Spatial Literacy

Contemporary Asante Women's Place-making

E. Amoo-Adare

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137281067
• eBook ISBN: 9781137281074
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Feminismo y teoría feminista

This book makes the case for an urgent praxis of critical spatial literacy for African women. It provides a critical analysis of how Asante women negotiate and understand the politics of contemporary space in Accra and beyond and the effect it has on their lives, demonstrating how they critically 'read that world.'

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL SPATIAL LITERACY IS URGENT POLITICAL PRAXIS

One thing established clearly in my mind, through intuition¹ and the theorizing practice of my everyday learning,² is that the power of spatial configurations and conceptualizations in our everyday social practices and ideological constructions of place and identity cannot be denied. Also when it comes to issues of power and socio-physical space, predominantly black women³ were—and still are—at the bottom of the barrel at which level classism, racism, sexism, and/or nationalism most violently intersect. This phenomenon is evident in various forms and degrees all over our (post)modern⁴ world, especially within the urban context; hence, you will find that black women are often in a majority at the bottom of the urban power hierarchy, in “Third World” cities such as Accra, as much as in Western cities like London. The unequal development of these urban spaces is clearly represented in the low spatial positioning of black women. The low spatial positioning of these women also has grave implications for their power struggles for place in the social construction of urban spatiality, their understanding of their resultant social practices, and most importantly their identity construction. And yet as Black⁵ women, we are not necessarily literate in the politics of space and how it affects our spatial configurations, social practices, and sense of place.

Furthermore, in everyday feminist struggles for social and political justice there is a growing awareness of the need for an explicit application of informed strategic spatial practice derived from an analysis of spatial configurations, concepts, and ideologies. For example, this shift in awareness can be observed in the politics of place that has been advanced by women using new information technologies for social struggles over health, environmental, and violence against women issues (Harcourt, 2001). Additionally, it is widely argued that space is important in the construction of the female subject and in gendered subjectivity and identity (Mohanram, 1999; Rendell, 1999). However, there has not been a natural and comfortable insertion of general concerns among women of African descent, living in the Diaspora and on the African continent, into these feminist considerations (Amadiume, 1995; Carby, 1999; Collins, 1990; Dolphyne, 1991; El Saadawi, 1997; hooks, 1989, 1984/2000; Hull, Scott & Smith, 1982; Lorde, 1984; Oyewumi, 1997, 1998, 2003, 2005; Steady, 1981/1994). Consequently, their concomitant spatial realizations and struggles have not been adequately mapped or interrogated.

Fortunately, oppositional responses such as African feminism (Aidoo, 1984; Mikell, 1995, 1997; Ogundipe-Leslie, 1997; Okeke, 1997; Steady, 1987; Sudarkasa, 1987) and womanism (E. Brown, 1989; Hudson-Weems, 1998; Ogunyemi, 1985; McCaskill & Phillips, 1996–1997; Phillips, 1994; A. Walker, 1983) provide ideologies for contemplating how feminism is enriched by women of African descent’s contestations, experiences, and voices. But they are yet to provide explicit strategies for developing informed spatial practices for Black women through Critical Spatial Literacy.⁶ As a consequence, there has not been explicit or extensive theorizing of how spatial configurations affect the daily lives of women of African descent or, in turn, how these women articulate their understandings of the spaces that they inhabit. There has, also, been very little empirical research on women of African descent’s spatial experiences (both on the African continent and in the Diaspora) in order to enrich and inform a feminist critical pedagogy of place that maps the spatial dimensions of our many and complex lived experiences.

So it follows that as a negotiating womanist-feminist, a Black woman, a trained architect,⁷ and an inhabitant of African, Western and other cities, I am particularly interested in how black women’s social and economic lives have been constituted, situated, and enacted in contemporary spatiality. Furthermore, I believe that black women are disproportionately represented worldwide in unsuitable and inadequate spatial allocations (e.g., urban slum settlements) and they are also disproportionately underrepresented in spatial development decision-making processes. In many instances, it is poor black women that are most subject to restrictive spatial allocation and movement within urban capitalist contexts. This is demonstrated by the fact that those who are often either homeless or living in inadequate housing—in both the economic “North” and “South”—are women, ethnic minorities and their children living in urban centers (Bauhmohl, 1996; Bergholz, 1993; Daly, 1996; Dhillon-Kashyap, 1994).

