Department of African American and African Studies
Spring 2019 Brown Bag Series
Wednesday April 17th 12-1:30 Hart Hall 2215
A Place Called Home:
A conversation about place making,
Nairobi-New York
with
Orly Clergé and Bettina Ng’weno
This talk is an exploratory conversation about neighborhood place-making in two similar
yet distinct cities – Nairobi and New York. In cities historically designed to exclude
residents of African descent, how contemporary Black residents are negotiating the ongoing
problems of colonialism, postcolonialism, economic inequality, and racial
segregation is a pressing social issue. The presenters will survey how Nairobi and New
York mirror one another through a global comparative frame. In conversation with one
another’s work, Ng’weno and Clergé will explore the following: How do Black residents
in Nairobi and New York understand displacement, dispossession, and dehistoricization
in light of neoliberal capitalism? What meanings do they attach to urban processes of
capital accumulation, appreciation, in migration, property speculation, criminalization,
and privatization? What cultural identities are produced as they interact with new
migrants to the city and its suburbs? What is their sense of home, place, and power in a
racialized economy?
Orly Clergé is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC-Davis. Her research focuses
on issues of race, migration, cities, inequality, and identity. Her forthcoming book, New Noir: Race, Identity
& Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press) is an ethnographic exploration of the
cultural politics of nation, racial consciousness and mobility among the Black Middle Class in the suburbs
of New York. Orly received her Ph.D. from Brown University in Sociology and Social Demography. She
is a Fellow at the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University and the Co-Chair of the Society for the
Study of Social Problems (SSSP) Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (DREM).
Bettina Ng’weno is from Nairobi, Kenya. Trained as an anthropologist she works on issues of space,
property, social justice, citizenship, cities, states, race and ethnicity within Latin America, Africa and the
Indian Ocean region. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a Masters
degree also in anthropology from Stanford University and has a bachelors degree in Agricultural Science
and management from the University of California, Davis. She is an associate professor in African
American and African Studies and the co-director of the Mellon Research Initiative Reimagining Indian
Ocean Worlds at the University of California, Davis.