Representing Postcolonial Urban Change R

JUCS 10 (1) pp.
75–93 Intellect Limited 2023
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies

Volume 10 Number 1
© 2023 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00065_1
Received 17 September 2022; Accepted 9 January 2023
RITUPARNA MITRA
Emerson College
Representing postcolonial
urban change: Recursive
infrastructures and forms of
liveability in Tram 83
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the postcolonial urbanisms
enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic literary cities
of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant sonic citizenship
labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of affect
gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and futurity
ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep memory
in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of
nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself,
available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure.
Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive
spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes
the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban
informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.
Delivered by Intellect to:

Rituparna Mitra (33333279)
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Rituparna Mitra
1. This phrase ‘strange There where the river runs not

continuations’ is
Ann Stoler’s (2016)
they have learned to dig
and she uses it to they dig nights
nuance readings of they dig days
Foucauldian historicity
as neither rupture they bury
nor continuity, but they bury
a reanimating and they bury
uneven presence of the
old in the new. they bury
they bury
they bury
they bury
they bury
they bury
their ritual marked
by red wine
and dance steps
in honor
of a claustrophilic god
who throws them crumbs
from the ramparts of his capital
ordering them
to start their labors
anew
to multiply the holes
to bury
again, again, again…
(Mujila 2021: 114)
If the first post of colonialism was an outpost, its last post and most
important final legacy was – and remains – the city.
(De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 47)
INTRODUCTION
This article is concerned with forms of the postcolonial urban that are ‘strange
continuations’ (Stoler 2016: 28) of colonial forms, with specific attention to
zones of extraction.1 I will examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s
novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes the city of Lubumbashi in the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), built and developed around exploitative mining
and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban
change that cannot be subsumed under the category of gentrification. The
forms of urban change captured by the novel may be best framed through
what Ann Laura Stoler terms ‘recursive histories’ that ‘in refolding, reveal
new surfaces and new planes’ opening also to ‘novel contingent possibili-
ties’ (2016: 26). Adapting this framework of reading history to postcolonial
urbanisms allows us to be attentive to the ways in which colonial spatial,
temporal and affective organizations persist, albeit to return to Stoler, with
‘partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations’
(2016: 27). My reading of Tram 83 particularly addresses forms of liveabil-
ity that coalesce in extractive urban frontiers allowing us to study informal
urbanisms in the light of these dissonant, interrupted and patchy changes
that are a ubiquitous feature of postcolonial cities. Diverging from the often

76 Journal of Urban Cultural Studies
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Representing postcolonial urban change
fixed and linear temporalities inherent in models of gentrification, Tram 83’s

recursive and prior spaces are a constitutive aspect of an urban informality
that at once exceeds and clarifies the infrastructural remains of the colonial
extractive city. As the editors of this Special Issue argue, literary and cultural
studies offer toolkits to ‘describe cities as places composed of built and natu-
ral environments, but also of flows of people and capital, and of competing
ideas of what the city is’ (Henryson and Knittle 2023: 17). I take up their call
in my article to steer critical conversations away from using the category of
gentrification ‘as though it were synonymous with all forms of inequitable
urban change under neoliberalism’ (Henryson and Knittle 2023: 17) by look-
ing closely at the affective and embodied lives that comprise the mining city
as well as the literary form, sonic, repetitive and haptic, that Mujila mobi-
lizes to represent it. By engaging with expansive temporalities, affective and
embodied relationships with recursive infrastructures, and sonic citizenships
in postcolonial urban worlds, the novel offers a reflection on urban change
in geographies undergoing cyclical extraction.
Multiple scholars, D. Asher Ghertner among them, have questioned the
applicability of the term gentrification to displacement in the Global South
caused by measures such as slum demolition, land privatization, periurban
enclosures, colonial land tenure histories, etc., also drawing attention to
how the forms of political opposition they galvanize are distinctly differ-
ent from traditional anti-gentrification struggles (Ghertner 2014: 1556).
Ghertner, in particular, gestures to the specific imbrication of colonial and
neo-liberal state violence driving displacement in cities of the south that
needs closer attention. Arguing against the imposition of ‘readymade’
interpretive frameworks on dissonant, constantly switching, pulsating and
reshaping cityscapes, AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse also argue
for a more precise and granular examination of southern urbanisms along-
side quantitative sociological data sets that consider larger scales, relation-
alities and patterns (2017: xii–xiii). My article draws on studies of affect,
body and environment to pivot towards the lived realm of the postcolonial
city and understand displacement and transformation on these terms. In
that respect, Filip De Boeck’s exhaustive ethnography of Kinshasa provides
an important guide on bringing the affective and haptic into focus in
terms of how people actively imagine and construct urban lives for them-
selves (De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 58). De Boeck has identified the libulu
(‘hole’) in Lingala, rather than built structures, as an organizing principle
of Kinois life (2016: 13). This could range from the ubiquitous mining-
related livelihoods, to truncated infrastructure, to potholes that crater the
city roads. In his analysis of these sites in Kinshasa that he calls lacks or
holes, De Boeck finds suture points – material, mental, moral practices to
fill the gap – that open up new spatio-temporal beginnings and there-
fore new forms of interactivity (2016: 16). As my argument unfolds, I will
provide a framework, adapting Stoler’s, De Boeck’s and Simone’s granu-
lar methodologies to answer the following questions: how do we explore
forms of liveability that are organized and distributed in relationality with
recursive, interrupted and patchy (post)colonial infrastructures that encode
urban change beyond gentrification? In what ways does Tram 83 aestheti-
cally intervene into and mediate the affective and expressive city undergo-
ing dissonant transformations? How do we understand the new cultural,
political and emotional investments of displaced urban collectives formed
within what Stoler (2016) calls ‘imperial durabilities’?

