also, y'all really should check out vada chennai
On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 5:05 PM David E. Ford Jr. via <ottoemezz= [email protected]> wrote: maryland, as it happens. wootton high school, class of '93. it's possible joe managed to scare up two ideal readers. my good friend and frequent traveling partner andy is acutely interested in built environments and the human stories that attend them (we both spend more hours than i care?to admit poring over google earth imagery). all the same, "imagining a readership that doesn't exist" might be a prerequisite for producing a written artifact of enduring interest, so i'd stick with the approach.
here is the idea behind my upcoming trip to tanzania, which i've managed to keep uncharacteristically brief:
there is a writing project that has been percolating for the last year or so. there's only so much to say about it now, but it will incorporate?some of the south india stuff as well as some of my other perennial concerns, but the important bit here has to do with the lesser flamingos that inhabit the soda lakes of the east african rift and breed on lake natron in northern tanzania. as i see it now, i'd like to spend a considerable period, perhaps as long as 12-18 months, observing these birds around the various lakes where they feed in northern tanzania and southern kenya. so the purpose of this trip, which will be december 30 (this is my departure date--i'll arrive in dar on january 1) - january 20, is to get to these places, see what they will be like on the ground and ultimately determine if and how i can pull off the more ambitious sojourn. because my time is limited this time around, i think managing to get to natron for a few days and perhaps also paying a visit to the ngorongoro crater (and the small soda lake magadi in its interior) is probably about as much as i can hope for. natron is absurdly remote and difficult to get to (even from the kilimanjaro airport near arusha) and it's apparently a miserably hot stinky soda ashy place, so i really think that just getting there is going to use up a lot of my time.?
much of this will be totally new for me but it's not all so grim. i had the good fortune some months ago of meeting a man named Theophyl, who is a cardiologist in Dar. As it happened, he was in Bethesda for six weeks for a conference at NIH and i happened to encounter him at a moment when he needed some assistance and i recognized this and provided that assistance and so when, a few months later, i broached the idea of visiting Tanzania, he was very gracious and extended an invitation and went so far as offering to set me up with Maasai guides (he is from a village at the base of Kilimanjaro). So Theophyl is something of an x-factor who might prove very helpful. but otherwise, as i'm sure you can surmise, there is so much i just don't know. it's fucking scary and i'm here for it.
so, yes, let us videoconference soon--perhaps sometime next week. i'm assuming that you are presently sheltering in vancouver, so, you know, in general,?weekdays in the evening (anytime after ~4pm edt, though preferably before 10pm edt) work well for me, or we can do it on a?weekend day pretty much any time. and don't worry, i'll record the conversation and put it up on youtube so the rest of y'all can continue to follow our riveting discussions.
hiho, df?
Where did you come from,?David E. Ford Jr?! I was able to write this book only by imagining a readership that doesn't actually exist (200 copies sold), and then Joe finds me you: an ideal reader. Thank you so much for your interest, your sharp attention, and your kind words. Let's get on the Zoom! Just gimme a time. (I've never read Collis, but I've now put that book in the Amazon queue. If you are interested in Portugal's history of nautical adventurism, I suggest .)
Also, Todd? Apologies for misspelling your name.?
On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 9:37 AM David E. Ford Jr. < ottoemezz@...> wrote: Hello, David Morton,
What can I say except that I'm sincerely grateful for your willingness to share some of your time to help me with my quixotic project. I will confess that I'd been trying to read your book so that I can appear well-informed in the event we exchanged communication, but i've known of your existence for less than a week, so i've only managed to read the introduction (is this the sort of thing that historians say to each other when they meet at conferences?). For the benefit of the rest of the readership and decidedly not in an attempt to ingratiate myself, I will say that there's more than a little to be excited about from the intro. the insights you begin to tease out about the manifold anxieties of land, tenancy and ~informality~ have a lot of relevance in post-colonial urban spaces around the world. one of my other pet interests is dravidian south india, mediated largely through tamil language movies and some contemporary tamil fiction. this might be an exaggeration but it seems like fully half of tamil movies that i've seen feature some element of this ancient anxiety, whether it's among the tamil community of contemporary kuala lumpur (e.g. Kabali), that of mumbai's Dharavi "slum" (Kaala) or?the hardscrabble dockside neighborhoods of north chennai (as in Vada Chennai?by the great Vetrimaaran). hell, much of the post-independence political struggle in the city of mumbai can be read through the anxieties of the communities that asserted competing claims on the city's increasingly rarefied spaces. I also really appreciate the note you make about the obsession with "informality" in describing some of these developing and post-colonial economies/societies and how the concept masks the often byzantine unwritten rules that underlie how things operate--this applies so deeply to the india that i've experienced.
