Rethinking space and politics from the urban interstices

Politicization of youth through Ouagadougou’s ‘grins de thé’

Resumo

In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, tea grins are set up in interstitial spaces, on the border between public and private. They are meetings of young people (mostly men) who gather at varying times to drink tea and chat. They constitute spaces of sociability, both refuge and resource space, where the hierarchies that usually structure social relations which are linked to age, gender or social status, are subverted without disappearing completely.

If they are not necessarily considered as political places by their users, politics is very present in the values mobilised around the grin and in the very practice they constitute. The grins can be considered as heterotopias, and moreover ‘arenas’ where public problems are constituted through collective discussion, but they do not appear as a legitimate instance of political debate. The grin thus represents an illegitimate arena where a ‘subaltern cityness’ is constructed. Thus, this article questions the processes of politicisation linked to specific practices of urban space, without necessarily appearing in the public space of discourse. Cityness is considered in its processual aspect, that is, as the space of the city that allows individuals to constitute themselves as political subjects.

This article also questions the existence of a continuum of political speech, whose public expression would depend on the possibilities of negotiations with the social order, and on the power relations that produce it. In short, it asks whether the infra-political practices of the space by the dominated allow the construction of collective actions around these questions.