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Rituparna Mitra
Tram 83 is Mujila’s debut novel published in French in 2014 and adroitly

translated into English by Roland Glasser in 2015. It has won several
awards including the Etisalat Prize for Debut African Fiction and acclaimed
for its linguistic inventiveness and ‘its reflection of African politics today’
(Quayson 2022: n.pag.). The novel follows writer and historian Lucien who
comes to the unnamed ‘City-State’ like multiple others, fleeing from politi-
cal violence in the Back-Country. He is to temporarily live with Requiem,
a hard-nosed shady dealer in the City-State’s informal economy, who once
was his friend and is possibly his half-brother. Lucien is interminably writ-
ing a ‘stage-play’ on Congo’s anti-colonial history to sell to a western-
located audience through his agent and relative, a sans-papier migrant in
Paris. The events of the novel revolve around Lucien’s encounters with
the heaving life of the City-State and its inhabitants, and his struggle to
understand the City-State’s modes of expressiveness. Although this ‘City-
State’ remains unnamed, there are indications it is a fictional composite of
mining cities like Lubumbashi, Kolwezi and Mbuji-Mayi, which after the
liberalization of mining in 2002 have seen intensified extractions (Monaville
2015: n.pag.). The novel references the secession of the City-State from the
Back-Country cursed with no minerals and cut through by the Congo River.
The events of the novel can thus be surmised to cover the early years in
which Katanga province seceded from the DRC and established its dissi-
dent government, funded and spurred by its rich natural resources in the
form of diamonds, copper, coltan, heterogenite (a raw material combin-
ing copper and cobalt), and other conflict minerals, with Lubumbashi as
its capital. The secession lasted from 2011 to 2016. The collective life of
the City-State plays out under the nervous, restless, precarious time of the
secession and its emergency. Mujila pays attention to the spatial, temporal
and sensorial relationships through which life in the City-State is repro-
duced and distributed.
LINGERING INFRASTRUCTURES AND THEIR AFFECTIVE PULL

Tram 83 delves into the City-State’s spatial organization in some detail to
draw out the durabilities of colonial infrastructure, what Stoler refers to as
the debris ‘people are left with’ and their ‘vital reconfigurations’ (2016: 348,
original emphasis). There is the Northern Station, artillery-gutted, that calls
to mind Stanley’s railways, but remains unfinished like many infrastructures
of the urban south. The railway cuts the only university, a hotbed of student
unrest, into two. There is the Hope Mine, the oldest mine in the city, with
warehouses, prefabricated sheds, old locomotives, boxcars and jalopies left
over since the decline of industrial mining in 1990s; its subterranean galler-
ies continue to yield multiple types of valuable minerals. North-west of it
lies the Polygon with its red laterite soil and craters and stones rich in iron,
cobalt, zinc, gold, etc. The residential neighbourhoods mirror the segregatory
urban planning of multiple colonial cities, remade in new configurations: we
have Vampiretown, originally built for the drivers, valets and servants of the
colonial government which is now a bourgeois neighbourhood with wide
boulevards lined with flame trees, pines and frangipani (Mujila 2015: 21). This
lies between the original and oldest white neighbourhood Saint Athanasius,
where the dissident General and the richest for-profit-tourists live, and the
Red Zone, a large-scale shanty town or ‘urban garbage dump’ (2015: 93).
Then there is the restaurant-cum-bar-cum-nightclub Tram 83 – all the major

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arteries lead to it – which appears to be a central urban hub. It, too, has a
history of infrastructural repurposing with succeeding political dispositions,
having been different versions of itself previously as Savor nan de Brazza, then
San Salvador, then Pool Malebo, then Santa Rosa, then Zanzibar. The novel’s
actions mostly take place inside it, but move in and out of all these networked
places in the city. In this organization, we can see not only how the urban
infrastructures hierarchize liveability recursively, but also how Tram 83 recur-
sively forms a node where relationships, associations and actions consolidate.
Of particular import is the city’s adoption of colonial segregation patterns with
the urban core never having experienced disinvestment but, on the contrary,
having been remade by repetitive power formations – a process distinct from
traditional gentrification templates. What also emerges in these descriptions is
the intersection of colonial and neo-liberal infrastructures and the dissonant
means through which they are negotiated.
According to AbdouMaliq Simone, infrastructure is what is in between;
it is what holds an urban collective together. In his words, ‘[i]nfrastructure
exerts a force; not simply in the materials and energies it avails but also in
the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capac-
ity’ (Simone 2012: n.pag.). The City-State seems arranged to coalesce, maxi-
mize and expend the capacity for extraction. The suburbs and peripheries
bordering Polygon and Vampiretown continue to be dug up for minerals by
the ordinary citizens. The surface the city-state’s infrastructure stands on is
hollowing out continually. Even centrally located colonial buildings occupied
by the current administration are taken apart in search of mineral wealth.
The City-State whose genesis and outgrowth were founded on its subter-
ranean value thus moves towards its own gradual entombment. However,
this subsidence is also shown to site the emergence of new urban forms
and socialities as we will see further into my argument. Central to this is
the nightclub where the leisure-worlds created through colonial networks
of mining, drinking, sex trade, and music flourish but, marked by a surplus
force, they are also recomposed and reinvented. Tram 83, a reflection or echo
of the railways so central to the City-State’s founding, is a node where urban
conjunctions thicken and intensify. Since the City-State has enacted emer-
gency laws that do not allow large assemblies, the nightclub is also one of
the only places where the urban residents from all walks of life congregate.
Here, important news is circulated and deals are made. As the novel unfolds,
how Tram 83 attracts people, draws them in, and coalesces and expends
their capacity becomes the central focus.
Apart from its spatial arrangements, Tram 83 also highlights the rhyth-
mic and verbal architectures that play a central role in the organization of
the City-State. This is mirrored in the astounding lyricism and frenetic, often
repetitive textual structure that borrows from the polyphonic rhythms of jazz,
rumba and other forms of urban Congolese music, trains, the onrush of the
river Congo as it ‘offs itself’ in the Atlantic Ocean, and the heady proximi-
ties and conjunctions of life in cities like Kin-la Jungle (an ironic take on the
city’s moniker Kin-the-Beautiful), Johannesburg, Lagos, Jakarta. Mujila has
spoken of these influences and also of his vision of the novel as a verbal musi-
cal score. In his readings, he is often accompanied by jazz musicians (Samatar
2015: n.pag.). The narrative brings together these pulsating urban rhythms
as well as the dissonant, patchy and recursive relationalities engineered by
the urban Anthropocene. Mujila speaks of the need to assemble a language
‘that was dislocated, abrupt, slithery, in order to describe these freight trains

