This chapter considers the structure of territorial cleavage from a national perspective. It focuses on patterns of polarization between regional electoral blocs, or “territorial oppositions,” in national politics. Axes of territorial cleavage arising between predominantly rural regions tend to take canonical forms associated with core–periphery politics in countries that are undergoing national economic integration and the growth of the central state. Stable axes of sectional competition, whereby leading regions square off against each other or against those on the periphery, are visible in the electoral data and in persistent policy cleavages in countries in this study. In broad outlines, these conform to models of territorial opposition in national politics advanced by earlier scholars (Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Gourevitch 1979; Bayart 2013). The analysis is built around four countries – Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda – that serve as archetypes of different patterns of territorial opposition and core–periphery politics. Tanzania is a shadow case.

This theory of regional cleavages in African politics embeds the behavioral assumptions of microlevel, ethnicity-focused models in a broader spatial, institutional, and temporal frame. A theoretically grounded framework built on economic geography, economic inequalities, and institutions produces general findings about national-level political dynamics in African countries that are close to what classical and mainstream treatments in the comparative politics and comparative political economy literatures would lead us to expect. Leveraging this perspective, this chapter reconsiders questions of economic cleavage, urban–rural politics, institutions, class politics, policy interests, opposition and regional parties, and ethnic identities in African politics. The challenges of territorial politics in regionally divided countries that confront most African countries today are increasingly prominent in non-African, postindustrial countries. This makes research on the politics of spatial inequality in African countries relevant to general understandings of how economic and spatial inequalities may heighten the challenges of national politics. For policy and politics, the analysis lends weight to calls for place-based economic development strategies that are designed to support national cohesion.

This chapter identifies the colonial origins of the institutional structures and patterns of uneven economic development that create the template for political regionalism in African countries. Functional economic regions and administrative regions tended to align in African colonies, defining patterns of regional difference and inequality that are often strongly visible today. This process established frameworks within which politically salient ethnic identities developed, and defined political constituencies in territorial terms. With the 1940s emergence of colony-wide politics, existing administrative and political structures channeled regional interests and ideologies of regional consciousness into the national arena. A boundary persistence analysis underscores the large extent to which colonial territorial grids have been reproduced over time. I explain this persistence in terms of how African political leaders, social elites, farmers, and members of rural communities found advantage in territorial institutions forged under colonialism. These regional cleavages and the territorial institutions that help to reproduce them have structured patterns of national-level political competition in many African countries for many decades.

This chapter outlines two possible approaches to geocultural analysis. In the chapter’s first section, I discuss what I call a phenomenological approach to literary texts. Scholars who adopt this mode of interpretation argue that literature provides a unique glimpse into the experiential worlds produced by capitalist systems. For such scholars, capitalism is not simply an economic system characterized by autonomous agents in a public marketplace (as envisioned by rational choice theory and free market ideology), but is instead a complex web of discrete processes, industries and modes of production, each of which organizes workers’ experiences, affects and environments in unique ways. The chapter’s second section proposes the term genre-system as a conceptual tool for examining how literary fields make sense of such contradictions by dispersing their representations of economic processes and ideologies across a range of different literary genres. Literary genres tend to render capitalism’s contradictions logically coherent by allegorizing particular stages of the production process within self-contained narrative forms. When such genres are examined together, as the constituent parts of a totalizing genre-system, it is possible to see how narrative forms work together to create a series of partial, dissonant, yet nevertheless legible representations of the capitalist world-system.

The book concludes by suggesting that if modernist representations of the city dovetail with current concerns among urban theorists, none of the writers under investigation dismisses the idea of development per se. Rather, their visions of the mundane aspects of civic life, technological modernisation, urban collectivity and public works offer an alternative to postmodern urbanism, insofar as the idea of development is reimagined on reparative and redistributive terms. Consequently, urban writing from beyond the imperial centre is seen to restore certain properly ‘modernist’ energies to the field.

This chapter discusses literary representations of the ‘peripheral’ city, highlighting depictions of the urban landscape as dreamlike and anachronistic in modernist and proto-modernist texts. From Dostoevsky to Machado, Kafka to Joyce, the clash between imperial and Westernising discourses, on the one hand, and the perceived incompleteness of urban modernity at the periphery of Western Europe, on the other, played a key role in the critical and experimental urban aesthetics that emerged from the late nineteenth century. Chronicling literary responses to the complex modernity on display at the margins of European culture, the chapter builds towards a theory of modernism at the urban semi-periphery – or metrocolonial modernism.

This chapter examines the 1930s urban fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, who adopts a self-avowedly Joycean emphasis on local specificity and engages critically with the Indian cities imagined by contemporaries including Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster. If the city in Forster’s A Passage to India affirms a sense of the text’s spatial and narrative limits, Anand’s detailed representation of Bombay in his novel Coolie (1936) – which follows the short life of a worker who migrates to the port city – enacts a shift away from this emphasis on unknowable cultural divides, presenting difference as integral to the organisation of the metrocolonial economy. Showing how this subverts the narrative of ‘imperial maturity’ central to the city’s colonial identity, the chapter aligns Anand’s writing with other modernist fictions from metrocolonial zones.