Beyond this, as a Black womanist-feminist architect who is intent on imagining and constructing radical counter-narratives within hegemonic spatial politics, Haque’s (1988) argument “that architecture is also informed by the politics of space,” has resonance and significance for me, as well as for the arguments made later in this book. For Haque, the architectural profession in Britain was made up of white, middle-class men who produced physical environments based on “their problematic definitions of women, Black people and the working classes,” and “their stereotypes of how Black and working class people live” (pp. 34–35). Haque’s analysis of the politics of architectural space in Britain in the late 80s is a key example of the importance of developing spatial awareness; that is, a critical literacy of space that reads the codes embedded in the built environment in order to understand how they affect people’s social lives, cultural practices, and sense of place (Amoo-Adare, 2006a, 2006b, 2011).⁸

Haque speaks specifically to the British context and to an issue that is far more complex and complicated than the black-white binary that she implies; however, her argument is still pertinent in the UK 20-plus years later, due to very little substantive change in the gender (and/or racial) composition of the British architectural profession (De Graft-Johnson, Manley & Greed, 2003; Fowler & Wilson, 2004; Mirza & Nacey, 2008). The nonrepresentative nature of the profession also extends to the European continent. This is except for in countries that are at least close to achieving, have achieved, or have exceeded gender parity; that is, countries such as Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, Sweden, and Turkey (Mirza & Nacey, 2008).⁹ Furthermore, Haque’s argument is relevant in many other parts of the world because the forces of globalization have created certain Western cultural flows, fragmentation, and pace that often challenge and even replace previous indigenous communities’ ways of doing and living spaces (Carter, Donald & Squires, 1993). For example, housing development in the “Third World” that results from rapid urbanization is often laden with Western, middle-class male conceptions of how people in a contemporary city must live in order to serve a capitalist economy. This occurs through the sometimes wholesale adoption of Western design, architectural practice, building technology, and concomitant economic, social, and ideological constructs.

We are in a time when there is a grave and growing need for Critical Spatial Literacy. Although, we as inhabitants of physical space and its associated ideological constructs (e.g., global community, nation, neighborhood, home, etc.) are most probably overwhelmed by the constant production and consumption of the built environment, we are not necessarily literate in the political language of space and how it affects power struggles, daily social practices, and identity construction. Developing a critical literacy of space is crucial because it is a critical awareness of the historical, geographical, economic, cultural, and political meanings that inform and are informed by the built environment and its social constructs (both physical and imaginary). For this reason, Critical Spatial Literacy as a theoretical framework provides the tools for a praxis of documenting and analyzing women of African descent’s contemporary spatial conditions and agency, just about anywhere in the world. It provides a transformative materialist interpretation of spatiality (a critical literacy of space over, through and in time),¹⁰ which recognizes the spatiotemporal nature of socioeconomic life and as a consequence reveals the possibilities for radical change in the politics of space.

Outline of the Book

It is with these founding assumptions that this book presents my intellectual journey—as an Asante woman—to better understand how matrilineal Asante women’s spatiality¹¹ is affected by migration to a city like Accra, which is constituted from Western colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal spatiality. More specifically, this book provides a critical analysis of how 15 Asante women negotiate and understand the politics of contemporary space in Accra (and beyond); plus how it affects their lives, thus, demonstrating how they “critically read that world” (Freire, 1983/1991, 1970/1996).

This endeavor starts in this chapter with the above discussion advocating for an urgent, political praxis of Critical Spatial Literacy, especially for women of African descent. This is followed, in chapter 2, by an explanation of how I, as the author, came to make this call for action; through a discussion of my positionality, insider-outsider Asante perspective, and exposure to certain Western referents, which were catalysts for the research work that informs this book and for the development of a Critical Spatial Literacy theoretical framework that steers the research-based truth claims made in chapters 4–7 of the book. Also discussed in this chapter are my renegade architectural stance and the purpose of using the research on Asante women’s spatiality to test the boundaries of architecture and being a Black female architect, as well as to investigate the role education could play in the politics of space by enabling Critical Spatial Literacy.

