JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 28, Numbers 3 & 4, 2008 Page: 403
391-836, [2] p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Mustapha Marrouchi
American capitals through Africa (Lagos) to India, China, Philip-
pines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our
times. The case of Lagos, the biggest node in the shanty-town
corridor of70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan,
is exemplary here: According to the official sources themselves,
about two thirds of the Lagos County total land mass of 3.577
square kilometers could be classified as shanties or slums; no one
even knows the size of its population-officially it is 6 million, but
experts estimate it at 10 million. Since, sometime very soon ... the
urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population,
and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban
population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon.
He goes on to add:
We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside the
state control, living in condition half outside the law, in terrible
need of the minimal forms of self-organization. Although their
population is composed of marginal laborers, redundant civil
servants and ex-peasants, they are not a simple surplus: They are
incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of
them working as informal wage workers or self-employed entre-
preneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The
main source of their rise is the inclusion of Third World countries
in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First
World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true
"symptom" of slogans like "Development," "Modernization," and
"World Market": Not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary
product of the innermost logic of global capitalism ("Leninism").'4
This is what Alan Badiou aptly called "evental sites": the slum-dwellers
are literally a collection of those who are "part of no part," the
"surnumerary" elements of society, excluded from the benefits ofcitizen-
ship, the uprooted and dispossessed; those who effectively "have nothing
to loose but their chains."" Badiou valorizes this marginalized section of
the world population, arguing that even though they are "free" from all
substantial ties-dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations
of the state-they are nevertheless an excluded large collective, forc-
ibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where they have to
invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of403
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 28, Numbers 3 & 4, 2008, periodical, 2008; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc268404/m1/15/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .