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Urban archives and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project

2020; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/21681392.2020.1753547

2168-1392

Noëleen Murray, Jill Weintroub,

Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

This special issue of Critical African Studies has emerged through our involvement in the scholarly meeting Secret Affinities, a workshop in critical reading and an interrogation of the city in Africa via Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk.The collection of essays presented in this volume is one of the outcomes of the workshop, which took place in Johannesburg in 2017.As Walter Benjamin turned his attention to the Paris of the nineteenth century, and to the space of Naples in the 1920s, to begin gathering lingering traces that would contribute to his 'other' history, so we in Johannesburg look to architectures and heritage spaces in the city, and invoke creative modes of research and innovative and experimental forms of writing to construct alternative forms of archiving the urban and the social.