This Open Book project is a space for experimental, peer-reviewed digital scholarship curated by Cultural Anthropology’s editorial collective under the directorship of AbdouMaliq Simone.

Capture, Connect, Shift is available to download in its entirety as a PDF, as well as individual PDFs for each essay.

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From Capture, Connect, Shift's introduction:

Essays in the Open Book

The eight original inquiries in this collection explore the relationship between modes of capture, connect, and shift in a wide variety of contexts. Cristina Cielo, Cristina Vera, and Vanessa Bone’s essay examines future-making projects and trickster pasts in Black coastal Ecuador under conditions of military surveillance and racialized violence; Aïcha Diallo explores creative practices of enacting refuge as method and collectivity in Dakar’s spiritual and cultural landscapes, as well as in sites of disposability. Some essays address issues related to (post)colonial urban registers: Irene Peano looks at the colonial specters of migrant encampments in Italy and how these spatial formations function as extensive spaces of resistance; Wangui Kimari focuses on postcolonial urban governance practices in Nairobi, employing the notion of enshacklement as a mode to maintain the unjust operations of the city; and a third, Danielle Beaujon’s essay explores how racial segregation under French colonial rule in the city of Algiers emerged not from one legal ruling or policy, but rather from a slow yet persistent project of erasure, racial violence, and expropriation, reducing the urban opportunities for Algerians in the city. Rupali Gupte’s essay is about inhabitation, analyzing how housing policies in Mumbai have brought to the fore the absurdity of demand-supply logics and how evasive domestic arrangements remind us to conceptually reframe the question of housing around questions of inhabitation and its spatial dimensions. Sabine Mohamed’s essay on blackness as affective infrastructures spotlights a T-shirt that demonstrates how urban residents in Addis Ababa inhabited and critiqued the foreclosure of their urban district with the resonances of displaced bodies and their futures. Jatin Dua, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, and Andrea Carnì’s essay is on toxic relations and the disavowal of toxic waste circulating from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

Navigating Capture/Connect/Shift

In envisioning this collection as an Open Book we want to make explicit the forms of hospitality that structure our relations of writing and reading. While each essay can—and should— be read as a stand-alone piece, the conceptual work on the thematic ideas of capture, connect, and shift exceeds the boundedness of each piece. Rather it emerged very much in the conversations that structured the collaborations as well as juxtapositions from reading pieces that are otherwise separated by geography and disciplinary boundaries. We encourage readers to think of capture/connect/shift as both keywords that organize these essays, but also as invitations to think between and across these pieces. We invite you to read and think across, for example Danielle Beaujon and Rupali Gupte’s essays and what thinking across time and imperial histories (French and British) can spark on homes and habitability? How might disposability (and resistance) emerge in Irene Peano’s essay on migrant encampments in contemporary Italy and in Aïcha Diallo’s essay navigating Dakar’s spiritual and cultural landscapes? How do histories of enslavement and (anti)colonialism frame urban governance practices in Nairobi and Addis Ababa as explored by Wangui Kimari and Sabine Mohamed? What is gained in thinking from the littoral in both coastal Somalia and Ecuador as in the pieces by Jatin Dua, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, and Andrea Carnì and Cristina Cielo, Cristina Vera, and Vanessa Bone? These juxtapositions are one possible itinerary, amidst multiple journeys, and we invite annotations, reflections, and comparisons to continue the conversations whose snapshots frame these pieces.