Chapter 3 presents the Critical Spatial Literacy theoretical framework utilized for documentation and initial analysis of the research data that informs this book. It also sets the geographical, political, and socioeconomic stage that requires the urgent praxis of Critical Spatial Literacy advocated in the introductory chapter. Here I utilize theories of spatiality to enable an understanding of the relationships among gendered spaces derived from Western capitalist spatiality and their concomitant construction of gendered social life. In addition, I highlight the immense challenges the current urban century brings, especially for African women, and discuss the problematic implications that Western capitalist spatiality has had for West African societies like the Asante, whose spatiality has changed as a consequence of encounters with colonization and contemporary transnational economic and cultural flows. In this chapter, I also provide an overview of the 15 Asante women who served as the sample for the study, thus, the subject matter of this book. Additionally, I present Chaos Theory as an organizing trope for thinking about the intricate interrelation of three themes, akwantu, anibuei ne sikasεm (travel, “civilization,” and economics), that constitute as the core of Asante women’s spatial literacy. The themes are subsequently discussed in chapters 4–6.

Chapters 4 through 6 provide descriptive analyses that reveal the character and form of Asante women’s literacy of contemporary space, which is about capitalist globalization in every sense of the word—before and particularly since colonial days—and the persistent movement of Asantes in the quest for money and eye-opening experiences that enlighten, “civilize,” and reconstitute the Asante self. In other words, life for them is about akwantu, anibuei ne sikasεm (travel, “civilization,” and economics); hence, it is the quintessential economic globalization story of political emergence out of dynamic social systems that are subject to the forces of time-space compression and all interrelated cultural change. The women’s narratives on travel, change, money, friendships, work, faith, awareness, education, family, and identity, vividly illustrate the spatial fluidity and interconnectivity of their lives, as well as the mechanisms they use to maintain a sense of a unified Asante-progress narrative and an assured but ever-changing identity. In conclusion, chapter 7 provides a descriptive analysis of how the Asante women’s literacy of space is filtered by an Asante-female spatiality that is about process versus a monolithic state of being, thus, about a fluid, constant becoming of Asante-female identity versus a rigid, fixed sense of personhood.

Bookmarking both ends of chapters 4, 5, and 6 are vignettes of 4 out of the 15 Asante women. Each vignette provides insight into the woman—often using her own words. This is an opportunity for the reader to take a cursory look at the places the woman has been to, the reasons for these migrations, and her attitudes toward travel. The vignette is also for the reader to observe the resultant transformation of each woman’s social networks, with particular regard to child rearing, the role that aguadi (trading) plays in her economic life, and the importance of enlightenment—in the shape of informal training and/or Western formal education—in the formation of the woman’s character and spiritual development. Each of these four women also provides her emphasis on contemporary spatiality: vignette 1, Auntie Pauline Sampene’s argumentation that Asantes are mobile by nature; vignette 2, Auntie Evelina Amoakohene’s descriptions of the changing significance of formal education for Asantes; vignette 3, Akosua Serwa Opoku-Bonsu’s insistence on the centrality of money, hard work, and financial prosperity to a young Asante woman’s life; and vignette 4, Nana Sarpoma’s prideful emphasis on the God-given nature of Asante Identity. Many of these four women’s experiences are shared by the other 11 Asante women; in terms of undertaking extensive travel and relocation, reasons for these migrations, and transformation in each woman’s social networks and identity construction.

The book concludes in chapter 8 with my argument that developing a Critical Spatial Literacy on contemporary Asante women’s spatiality is one key step toward making a role for education in the politics of space, thus, reappropriating architecture and redefining what it means to be an architect. I assert that such an endeavor is not in opposition to existing collaborative and transformatory feminist architectural practices, but is rather a complement to them in a bid to develop what Ahrentzen (1996) calls, “a new culture of architecture”; that is, one that imagines and constructs radical architectural counter-narratives in contemporary space; however, in this specific case for West African women. In doing this, I also argue that the research-based discussions in this book should inform transnational feminist practices that seek to comprehend and transform the politics of uneven development of space as it affects African women, which is very much my inten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.   Introduction: Critical Spatial Literacy is Urgent Political Praxis
• 2.   Feminist Positionality: Renegade Architecture in a Certain Ambiguity
• 3.   Politics of (Post)Modern Space: Asante Women’s Place in a Capitalist Spatiality
• Vignette 1 Auntie Pauline Sampene (Mobility)
• 4.   Akwantu: Travel and the Making of New Roads
• Vignette 2 Auntie Evelina Amoakohene (Education)
• 5.   Anibuei: Civilization and the Opening of Eyes
• Vignette 3 Akosua Serwa Opoku-Bonsu (Economics)
• 6.   Sikasεm: Money Matters and the Love of Gold
• Vignette 4 Nana Sarpoma (Asante Identity)
• 7.   Process Not State, Becoming Not Being
• 8.   Conclusion: Toward a Pedagogy of Critical Spatial Literacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index