A Snapshot of Happiness: Photo Albums, Respectability and Economic Uncertainty in Dakar

Abstract

Young women who live in the improvised urban spaces on the outskirts of Senegal's capital city, Dakar, extemporize their respectability in a time of fiscal uncertainty through personal photography. The neighbourhood of Khar Yalla is an improvised, interconnected and multilayered space settled by families removed from the city centre during clean-up campaigns from the 1960s to the 1970s, by families escaping conflict in Casamance and Guinea-Bissau, and by recent rural migrants. As much as Khar Yalla is an improvised neighbourhood, it is also a space of improvisation. When women pose for, display, and pass around portraits of themselves at key moments in their social life, whether in the medium of social networking sites or photo albums, they reveal as much as they conceal the elements of individual and social life. They index their social networks and constitute their urban space not as peripheral, but as central to the lives and imaginations of their siblings and spouses who live abroad. Photographs actively shape and construct urban spaces, which are often loud, unruly and fraught spaces with vast inequalities and incommensurabilities. How women deal with economic and social disparity, within their own families, communities, and globally, is the subject of this article.

If You Were in My Sneakers: Migration Stories in the Studio Photography of Dakar‐Based Omar Victor Diop

“…Candace Keller mentions how, aided by Seydou Keita's studio props, young men displayed fadenya characteristics, of individuality and fortitude, by dressing as boxers, cowboys, and dandies (Keller , 371). In Dakar, this trend of prop‐heavy portrait photography continued into the 1980s and 1990s when technological shifts in cameras and film developing moved the practice out of the studios and into homes (Buggenhagen ).…”

Data, desire and recognition: Learning to identify a ‘prostitute’ in Dakar

“…Foley and Drame (2013), for example, argue that mbaraan is the name given to a set of social practices which allow women to explore and contest their ‘unfulfilled material, emotional and sexual expectations within marriage’ (p. 122). The ways in which generalized precarity and economic uncertainty have unmoored gender relations over the life course from their normative patterns has made it all the more urgent for women in Dakar to find new ways to ‘extemporize their respectability’ (Buggenhagen, 2014: 78), making the body and bodily display a high-stakes game balancing the desire to jaayu (display one’s physical attributes in public) while performing and embodying one’s fidelity to social and religious norms of modest and appropriate feminine conduct.…”

The Weightless State

“…By highlighting the instability of transparency as an institutional goal and cultural concept, this body of scholarship also illuminates the ways in which contemporary governance is inextricable from both the ideological and material realities of media and technology. In Senegal, the tension between what is seen or disclosed ( zahir ) and what is hidden or not visible ( batin )—both concepts borrowed from Arabic—has long animated religious and social life (Buggenhagen 2010, 2014; Roberts and Roberts 2003). Concerns with transparency and opacity certainly stood at the forefront of APIX's agenda and routines.…”