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Rituparna Mitra
2. Historically this and the reality of the uncontrolled exploitation of minerals’ (Samatar 2015:
is a reference to
the building of a
n.pag.). This is seen, for instance, in the incantatory sentence forming the
copper foundry epigraph heading Chapter 1 and summons up a world in which mineral,
and the founding railroad, flesh and city are fused. Notice the verbal and rhythmic patterns as
of Elizabethville/
Lubumbashi near it. In through incremental repetition and musical variation of sounds, words, pacing
1910, two years after and energy, the sentence performatively captures the rhythms of this mining
the Belgian state took boom-driven world.
control of the Congo
as a colony, the railway
from Southern Africa In the beginning was the stone, and the stone prompted owner-
arrived in Elizabethville
facilitating the
ship, and ownership a rush, and the rush brought an influx of men
movement of copper of diverse appearance who built railroads through the rock, forged
ore out of the Congo. In a life of palm wine, and devised a system, a mixture of mining and
order to obtain cheap
labour, Europeans trading.
imposed a head (Mujila 2015: 1)2
tax policy that was
administered by local
chiefs and village This world is immediately again invoked, albeit with more detail in the lines
headmen, resulting quoted below that occur almost immediately at the beginning of the novel
in a forceful push of
Africans away from the
and also close it.
countryside and into
urban centres (Makori The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an
2017: 784).
unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and loco-
3. See Quayson (2022), motives, that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava
Deckard (2019) and
Fyfe (2021).
fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches,
bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nation-
alities combined.
(Mujila 2015: 1)
In fact, there are riffs on the Northern Station’s incomplete, patchy persis-
tence repeated at various moments in the text which function as a reprise.
Together, they accumulate and sediment a sense of how vital imperial dura-
bilities remain in terms of the structuring of new urban worlds.
Tram 83 is marked by forward-rushing lists that not only provide it with
narrative impetus but also shape these urban worlds. As commentators have
observed, these enumerations and lists assemble components that otherwise
seem disparate.3 In both the examples I have given above, we see that gath-
ering impulse in motion. Alexander Fyfe, for instance, reads in them a level-
ling of the human body to the same conceptual plane as inanimate objects,
thus ‘preventing the emergence of traditional political subjects’ (2021: 7).
I would like to focus on the assemblages evoked in these lists where we find
the human body becoming-with the material and infrastructural aspects of the
city. In the above examples, there is a particularly insistent drawing of our
attention towards patterns of relationality between mineral (stone), time
(beginning, rush and unfinishedness), urban infrastructures and appetite-
ridden bodies that compose liveability – note that the urban sites listed all
accommodate exuberantly fleshly and vocalic bodies. It is this assemblage
or relations of patterns that I want to trace and examine further through
my affective readings of the novel. These assemblages are akin to Simone’s
framework for how urban conjunctions, i.e. ‘accelerated, extended, and inten-
sified intersections of bodies, landscapes, objects, and technologies’, become
an ‘infrastructure – a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city’
(2004: 408). Simone’s rich framework is important in understanding the
flows, trajectories and connections that are mobilized tacitly in the face of

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urban uncertainty. My affective understanding of the assemblage of human 4. Jasbir Puar draws
attention to this
and more-than-human, in the example above is also close to Rosi Braidotti’s in ‘“I would rather
‘post-human’ subjectivity, in turn influenced by Deleuze and Guattari as be a cyborg than a
well as eco-feminist philosopher Donna Haraway. Braidotti’s concept of the goddess”: Becoming-
intersectional in
post-human invokes a dynamic amalgam of human and non-human others assemblage theory’
(animal, mechanic, technical) that destabilizes the unitary subject, one that (2012).
Fyfe perhaps refers to as ‘traditional’. For Braidotti, the post-human is a vital,
material and unsentimental response to the toxic and destructive forms of
contemporary life under advanced capitalism that insist on commodify-
ing life across species and matter (Braidotti 2013: 49–50). Elizabeth Povinelli
points out similarly that capitalism sees all things as having vitality, nothing
is inherently inert (2016: 20). What remains urgent for critical theory is to
view this object-assemblage world from the unequal forces organizing it and
their demands that certain formations remain as the condition for the object’s
endurance (Povinelli 2016: 91). Tram 83’s mineral-flesh-infrastructure assem-
blage world is an experimentation with forms of multiplied subjectivity as it is
a laying out of the effects of unequal forces and relationships within the City-
State (to revert back to the original French agencement or lay out in Deleuze).4
Drawing on Simone, Braidotti and Povinelli, my affective reading empha-
sizes the more-than-human as the ‘matter’ of politics, as a productive force
acting on other relational subjects. In Tram 83, we find the imprint of a
more-than-human politics that takes into account the force of the mineral,
the fleshly and the infrastructural in organizing material urban worlds. The
urban sites (the railroad, trains, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons,
bordellos, Pentecostal churches and bakeries) resonate with a historically
situated extractivism largely dependent on migrant labour and dispossession;
they also amplify the connivance and calculation of the current inhabitants of
the city-state – men of all generations and nationalities – as colonial power
reworks and rearranges itself among the elites of the postcolony and their
global counterparts. Importantly, as the overwhelming incantatory experience
of Mujila’s language conveys, sound – in the example, discomfiting ‘noise’
– remains fundamental to a collective experience of the city and, as I will
argue, to asking what imperial durabilities remain and how they are lived
with (Stoler 2016: 348). I will return to Tram 83’s generation of an embodied
and sonic citizenship that is also a becoming-with the material city in the
final section of my article. The sonic and rhythmic form, in my argument, is
not only integral to the novel but also a pivotal contribution towards studying
urban change through its embodied and affective aspects. But first, I want to
examine Mujila’s rendering of the City-State’s particular relationship with the
multiple temporalities of its recursive, patchy infrastructures and the affective
urbanisms they enfold.
RECURSIVE URBAN TEMPORALITIES

