African Urbanisms and Their Hinterlands

Femi Eromosele is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, Netherlands. His research interests include African literature and the health humanities, African popular culture and African urbanities. He is the author of Mad Fictions: Psychiatry, Disability, and the Politics of Mental Distress in African Literature (2025).Rebecca Fasselt is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her research interests include intra-African migration and diasporic literatures, contemporary South African literature and women’s popular writing. She is co-editor of The Short Story in South Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives (2022) and one of the co-editors of The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (2025).Lwanga Songsore recently defended his PhD thesis, titled “Deconstructing the Genealogy of Sorghum beer (Pito) Production and use in Rural and Urban Contexts in Ghana,” for the award of a Doctoral Degree in African Studies at the University of Ghana. His research interests are in the material and consumer cultures of Black people, life writing, and Black cosmologies and cosmogonies. He has several publications in peer-reviewed journals.

• Introduction: African urbanisms and their hinterlands: contemporary cultural imaginaries of spatial connections 1. “Johnny Just Come”: Lagos and the newcomer figure in Nigerian screen media 2. Rural ritual, urban appropriation: night running as an examination of mobility in the city by night 3. Notions of self and community in Kampala urban space in Ugandan poetry anthologies 4. Harare muJoni: musicking, placemaking and everyday citizenship of Zimbabwean immigrants in Johannesburg, South Africa 5. Circular mobilities and health care seeking practices for perceived malaria illness among Nairobi residents in Kenya 6. Ambivalent identities in Kampala city: an interrogation of the “grasshopper delicacy” in Ugandan press photographs 7. “Yesu Adom (God’s grace)” chop bar: liminality and provisionality within Accra Airport City 8. Polyphony, instrumentality and the urban experience for migrants in Accra, Ghana 9. Understanding amapiano and the South African city through the music videos of Big Flexa and Bhebha 10. Reconfiguring Acholi cultural dance: a visual arts mediation of Bwola dance in a performative space of Kampala city