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In Histories of Dirt Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance. Seeing Lagosians as sources of contagion and dirt, British colonizers used racist ideologies and discourses of dirt to justify racial segregation and public health policies. Newell also explores possibilities for non-Eurocentric methods for identifying African urbanites' own values and opinions by foregrounding the voices of contemporary Lagosians through interviews and focus groups in which their responses to public health issues reflect local aesthetic tastes and values. In excavating the shifting role of dirt in structuring social and political life in Lagos, Newell provides new understandings of colonial and postcolonial urban history in West Africa.
Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Author's Note ix
Preface. The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa (Dirtpol) Project xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
1. European Insanitary Nuisances 16
2. Malaria: Lines in the Dirt 32
3. African Newspapers, the "Great Unofficial Public," and Plague in Colonial Lagos 43
4. Screening Dirt: Public Health Movies in Colonial Nigeria and Rural Spectatorship in the 1930s and 1940s 58
5. Methods, Unsound Methods, No Methods at All? 79
6. Popular Perceptions of "Dirty" in Multicultural Lagos 90
7. Remembering Waste 115
8. City Sexualities: Negotiating Homophobia 142
Conclusion. Mediated Publics, Uncontrollable Audiences 158
Appendix. Words, Phrases, and Sayings Related to Dirt in Lagos 169
Notes 175
References 215
Index 241