Tram 83 has an obsessive preoccupation with time. As Ato Quayson has
observed, its most-repeated line is ‘[d]o you have the time’ and its varia-
tions (2022: n.pag.). Indeed, Tram 83’s opening sentences, ‘Northern Station.
Friday. Around seven or nine in the evening’ place the reader in clock time, if
unsurely, before the very next sentence underscores the fragmented, erratic
and inventive energies associated with time that I argue are a defining mark
of the novel’s postcolonial urban world: ‘Patience, friend, you know full well
our trains have lost all sense of time’ (Mujila 2015: 1). This stray disembodied

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Rituparna Mitra
5. See the introduction comment brings the interaction of time and infrastructures to the foreground,
to this issue. For
more on fixed vs.
how time is worked by interrupted and patchy infrastructures but also the
uneven temporalities temporalities created and sustained by infrastructures of the mining city and
of gentrification see their aftermaths.
Phillips et al. (2021:
66–82). Keeping temporalities of living in view, the novel charts the volatile
and frenzied existence of the miners, students, bus-girls, single-mamas and
baby-chicks, the ordinary citizenry of Lubumbashi. Most of them work from
dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn
cavort deep in the belly of the restaurant-bar-nightclub Tram 83, their high-
octane energy fuelled by alcohol, music, sex and dog kebabs. At the scale
of the body as at the scale of the city, there seems to be an acceleration
and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures,
and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila refers to how much of life
in the DRC is lived as though ‘the world was going to end in forty-eight
hours and we should therefore make the most of our remaining crumbs’
(Samatar 2015: n.pag.). Lucien records such observations on one of his
walks through Gravedigger Street where mineral merchandise was traded
for coffins, ‘here childhood is zero to two years old. Puberty three to seven
years. Adolescence, eight to twelve. At fifteen you already start scribbling
your will’ (Mujila 2015: 75). When speaking of the young girls making their
living through sex work, Lucien notes ‘[t]hese girls knew how to leapfrog
certain stages of their lives, or rather they consumed their adolescence to
the full. Requiem liked to go on about how they were the future of human-
ity’ (2015: 81). In both these examples, the present is contracted by means
of labour, sex, sleep, music and drink. Any future that is projected is at first
appearance, nothing more than a repetition of this present. The repetitive
structure of the narrative continually reinforces this, creating what may be
read at first as claustrophobic enclosures and blockages. The exuberance
and effusion that characterizes the novel at the sentence-level as well as
the life-worlds depicted is thus, never atemporal; that is, it is always under-
stood to be an accelerated burning up of energy in time and a burning up
of future time. In that respect, Mujila’s urban world resolutely rejects tele-
ological narratives of productivity. As my reading clarifies, fixed and eventful
displacement of the kind ascribed to traditional studies of gentrification fails
to make sense of such urbanisms.5
To return to Tram 83, this burning up and expenditure is of course deathly
and the life-worlds depicted here can be understood through Mbembe’s
reading of death-worlds in postcolonies where life is that of the living dead
(Mbembe and Corcoran 2019). Elizabeth Povinelli, on the other hand, focuses
more on the durationality rather than eventiveness of the violence which is
particularly useful for my argument. She argues that in racialized and ecologi-
cally abandoned zones, the predominant form of violence is not the killing
of life but the violence of enervation, a driving to exhaustion and somno-
lence fuelled by extractive capitalism (Povinelli 2011: 132). While the action
of the novel inside Tram 83 is focused on frenetic activity, we are notified of
several attacks of sleeping sickness that have afflicted its customers in the
past. Moreover, the narrative’s description of the three ‘tribes’ that frequented
Tram 83, affirms the cyclical nature of its life forms. We are told the civil serv-
ants live by day, live miserably, saddled with many months of non-payment.
The majority of the City-State’s inhabitants constituting the students, the
diggers, the baby-chicks, the for-profit-tourists, and the friends and collabo-
rators of the Dissidence, are on standby day and night and are referred to

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as sleep-walkers. Even the most predatory category, the single-mamas, the

human-organ dealers, the child-soldiers, the apostles, the night waitresses
and bus-girls, the musicians from former Zaire, the bandits and burglars sleep
during the day (Mujila 2015: 15).
In keeping with the repetitiveness, Lucien’s encounters with the City-
State reveal a ubiquitous disavowal of any expansiveness and depth of time,
emphasizing the inertness and inevitability of the past, and a proleptic amne-
sia that fails to project a futurity. This enclosure is related emphatically with its
extractive mining infrastructure as this refrain of Requiem’s intones: ‘Your fate
is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the
locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying’ (Mujila 2015: 37).
The anonymous choral voice of the City-State that appears several times in
the narrative takes up and reaffirms this credo: ‘The tragedy is already written.
We merely preface it. So let us preface it’ it avers (2015: 111). The tempo of a
repetitive life is enshrined in one of Requiem’s numbered rules that punctuate
the narrative: Rule 23 lays down that,
with sun, you reintegrate the cycle of the City-State, you fish, you dig,
you scavenge, you glean, you devise, you fuck, you sweat, you sell, you
trade, you peddle, you abuse, you corrupt, you drink, you shit in the
stairwell, you identify with the jazz, you taunt the white tourists.
(2015: 75)
The short staccato syllables of the verbs and their insistent, high-speed repeti-
tive energy here emphasize that life here is lived in short, unvaried acts all
inseparable from the infrastructures of mining, profiteering, sex trade, and
drinking that the city thrives on. This tempo of a repetitive, mechanical, obses-
sive life is found also in ‘Solitude 10’ from Mujila’s recent poetry collection
The River in My Belly which forms the epigraph to this article (Mujila 2021:
114–15). Tram 83, however, also uncovers temporalities within these extractive
spaces that allow openings into other forms of liveability. It does so by mobi-
lizing the possibilities and promise of these recursive infrastructural networks
and their affective force.
One of the strongest examples of this is found in the performative collab-
orations between Lucien and the singer of uncertain Asian origin, that the
customers of Tram 83 call the railroad Diva. One night at Tram 83, Lucien and
she perform his stage-play about a man and woman – both amnesiac – meet-
ing on a train and falling in love, to the background of pre-recorded railroad
sounds that is the Diva’s signature. As a prelude, the Diva performs her song
‘This Life is Longer than the Train to Nowhere’ over the crescendoing noise of
boxcars. Her ‘freight train voice’ with a ‘chorus of acoustic rails’‘soared, pirou-
etted, descended’ filling and stretching time, as it ‘ripped the vile stench of the
rails from the frozen-hearted’ (Mujila 2015: 179–80). In a sentence that spans
almost two pages and 49 lines, the space opened up by the time of the song is
described as one that allows for remembering those who had been engulfed
by the mines, taken in train derailments, died on dangerous routes across
the oceans to Europe, the ghosts of the urban collective, otherwise forgot-
ten. The for-profit-tourists and diggers reach a temporary alliance as, for what
is the only time in the narrative, the former ‘view their [extractionist] past’
(Mujila 2015: 180). The song’s force spurs memory and unburies forgetting
as the narrative incants ‘[i]n the beginning was a diva and her freight-train
voice’ (Mujila 2015: 180) allowing a return to the zero hour, a return which

