Abstract

This article looks at the relatively recent tendency to aestheticize life in Nairobi’s working-class and informal neighbourhoods in different forms of art and media. It focuses on two case studies – Steve Bloom’s photobook, Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi (2009) and the first issue of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? (2003). These are compared to the collectively performed poem ‘Mistaken Identity’ (2019) by a group of poets from the neighbourhood of Kayole, to show that the street aesthetics in the two cases rest on distance, while the meaning-making in the poem rests on proximity. Distance in this context takes several forms, such as the gap between socio-economic classes and actual physical distance, but I register it on the level of epistemology. The poem also articulates a form of epistemological proximity between, first, the forms of meaning-making that can be seen in both the text and the visual and performative components of the video, and, second, the place that is portrayed. Rather than arguing that proximity is preferable to distance as a basis of meaning-making, this article attempts to theorize the emergence of a specific aesthetic. This aesthetic presents itself as an aesthetic because the particular forms of social stratification and concomitant social distance between communities and neighbourhood (which have emerged in Nairobi since 2000) allow an economic, political and cultural elite to re-discover the city, which they experience as simultaneously strange and familiar.

摘要

本文着眼于最近以不同形式的艺术和媒体将内罗毕工人阶级和非正式社区的生活美化的趋势。它侧重于两个案例研究——史蒂夫·布鲁姆的相册《交易场所：内罗毕商人》 (2009) 和肯尼亚文学杂志《Kwani?(2003)。将这些与Kayole社区的一群诗人集体表演的诗歌“错误的身份”（2019）进行比较，以表明两种情况下的街头美学基于距离，而诗歌中的意义建构基于接近。在这种情况下，距离有多种形式，例如社会经济阶层之间的差距和实际物理距离，但我将其登记在认识论层面。这首诗还阐明了一种认识论上的接近形式，首先是在文本和视频的视觉和表演成分中都可以看到的意义形成形式，其次是所描绘的地方。这篇文章不是争论接近比距离更可取作为意义创造的基础，而是试图对特定美学的出现进行理论化。作为一种审美，因为社会分层的特殊形式和社区与邻里之间伴随的社会距离（自 2000 年以来在内罗毕出现）允许经济、政治和文化精英重新发现他们既陌生又熟悉的城市.