Aslam Fataar, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town

The urban text as ‘lived space’ Cape Town as spatial backdrop the African city as an ‘elusive metropolis An analytics of the wordliness of contemporary African life forms.

Analytical task Subject making and the reconfiguring urban text Making the mobile school going subject visible Subjectivity as embodied performance

Key argument There seems to be a widely unacknowledged formative relationship between different urban discourses: the planned and the providential, the informal routes of the urban poor and the formal accessibilities of the middle classes, the exclusions of the discourses of the urban underside and the predominance of middle-class ‘ways of knowing’. These operate in parallel. The extant formal discourses of the city are oblivious to the ontological presence of the black subaltern other, whose precarious subjections in the city remain an invisible presence or a visible absence.

Formal schooling in the city plays a largely reproductive role in circulating a parallel message: that is, urban discourses associated with formal schooling circulates an exclusive focus on the narrow epistemological or curriculum code on the one hand while simultaneously working to prevent the ontologies and knowledges of the city’s poor and black majority from entering the formal public domain.