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Rituparna Mitra
6. An effect of is simultaneously a reinvention with a critical difference. Instead of the act of

reminiscence in which
a past situation or
confronting the past being ‘a waste of energy’ (Mujila 2015: 32) and entry into
atmosphere is brought both Tram 83 and its city being inadvisable for historians and archaeologists
back to the listener’s (Mujila 2015: 9), this temporary reinscribing of time becomes a ritual of collec-
consciousness,
provoked by a tive remembering and Tram 83 its sole monument. This moment, once again,
particular signal makes evident the need for locating a city’s transformations more capaciously
or sonic context. and recursively.
Anamnesis, a semiotic
effect, is the often Lucien and the Diva then begin reading the text of the stage-play. Towards
involuntary revival the end as the man tries to fashion a language to talk about their previous life
of memory caused
by listening and the
and of their love, instead of speech, the Diva reels out a song described as long
evocative power of and mournful with mournful repeated exactly 80 times. Here as in the prel-
sounds (Augoyard and ude, the narrative emphasizes a prolonging of time: as seen in ‘they walked
Torgue 2014: 24).
the length of their thoughts’ (Mujila 2015: 180) or the 80 repetitions of mourn-
7. Baloji and Mujila are ful (Mujila 2015: 181). Reading both scenes, we can see a prolonging, expan-
cousins – see Monaville
(2015). siveness and depth emerge – where rust and steel become engines to shared
memories of forced displacement and labour, and railroad music evokes a
8. Filip De Boeck’s study temporality fused with the sensory smell of rust and blood – allowing not
of holes in Kinshasa
as new openings only the past to emerge in the neocolonial present, but also breaking open the
alludes to Mbembe and chokeholds on futurity. Achille Mbembe speaks of the intimate force of urban
Baloji (2016). Congolese music that allowed people to sing what could not be expressed
in any other form of speech. He writes that, ‘by the mid-1970s, music had
become a key means by which Congolese urban society reflected on itself, on
its own identity, and on the modes of representation’ (Mbembe 2005: 78). This
force explains why the Diva’s song is able to give speech to erasures and why
its prolonging of melancholy satiates ‘a desire for duration and sensation’ even
if it is temporary, ‘an illusion’ and ‘a dissimulation’ (Mbembe 2005: 90–91). That
this dissimulation of liveability is liveability is confirmed by Mbembe’s and, I
argue, Mujila’s representation of music ‘as an archive of Congolese urban life-
forms’ (Mbembe 2005: 91). If the Diva’s music and their collaborative theat-
rical performance borrowing on the sounds of the railroads is an archive of
liveability in Tram 83’s extractive frontiers, the affective temporalities evoked
by the smell and other sensory memories of the slow release of energy through
burning (or oxidation) of iron provides another slowing down of time. Thus,
the dissimulation of memory becomes memory in multiple ways in the scene
above at Tram 83. The lowering of momentum and the elongation of time
creates an opening for a future other than the same. The assemblage of time,
rust, dispossession and urban life evoked by the sonic experience of anam-
nesis here is firmly placed in relation to recursive colonial infrastructures that
continue to become after.6
I want to examine this assemblage further by returning to the Diva’s song
which I earlier read as inaugurating a zero hour that opens new worlds. I find
it productive to think with the concept of zero-world proposed by Mbembe to
refer to a similar site of recursive memory: Congolese-Belgian artist Sammy
Baloji’s collection of images of abandoned mining infrastructure in Katanga
province in his collection Memoire produced between 2004 and 2006.7
Thinking of the Diva’s song as a vocalic materialization of the zero-world,
an opening into a new origin site, helps us further analyse the affective and
memorial force exerted by colonial infrastructures.8 Born in Katanga province,
and growing up in Lubumbashi with its many layered histories of mining and
exploitation, many of them deliberately hidden in plain sight, drove Baloji to
explore the presence of the past through the remains of corroded and ageing
infrastructure.

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Figure 1: Sammy Baloji, Memoire 24, 2014. Photograph. Brussels: Africalia. Courtesy of S. Baloji.

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In Figure 1 above, the sprawling and decaying mining infrastructure

