Part 1: Eliza Haywood’s oriental romance Eovaai reworks the trope of being “carried away” as an undisciplined way of inhabiting a world organized around reproducing patriarchal power and masculine dignity. Haywood evokes the classical fascinum, or winged penis, to confront readers with a spectacle of the materiality of heteropatriarchal world-making. Tracing Haywood’s fascinum back to earlier iterations from the medieval and early modern periods, as well as forward to psychoanalytic and phenomenological treatments, this book considers the possibilities of fascination as a paracritical mode of attention. The anamorphic describes a mode of representation that resists resolution into something straightforwardly comprehensible, thereby withholding from the subject who views it the steadying ground of epistemological certainty. Eovaai presents an irreverent celebration of bodies that choose flight over fixity, vulnerability over legibility, and transformative potential over ideological coherence. As such, it ushers readers into unexpected encounters with our own epistemological capacities as dynamically embodied creatures.

This book examines the aesthetic insurrections enacted by “funny things” in eighteenth-century literature and material culture. It dwells with these details and their cultural associations to model a way of reading that resists the epistemological urge toward resolution. I submit that eighteenth-century fiction furnishes us with these invitations to think and feel in ways not oriented toward “making sense” of what we’ve encountered, and that this reading practice is important to any intellectual or interpretive commitment to resisting and refusing colonialist patterns of epistemological enclosure and appropriation. By disrupting the aesthetic and narrative effects that allowed British readers to experience the material world as mental property, these irreducible details indicate the possibility of ideological malfunctions in the systems of knowledge that took hold in the early stages of British imperialism. The book mounts its argument in three parts – “The Anamorphic,” “The Ludic,” and “The Orificial” – each focused on a specific mode of distorting the forms and logics of emergent liberal norms in the context of empire, including realism, empiricism, ownership, individualism, and gendered heterosexuality. In each of these sections, I approach a detail from an eighteenth-century text – focusing primarily on works by Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, Richard Bentley, and Frances Burney – as a prompt to consider the intertwined ways that funniness operates as an aesthetic, a heuristic method, and a reading praxis. The distortions that render things “funny,” I argue, generate a nascent politics that refuses the rigidity of given realities and their parameters of plausibility, and leans into the prospect – or, more accurately, the feeling – that the world as we know it could be otherwise.

Part 2: Through a reading of the works of Horace Walpole, this book shows the ludic as a mode of play unconditioned by any preconceived judgment or intended outcome. As bourgeois taste is increasingly tasked with dispelling the material conditions of risk, uncertainty, violence, and death that underwrite Britain’s growing colonial wealth, it becomes increasingly hostile to funniness – any kind of oddity, proclivity, or quirk that disrupts an engineered sense of safety, stability, and predictability in the lived world. Borrowing from Brian Massumi’s theorization of “ludic play” between dogs, I invoke eighteenth-century philosophy’s interest in “animal spirits” to show how Walpole coordinates his own ludic scenes. Ludic play, I offer, is a technique for strategically disorganizing the rituals and conceits of civility and good taste, retooling them from techniques of disavowing violence to a means of grappling with violence in its most diffuse and ever-present forms.

Frances Burney’s Evelina conjures silly, embarrassing, ludicrous, and morally sunk social pitfalls that its young heroine must studiously avoid in her progress toward social legibility, political safety, and material stability. Prompted by Daniel Cottom’s “the topology of the orifice,” this book shows that an orifical reading of Evelina coaxes open what the marriage plot aims to shut down, making the novel available to unpredictable genealogical connections. This. book traces one such line of descent to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and a performance by Bob the Drag Queen from the reality show We’re Here. Contextualizing Evelina in this way exposes the eighteenth-century marriage plot’s promotion of whiteness – specifically, whiteness as a sign of the social and sexual self-discipline that promises, in advocation against collectivity and queer intimacy, to keep us “safe” from one another as we attend to individuated prospects of “well-being.”

