnjoh
(Copyedited & Copyrighted version published in Africa, Vol.75 (3) 2005, pp. 295-324)
Abstract
This discussion traces metaphors of consumerism, commoditized sex and sexified commodities that proliferate throughout urban Africa, signaling the intensified globalisation of images of desire and opportunity on the one hand, and chronic poverty and destitution on the other. Focusing on sexual economies in Dakar as a case in point, the paper attempts an analysis of how, in situations of increasing scarcity and transurban articulations, language, sex, possession, loss, self-construction, and self-corruption mutually shape each other. The paper seeks to represent the textures and intricacies that arise as the interdependencies among status, pleasure, appropriation, seduction, and livelihood are worked out.
It examines how these operations themselves elaborate a landscape of possibilities always on the verge of overflowing established sense and sentiments, yet somehow reined in, held, albeit in a highly tenuous relationship, to what is known and valued. The city makes itself urban, despite the nearly impossible economic and political conditions it faces, through a capacity to narrate these tales of fishing (as well as fishy stories), but also always trying to chase, to catch up with its capacity to proliferate words. Written against the background of the threat posed by HIV/AIDS in Africa, the paper also draws attention to the need for further scholarly research on the lethal cocktail of the twin globalisation of consumerism and poverty in marginal sites of accumulation pregnant with contradictions and uncertainties such as Africa.
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