of Katanga is photographed, the red of the rust and the red of the laterite
soil bleeding into each other. In the same series, Baloji also creates photo-
montages by superimposing archival images of colonial-era labourers, forcibly
deported and made to work in the mostly copper mines onto the contem-
porary cratered and corroded mining landscape of Katanga (Figures 2–3). As
mentioned in my reading of Tram 83, the City-State is a thinly veiled fiction-
alization of Lubumbashi which was founded as Elizabethville in 1910 near a
copper foundry built by Belgian mining company Union Minière, about fifteen
years after Katanga province was annexed by King Leopold II by decree of
the Berlin Treaty. After independence, during the years of Mobuto Sese Seko’s
dictatorship (the Second Republic) from 1965 to 1990, the colonial mining
companies were nationalized as Gécamines and played a central role in the
social and economic lives of the region. The 1980s and 1990s saw a steep reve-
nue decline due to mismanagement and global price decreases which led to
the eventual collapse of the conglomerate, resulting in large-scale social and
economic devastation of the region. In 2002, the mining industry was liber-
alized on the insistence of the World Bank in return for debt management.
Simultaneously global prices increased, leading to a steady increase in foreign
investment. In his Work Notes about Kolwezi, a subsequent series of photo-
graphs on artisanal miners, Baloji writes about this liberalization as interna-
tional investors ‘swooped down’ on Katanga with a promise to rehabilitate the
fraying infrastructure in return for extraction rights (Baloji and Popovitch 2014:
155). Clearly, the latest generation of for-profit-tourists in Tram 83 refers to
them. Furthermore, artisanal or craft mining by the creuseurs which appeared
after the collapse of Gecamines, supported by the government, became a
central source of employment for many Congolese fleeing war. Thus, Baloji
like Mujila notes that resource extraction and forced migration are a recurrent
feature of life in the region. In common with Mujila, Baloji too stresses the
complexity of networks under globalized mining where ‘you don’t know who’s
exploiting who – it’s more complex than in the colonial period’ (2015: n.pag.).
Most importantly for my argument, Baloji too is concerned with a debilitating
amnesia that grips the region and an inability to envision alternate futurities.
He says his photographs ‘confront the past and the present where there are
links, but it’s like coming back to the same point, to the starting point, in a

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way’ (Baloji 2015: n.pag.). In their work, both Mujila and Baloji aesthetically
mobilize multiple temporalities of mining infrastructures to pierce through
memorial blockages and engender openings into otherwise curtailed futures.
As mentioned, the concept of zero-world has been formulated by Mbembe
in response to Memoire to describe infrastructural ruins from the past that are
at the same time origin-sites. The confrontation of man and material (here,
metal and mineral) is integral to these sites. While the zero-worlds of the
mining machinery draw on the deep time of the mineral and geological, they
are also marked by corrosion and decay. Mbembe posits that
the decaying of life and materials is not the same as death – it is a kind of
opening up to an extreme externality which we will call the zero world.
In this zero world, neither the material nor the life come to an absolute
end. They do not become nothing. They simply move on towards some-
thing else, and in every case the end is deferred.
(Baloji and Popovitch 2014: 77)
There are two aspects to this zero-world identified by Mbembe. One recog-
nizes that the worlds the machinery supported are no longer there, though
the towering external forms continue to exert a powerful force. The second is
that in these zero-worlds, time oscillates and the beginning, end and middle
are indeterminate; this, in my understanding allows beginnings to open up
unexpectedly. Thinking of the Diva’s song as a vocalic materialization of the
zero-world, an opening into a new origin site, helps us further analyse the
affective and memorial force exerted by colonial infrastructures. The perfor-
mance of Lucien’s stage tale is, thus, one key instance where, as in Baloji’s
images, ‘the past rises up to the surface of time’ (Baloji and Popovitch 2014:
77) interrupting the relentless and unvarying tempo of life and its collective
amnesia.
SONIC CITIZENSHIPS IN TRAM 83

The experience of anamnesis during Lucien and the railroad Diva’s perfor-
mance is an act of reconstitution where not just memory but those remem-
bering are reconstituted. We might think of this as an embodied and sonic
citizenship. Sharae Deckard has emphasized a foreclosure of political horizons
and the displacement of politics onto the aesthetics in Tram 83 (2019: 21). I
would like to widen the understanding of the political to include the aesthetic.
An understanding of Global South urbanisms has to consider that the ways in
which we go about imagining and making a common have a lot to do with the
aesthetic modes we create. The political is often encountered in spaces where
you would not expect them to be. Jacques Rancière’s idea of aesthetics as the
construction and reconstruction of our sensible world, and the political as
deeply invested in the distribution of the sensible, in disclosing ‘the existence
of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts
and positions within it’ (2013: 12), is useful in this context. In those terms, the
denizens of the City-State through their embodied and sonic participation are
interested in how ‘the sensible world can change and be changed’ (Brezavšček
and Perko 2017: 106). They, like Rancière’s stakeholders, strive to ‘invent for
themselves and for others a kind of new form of living in the world through
their mode of presence, their language, their bodies’ (Brezavšček and Perko
2017: 107). Embodied and sonic experiences form the crux of how people

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Rituparna Mitra
9. For a complex and navigate the urban environment of the City-State, how they create, dissent
nuanced reading of
this, see Fyfe (2021).
and collaborate with one another. In his interviews, Mujila emphasizes that he
carries Congo in his body and in the rhythms bodily, verbal, musical through
which he transmits his text. He says:
when a state ceases to exist, your body becomes your own state, the one
and only state you have. […]. When I give readings, I walk about, trying
to use my body as a country, my body as a memory, my body as a river.
(Samatar 2015: n.pag.)
What does it mean to carry the City-State in these terms and respond to it?
On the one hand, this is resonant of the idea of people as infrastructure as
developed by Simone which remains a crucial way to understand social and
political coalescence in cities like Lubumbashi. In contexts where infrastruc-
ture is curtailed and incomplete, bodies function as techniques of prolonging.
Simone recognizes that endurance or durance is key to a complex collective
and proposes that bodies ‘in their extension towards a liveliness of things in
general’ become ‘a transversal technology, as gesture, sex, gathering and circu-
lation operate as techniques of prolonging’ (2019: 19). ‘When bodies speak,
spit, stomp, fuck, gesture, lunge, or hover, they become technical forces’ that
amplify ‘the dispersal of intensities across various places’ (Simone 2019: 19).
De Boeck, too, points to the primacy of the body, primarily vocalic bodies, as a
site of invention within recursive colonial infrastructures. He urges,
Rooted and moored down by the body, words, in the form of speech,
song, and prayer are not only important tools of self-making, they also
create the city itself. Indeed, the urban form is often primarily an acous-
tic one, of verbal and musical architecture.
(De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 85–86)
Thus, the new forms of living and new arrangements of the sensory world,
i.e. forms of the urban political we encounter in the City-State, are inevitably
embodied and acoustic. This understanding of embodied political responses
to urban transformations is given further credence in the novel in the final
sections which I will now examine closely.
In the final sections of the novel, Requiem has published naked photos
of the dissident General and Lucien’s published stage tale has seen the dissi-
dent General meet his death by thrashing in the hands of Patrice Lumumba.
The words that conclude Lucien’s book, a doggerel, ‘an empty-body/a thingy-
body/ a trashy-body/a doggy-body/the headless-body’ of the General lying in
the sludge, decaying, are on everyone’s lips (Mujila 2015: 204). Its easy syllables,
comprehensive syntax and lilt draw it into ‘urban speak’ which in De Boeck’s
terms describes the wit, humour, verbal ingenuity with which urban residents
in cities such as Kinshasa over-use and mould language to make meaning of
the chaos of their daily existence (De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 88). Again, we see
how dissent is encoded into the aesthetic and circulated through embodied and
sonic means.9 In response, the General closes all mines and orders the demoli-
tion of Tram 83. This is unprecedented in the history of the City-State and leads
to an outpouring of anger. As the nightclub was as old as the city’s history, it
would be like ‘decapitating the memory of the City-State’ (Mujila 2015: 205). In
my reading we have seen one instance of how Tram 83 becomes a monument,
a powerful reminder and thus we can confirm that in the production of the city,

