Gunvor Jónsson. Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market: An Anthropology of Endings. University College London Press, 2024. 258 pp. $40.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9781800086319.
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: In Urban Displacement, Gunvor Jónsson examines the social life of urban displacement in Dakar following the demolition of the Malian market at the city's railway terminus in 2009.Rather than treating eviction as a moment of closure, Jónsson advances what she terms an "anthropology of endings," an approach that focuses on what happens at the end of the demolition (11).The book argues that displacement does not dissolve markets, identities, or social ties; instead, it reshapes them, as traders reorganize economic and social life in ways still rooted in the destroyed market (3).The aim of the book is not to argue that "good things come out of destruction and displacement," but rather to examine "what displacement produces" in everyday life (11).She uses this framing to acknowledge real loss while still showing how social life continues after demolition, as traders struggle to rebuild their livelihoods and collective identities long after eviction.The book is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily in 2013 among Malian women traders displaced from the Terminus market.These ethnographic materials are complemented by historical sources, including colonial and postcolonial maps, policy documents, and secondary literature on the Dakar-Niger railway, migration, and trade.These sources were carefully used to explain how the traders understand loss, opportunity, and belonging after demolition, which helps situate the 2009 demolition within a longer history of displacement in the city.Jónsson makes a clear historiographical intervention by challenging the narrow focus of urban displacement scholarship, noting that the urban displacement literature has neglected commercial and workspace displacement of traders and small business owners (18).When displacement is discussed, it is most often framed through residential eviction in cities of the Global North.She redirects attention to traders in Dakar and demonstrates why marketplaces matter for understanding how displacement actually works.The book is organized chronologically, but with strong thematic chapters.Jónsson moves from the period before demolition, tracing the historical significance of the Dakar Terminus and its emergence as a place of Malian trade linked to the Dakar-Niger railway, to the moment of eviction, demolition, and its immediate consequences, examining eviction, uncertainty, and what she calls "evictability," which is the condition of living with the constant possibility of removal, and finally, to the long aftermath of displacement.This structure allows her to show how traders' experiences and strategies changed over time rather
Source: African Studies Review
Author: Chukwuzitere Nkemdirim
Institution: University of Mississippi
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7127325138
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