On 28 and 29 October 2024, UCT’s School of Languages & Literatures is hosting an interdisciplinary conference around the theme “Imagining the Ordinary City”, to take place in the African Studies Gallery and Seminar Room in the Humanities Building.  The conference is part of a larger British Academy-funded research project, which involves scholars  from the Universities of Kent and Oxford in the UK,and it is supported by UCT’s Hosting a Conference Grant.

Keynotes:

Professor Jennifer Robinson (University College London)

Professor Thembinkosi Goniwe (Rhodes University)

Professor Lynda Gichanda Spencer (Rhodes University)

Details:

Though the city has long been associated with speed and spectacle, including its fast-flowing transport systems and towering buildings, it has also always harboured more mundane activity and sights such as the rehearsed small talk of (consequential) strangers and the habitual queues of daily commuters. These everyday practices (in Michel de Certeau’s terms) form ordinary spaces that are fundamental to the urban imaginary yet are rarely explored in artistic endeavours and, connectedly, rarely granted a cultural value that adequately conveys the social value they afford a city’s population.

In broader discourse on cities, when the notion of ‘ordinariness’ is accepted as an urban quality it often fuels a centre/periphery binary, with artistic and scholarly interest only occurring when it is located in the latter (the sustained representation of suburban ennui, for example). Resonating with Njabulo S. Ndebele’s work (1991), it is important that cities – where the spectacle of state trauma and violence is often most obvious – are understood in more complex terms, with everyday urban lives foregrounded. Additionally, there is a tendency within and beyond academia to hierarchise cities, with those in the Global North held up as the model to which all others are compared, despite Jennifer Robinson’s (2006) seminal work in calling for an alternative framework where all cities are considered ‘ordinary’ and worthy of examination.

In linking together different strands of understanding ordinariness then, this conference seeks to (re)establish the value of the ‘ordinary city’ as it is employed, constructed and imagined in a range of artworks including, but not limited to: literature, visual art, screen media, theatre and performance.

Enquiries can be sent to imaginingordinarycity@gmail.com.

Conference organisers:

Lavinia Brydon (University of Kent)

Bibi Burger (University of Cape Town)

Sanele Ntshingana (University of Cape Town)

Janina Schupp (University of Oxford)

Research Assistants:

Liam Creighton (Imperial College London/NYU London)

Elodi Troskie (University of Cape Town)

Scientific committee:

Markus Arnold (School of Languages and Literatures, University of Cape Town)

Emre Çağlayan (Department of Communication, Media and Culture, American University of Paris)

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram (Department of Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London)

Isolde de Villiers (Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape)

Louisa Uchum Egbunike (Department of English Studies, Durham University)

Sonja Loots (School of Languages and Literatures, University of Cape Town)

Rike Sitas (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town)

Dylan Valley (Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town)