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of what is shared in common, Tram 83 has always been a hub. The narrative at 10. See also the 2020
Congolese anti-
this point confirms that in providing ‘leisure’, the nightclub has been, in fact, an government protests
embodiment ‘of national unity and cohesion, despite the deep-rooted subdivi- and nationwide strikes
sions’ (Mujila 2015: 205); the irony in keeping with the verbal swelling that is against President
Felix Tshisekedi and
characteristic of this urban world, accentuates how pivotal the cultural forms his appointment of
produced, consumed and circulated there have been to a sense of collective- a new judge of the
hood. It is, in fact, ‘the only thing that really belonged to them’ (Mujila 2015: Electoral Commission.
These labour protests
206). This brings me back to the question I had earlier asked: what does it mean and violent street
to carry a City-State (or a country) in your body? Does it not become an inher- demonstrations were
mainly centred in
ently radical political act when most avenues for political participation have Kinshasa and Katanga.
been violently closed off? In defiance of the General’s orders, the inhabitants
head for Tram 83: some use the melee to lure potential clients, some protest
the prohibition on excavating, others block the imminent destruction of the
nightclub, showing how recursive infrastructures continue to be open to multi-
ple political and emotional investments. In fact, for two months the whole of
the City-State eat, drink, piss, idle and shit at Tram 83 and its vicinity, putting
their bodies on the line, turning together into a political force, as they repel
the General’s attacks three times (Mujila 2015: 206). In defending ‘their Tram’
(Mujila 2015: 206), the Tram is confirmed as the people’s thing, the res publica
it has always been, and bodily actions are revealed in terms of their political
charge, which they have always carried. The reverberations of this transversal
force result in a 100 mercenaries breaking away and switching camps with arms
and ammunitions, creating further dissidence within the Dissidence. What is
especially potent is that even when the defection of his army forces the dissi-
dent General to lift his prohibition on the mines, the mines interest nobody for
two months, a long time in the life cycle of extraction, as the energies and atten-
tions of the City-State remain focused on their affair, the defense of Tram 83.
This radical act of ownership and attention invokes the histories of politi-
cal action in bars and ngandas of cities such as Kinshasa and Lubumbashi in
Central Africa. Multiple commentators including De Boeck have noted how a
novel form of urban space came into being with these ‘new iconic spaces of
leisure that did not exist prior to the birth of the city, but gradually emerged
with the new labour and leisure time regimes imposed by the colonial city’
(De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 86). New forms of associational life in the form of
mozikis and other voluntary associations emerged. De Boeck reminds us that
bars also fomented spaces where a first generation of nationalists invented its
own political voice. In fact, it is where Lumumba, who worked for a brewery at
the time and frequented Kinshasa’s bars to sell Polar beer, held its first politi-
cal rallies (De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 86). While the political actions of Tram
83 are truncated and disorganized, reading through the framework of recur-
sive infrastructures confirms the charge and potential carried in urban spaces
which in recent years have been mourned as apathetic. Mujila demonstrates
that there is always a surplus charge, if dormant, disorganized, ironic even,
where embodied and sonic citizenships unfold. Tram 83 ‘emulates the cultural
mapping’ and political energy Mujila and other observers note ‘returning’ to
Congo’s bars and nightclubs as in the recent mobilization in Kinshasa against
the extension of Joseph Kabila’s presidency beyond its constitutional end date
in January 2016 (Monaville 2015: n.pag.).10
The final lines of the novel which are also a variation and reinvention of
the beginning, underscore this mutating, chaotic and patchy urban collec-
tivehood produced and reproduced within recursive colonial infrastructures.
I read this collectivehood as a vital rearrangement that is at the core of an

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Rituparna Mitra
affective politics. Although Tram 83 has been saved for now, Lucien, Requiem
and Lucien’s publisher, the Swiss Malingeau, are forced to flee the City-State
for the Back-Country. They have an enormous ransom on their heads which
with their usual tactical manoeuvring the denizens of Tram 83 want to claim
as their Christmas benefit. This is in keeping with what many Congolese call
Article 15, an imaginary article of the Zairean Civil Code that says: Débrouillez-
vous! Or, ‘Shift for yourselves’ (De Boeck and Baloji 2016: 95). As the three
men flee in disguise, they pass by Tram 83. When they begin to cross the rails,
stepping from one to the next, the music from Tram 83 reaches them, a deli-
cious conversation between saxophone, drums and trumpet which echoes
through the metal station. I quote the closing lines below:
The saxophone rose, rose, rose, then faded into blissful silence. The drums
then filled the empty space before petering out. Sax and drums then
climbed together, before the drums broke off, giving free rein to the sax
[…] which passed away in turn […]. It was at this precise moment that
the trumpet made its entrance, covering a tune known throughout the
City-State. The saxophone then ascended from its ashes [...]. In two beats,
the drums joined this predator’s ball which echoed through the station
with its unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and
locomotives, that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava
fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches,
bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationali-
ties combined.
(Mujila 2015: 210)
The temporalities of jazz function here, as throughout the text, to produce

