Faculty Book Talk: Samuel Shearer, Kigali
Samuel Shearer, assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies, will discuss his book Kigal: A New City for the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025) with Jessica Samuel, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African and African American Studies and Scott Ross, lecturer in sociocultural anthropology.
This event is free and open to all. Light refreshments will be served.
Registration requested.
Co-sponsored by the Department of African & African American Studies.
About Kigali: A New City for the End of the World
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired American and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The firms produced promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. However, to make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed and its residents converted to consumers of green housing and service delivery systems.
Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city’s popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism.
Description from the University of California Press. This title was published on their open access platform and the electronic edition is freely available online.
About Samuel Shearer
Samuel Shearer’s research and teaching places ethnography, African and African American Studies in conversation with urban studies to account for the future of urban life in Africa and the United States. Kigali: a New City For the End of the World is his first book. In the Department of African and African American Studies he teaches courses on urban theory, racial capitalism, and popular culture from a global, interdisciplinary, perspective.