Also extremely important, in my view, is this sentence:?
Those who would govern and those who would be governed also reached desperately for one another--usually without success.
This is so good because it acknowledges (something extremely rare) that a government that in hindsight is deemed to have been a failure, or worse (and this seems to be the consensus about the?Frelimo state), can also be acknowledged to have been comprised of people with legitimate aspirations of benefiting their societies. This sort of compassion seems pretty rare in?contemporary humanistic/social scientific scholarship and it's the sort of thing that is required at moments of grotesque social division.
Also, this one:
The Frelimo state was . . . an almost fictive entity needing people to fill it with content and meaning.
This is really evocative and I think I understand what you're getting at, but i'll give the discussion of your work a rest now aside from noting the allied scholarship you mention regarding these issues in South Africa, Dar and Zanzibar. But, in all seriousness, what is it with the peculiar darkness that seems to attend Portugal's post-colonial spaces?
I'm going to have to write again to give you an idea of what my pending travel to Tanzania is all about (hint, mainly birds, but humans and history and politics always play a role in the things that move me), but that promises to be a long email and i've got legislative histories to compile just now. I was going to say that I'd send this longer email directly but now that this whole group of men-of-a-certain-age has been party to the beginnings of this encounter, who am i to deny them the satisfaction of seeing it through?
more soon, david ford
p.s. speaking of portugal's history of nautical adventurism, any of y'all ever read The Land of the Great Image?by Maurice Collis?
Dear Dave Ford,
We have a lot to talk about. And we have plenty?of time to talk about it. Let's zoom sometime between now and...December?
Todd Rhodes: good detective work.
And a hat tip to Dan and Reechard.
I'd be honored to attend a bimonthly zoom chat of this particular gang.
D.?
On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 7:43 PM Joe Steinberger < joe@...> wrote: Dave Morton, meet Dave Ford.?
Dave Ford, meet Dave Morton.
Dave (Morton), you may be surprised to see that a fine group of people many of whom you don't know are discussing your professional work.?(
Todd Rhoads did some good googling on you.)? ? Well, we are.? Dave Ford will be going to Tanzania this December and he is curious to hear any knowledge of the region you may be able to share.??
I don't know if you have any spare time between now and December... and I don't know if you actually like to talk to people who are interested in your professional work about the?things you have been investigating, but if so, please reach out to Dave (Ford).? Perhaps we could even have you on as a guest lecturer on one of our bimonthly zoom chats.??
what?do you think?
joe
On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 4:25 PM Todd Rhoads < Todd@...> wrote: that topic is really interesting to me because the same as the favelas and other unplanned "Communidades" in Brazil - super dangerous of course?because squatting/built on unused hillsides usually,? and very vulnerable to rain/flooding/mudslides/landfill-slides; but they can be anywhere, right next to nice neighborhoods (where the wood-burning smoke pollutes everything) and with magnificent?views.
On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 4:21 PM Todd Rhoads < Todd@...> wrote: Joe's of course his friend i only met him a little bit but here's some info on him -??
and here's a podcast -?
?
?about his book???(Ohio University Press, 2019) describes the incremental process through which Maputo’s?suburbios?– popular neighborhoods outside the formally planned city – were built and occupied. Through key episode’s in Mozambique’s urban history – from colonial responses to migrant labor to independence-era responses to flooding, he interprets the routine forms of house construction as critical political acts through which ordinary residents of the city have inserted themselves into the city and concretized urban belonging. The materiality of different building materials are central this story. The risks and obstacles of constructing permanent, concrete, housing in the face of politically enforced urban impermanence an d ambiguous legal status kept the popular?suburbios?in suspension. David Morton talks to host Jacob Doherty about the ways that the built environment both reflects and shapes the changing aspirations and achievements of the city’s residents. Offering a critical contribution to the process of decolonization in African cities, Morton examines the racial and spatial effects of colonial Portugal’s officially race-blind ideology as well as the ambivalent anti-urban bias of the early FRELIMO regime.
On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 3:59 PM David E. Ford Jr. < ottoemezz@...> wrote: oh, joe steinberger, will you remind me the details of your friend who went rm (that's right, right?) and is now a mozambique specialist?
David Earl Ford Jr. :??
See you all who can come in 40 mins
If Eric is in we'll do 10:30 pm EST. If Eric is not in, we'll do earlier. Let me know!
Dan
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