repetition as reinvention and renewal. The constant invention and anticipation
of the new keeps resonating, spiralling and rearranging. As crescendoing and
de-crescendoing sound creates and connects space, our attention is drawn to
a tension between the flight of the three men and the suspended moment
when they are held in the tempo-spatial folds of Tram 83 and the station with
what are sonic vibrations, breath, toxic particulate matter, volatile molecules of
rust (metal oxide) and so on.
Timothy Choy and Jerry Zee discuss suspension as a becoming open in
their careful ethnography of suspension as practice of living among turbu-
lence and volatility of enduring in a particulate fellowship with suspended
and suspensible others (2015: 212). This framework, once again, draws atten-
tion to the idea of prolonging, of durability. The sonic experiences described
and performed include echoes, resonances, reverberation, delays and rema-
nence. All of these experiences are contingent on returning sounds or sound
energies and on ‘the aftermath’ that involves a prolonging and propagation.
This aftermath, an after-becoming, is made possible and more durational due
to the shape, volume and material of the urbanscape with its intermediary
spaces such as the railway lines that direct sound in specific directions, to
the vibrating metal particles in the air that create resonance, to the reflective
metal structure of the station off which sound reverberates and gains in dura-
tion (Augoyard and Torgue 2014: 8, 99, 113). In the ghost or mnemic sounds
that remain in our ears past the closing of the narrative, we have yet another
focus on the after-becoming. Bodies, breathly, vocalic and fleshly, fuse with
the materiality of the locomotive city to prolong, endure and recompose, both
exceeding and clarifying its infrastructures. In helping us dwell with these

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workings and processes, Tram 83 carves an urban world from an amplified

perspective, one that allows its vital complexities to unfold alongside and from
– not to the exclusion of – its frenetic, repetitive, exhaustive life cycles.
CONCLUSION: RETHINKING URBAN CHANGE

The moments of assemblage, elongation, suspension and reverberation
within Tram 83 examined in this article help us negotiate the unequal forces
that arrange life in postcolonial urban worlds that are also extractive zones.
Alongside the enervation and exhaustion, they force us to reimagine living in
duration. Living with colonial durabilities, in their duration, while not evoking
the revolutionary charge of former anti-colonial movements, demands a poli-
tics nevertheless – of making habitable, making common and collaborating
towards that end. It is also a central hermeneutic to re-read the urban south
as a generative, productive, space, albeit a space where forms of urbanism and
collective living involve negotiating, rearranging and living with infrastruc-
tures built to allow certain forms of existence to the exclusion of others. Tram
83 highlights the collectivities that are sustained within these imperial dura-
bilities, and Mujila seems particularly invested in capturing the contours of an
embodied and sonic citizenship as a form that endures.
Ultimately, my reading of Tram 83 suggests a more attuned model of
representing urban change in Global South cities of extraction – one which
enfolds body/environment relationships, expansive engagements with
temporalities of change, development of collectivehood in tension with colo-
nial and neo-liberal infrastructure, and use of the haptic to signal a belong-
ing to place that exceeds these infrastructures. Until recently, cities in the
Global South have been examined mainly as models of crisis, dysfunction
and brokenness. The urgent work of repairing their imperfect conditions has,
in turn, been perceived solely in terms of rapid and uneven development in
official discourse or mourning the demise of organized revolutionary energies
in others. Thinking with recursive infrastructures not only allows a habitable
futurity to emerge, it helps us refocus on lived existence as durability, on this
‘activity of endurance’ (Povinelli 2016: 28) that is constantly rearranging and
recomposing. This, I argue, enables a turn away from repair to focus on preci-
sion and complexity as goals of representing urban change.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Davy Knittle and Hanna Henryson for their careful and
in-depth suggestions and comments that greatly helped me develop my argu-
ments. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their
valuable feedback. Various early versions of this article were presented at
conferences including the Modern Language Association, North-eastern MLA
and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and gained
from rich discussions with co-panellists and attendees.
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Times, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Stoler, A. (2016), Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Mitra, Rituparna (2023), ‘Representing postcolonial urban change: Recursive
infrastructures and forms of liveability in Tram 83’, Journal of Urban Cultural
Studies, Special Issue: ‘Representing Urban Change beyond Gentrification’,
10:1, pp. 75–93, https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00065_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Rituparna Mitra is assistant professor of interdisciplinary and postcolonial
studies in the Marlboro Institute at Emerson College. She is finishing her first
monograph Partition’s Enduring Traumascapes in Postcolonial South Asia (forth-
coming) which examines the trauma of displacement and conflict in conver-
sation with natural and built landscapes. She has current and forthcoming
chapters and articles in Postcolonial World, Narratives of Loss and Longing:
Literary Developments in Postcolonial South Asia, Postcolonial Studies, etc.
Contact: Walker 505, Marlboro Institute, Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street,
Boston, MA 02116, USA.
E-mail: rituparna_mitra@emerson.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7050-8481
Rituparna Mitra has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

IP: 202.142.67.11
On: Fri, 21 Jul 2023 04:49:57

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JUCS 10 (1) pp.

75–93 Intellect Limited 2023

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies

Delivered by Intellect to:

1. This phrase ‘strange There where the river runs not

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fixed and linear temporalities inherent in models of gentrification, Tram 83’s

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Tram 83 is Mujila’s debut novel published in French in 2014 and adroitly

LINGERING INFRASTRUCTURES AND THEIR AFFECTIVE PULL

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RECURSIVE URBAN TEMPORALITIES

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as sleep-walkers. Even the most predatory category, the single-mamas, the

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6. An effect of is simultaneously a reinvention with a critical difference. Instead of the act of

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In Figure 1 above, the sprawling and decaying mining infrastructure

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SONIC CITIZENSHIPS IN TRAM 83

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The temporalities of jazz function here, as throughout the text, to produce

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workings and processes, Tram 83 carves an urban world from an amplified

CONCLUSION: RETHINKING URBAN CHANGE

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Baloji, S. and Popovitch, M. (2014), Sammy Baloji: Memoire/Kolwezi, Brussels:

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