Global retail capital and urban futures: Feminist postcolonial perspectives

Critical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital (GRC). This essay engages feminist postcolonial approaches, grounded in African continental feminist work, to theorize from the urban transformations, displacements, and resistances driven by GRC and emerging in urban East Africa. This framework engages an intersectional understanding of capitalism, and its work driving urban displacement, as always co-produced through gender, racial, colonial, heteronormative, nationalist, and other power-geometries. We assert that feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, within and beyond Africa: critical of colonial past-presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights-intellectual and material-of African women.