Unseeing urban divides in Luanda and Maputo

Taking China Miéville’s novel The City & The City as our point of departure, we develop the idea of “unseeing” as a central cultural skill to make sense of, and live with, contemporary urban inequality. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Luanda and Maputo, we posit unseeing as a useful heuristic to capture the processes by which divisions between disparate urban lifeworlds are produced and upheld. While unseeing is a necessary, entrained social practice to live with the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, urban life also offers opportunities for moments of “breach” that reveal both the forces that reassert social division and the potential of practices that seek to force people to see rather than unsee.