On the Ethiopia–Somaliland border, harsh checkpoints imposed in 2015 relegated Somali kontarabaan (contraband) traders – mainly women – to precarious livelihoods. Beginning with an ethnographic description of crossing through these checkpoints, this chapter outlines a contradictory dynamic: Jigjiga, Ethiopia’s premier smuggling hub, has become the capital of a local government bent on hyper-securitizing its borders. Intensifying border security interventions and a wave of return-migration among the global Somali diaspora have made many local merchants viscerally aware of their marginality and immobility in contrast to people with foreign passports and government connections. For small-scale traders, Ethiopia’s borders tend to operate as dividers. For government-connected elites and diaspora returnees, the same borders often enable opportunities for business connections and mutually profitable alliances. This chapter uses this observation to critique what it calls the “connective cities, divisive borders” portrait of globalization. It explains the importance of thinking about borders and cities as interconnected spaces of daily life. It introduces the book’s main arguments: that African urbanites are active agents who work to refashion geopolitical borders and create opportunities from them, and that everyday practices of exchange and mobility in the city do not just produce urban space but also resonate more broadly into border management.

After 2010, hundreds of diaspora Somalis left seemingly stable lives in cities of North America, Europe, and Australia and flocked to invest in Jigjiga, a post-conflict boomtown ruled by an unstable authoritarian administration. This chapter follows these diaspora businesspeople beyond Ethiopia’s borders and explores how their motivations for, and practices of, return-migration to Ethiopia are shaped by the experiences of migrant life in cities outside the Horn of Africa. Drawing on fieldwork among Somali businesspeople in South Africa and the US as well as Jigjiga, I show that Somali return-migrants to Jigjiga are driven by a complex mix of motivations, including responsibilities for family support, perceptions of business opportunity in the Horn of Africa, and experiences of precarity and risk in cities abroad. The implication is that social transformations in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands cannot be analyzed only at a local level. These ongoing shifts in securitization and urbanization in the Horn’s borderlands are entangled with “urban borderwork” in cities far beyond Ethiopia. This analysis not only situates Jigjiga in a broader world of cities and social relations; it also pushes us to think more deeply about the dynamic relationship between city-making and border-making in the world more broadly.

For Somali merchants in eastern Ethiopia, border securitization seems to be driving urban inequality. Ethiopia’s governing elites have instrumentalized borders, offering exclusive import–export licenses to political supporters, including diaspora return-migrants. In turn, the beneficiaries of these trade schemes speculate in sectors such as urban real estate. The “informal” kontarabaan (contraband) markets in Jigjiga are a seeming locus of resistance to these new elite collaborations. In contrast to the securitized checkpoints around the city, officials rarely try to regulate smuggling within the dense urban market. But is this really an issue of governance versus informality, political elites versus lower-class traders, and border security versus urban tolerance? Looking closely at people’s transactions in urban space, this chapter shows how expectations about obligation and reciprocity crosscut apparent social divisions in the city. In their daily interactions, both merchants and government regulators often draw on ideals of Somali nonhegemonic or “egalitarian” ethos to explain and justify their activities. Yet the way these egalitarianisms function in the city looks different than the idealized “egalitarian society” of anthropological lore. I show how people’s practices of reciprocity and exchange are spatial work that affects how “transformations of space” including walls, streets, and borders operate in daily life.

When Ethiopia aligned itself with the US in the global war on terror after 2001, top–down security interventions in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands led Somali secessionist conflict to spiral out of control. The protracted “state collapse” of neighboring Somalia spawned regional instability throughout the 1990s. In what is today Somali Regional State (SRS), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) spearheaded Somali-led rebellion against the new Ethiopian federal government. Somali rebels massacred Chinese oil workers in 2007 and attempted to assassinate SRS’s president in Jigjiga in 2008. Why, then, did diaspora Somalis begin returning from stable lives in North America and Europe to invest in Jigjiga before these conflicts had even settled? This chapter addresses this question by tracing how SRS authorities sought to create alliances among the global Somali diaspora. Through an ethnographic analysis of the dramatic change in diaspora–homeland relations that unfolded after 2010, it argues that border securitization in the Horn of Africa is not just a matter of topography – of territorial control, walls and razor wire, and security patrols. It is also a matter of reorganizing a complex topology of transnational relationships.