Notes on bewilderment,suspension,and urban life at the extensions

Abstract

Simone et al.’s ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’ is an important contribution to rethinking the logics of urbanization through the perspective of extensions. This commentary engages the text along the lines of bewilderment, a starting point for the authors of this piece. Engaging the works of economic anthropologist Jane Guyer and novelist Ben Okri as a West African comparative frame to ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’, this commentary describes bewilderment as an approach of (dis)orientation. To think of extension (instead of city centers vis-à-vis a perceived periphery) through the mode of bewilderment and disorientation, and as I suggest suspension, allows us to broaden our understanding in terms of allocating agency to the actions of urban residents as well as locating larger processes of urbanization.