Beautifying Brazzaville: Arts of Citizenship in the Congo

Abstract

The social practices that beautify Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo, partake of the arts of citizenship. They express the way in which the Congolese take part in ruling and being ruled. The reference to the beauty of certain objects initiates them into an aesthetic dimension as it summons a distinctive way of being that belongs to art; they are identified by the fact that they belong to a specific regime of the sensible.¹ What I mean by the arts of citizenship are configurations of experience that give rise to ways of feeling and result in specific forms of political subjectivity. I take inspiration here from Jacques Rancière’s analysis based on le partage du sensible (“the distribution of the sensible”), namely, a “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations within it that define the respective parts and positions within it” (2006: 12).