Prisons fulfil central political and economic functions. They are industrial complexes that generate high profits, and at the same time they are internment camps for those not wanted in this society. Numerous groups of persons unwilling or unable to cope with the demands of late capitalism in the global North are affected by imprisonment.

Migrants are one of the most important and largest groups of persons imprisoned. For them the “small prison” is a part and a condensed expression of the big prison: this is the society in which they live, but are systematically prevented from participating in. Both the big and the small prisons individualize and moralize social problems, responding with radical exclusion.

This webjournal is part of a bigger project in the framework of WienWoche, “About borders and walls. Migration and Prison”, led by Hor 29 Novembar.

The publication of the next volume of the Johannesburg Salon. Volume 7 centres on a collection of essays convened for Achille Mbembe’s African Future Cities Seminar, held at Harvard University in Autumn of last year. Edited by Stephanie Bosch Santana, the pieces explore the continent’s diverse urbanisms with an eye towards future trajectories of inventiveness, fortification, resilience and segregation.

In the Editorial section, artist Raimi Gbadamosi remembers the late Stuart Hall, Ashleigh Harris discusses style in recent diasporic African fiction, Helena Chavez Mac Gregor explores emergent political formations in Mexico and elsewhere, Lewis Gordon ruminates on the philosophical blues, Jonathan Klaaren reflects on the limits of the South African legal system and Ellison Tjirera makes a case for Windhoek’s city-ness. Catherine Portevin interviews Achille Mbembe (in French) about how his book Critique de la Raison Negre draws on the theories of Frantz Fanon and others to enter into dialogue with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The AFC symposium is complemented by Bregtje van der Haak’s exclusive interview with Rem Koolhaas, in which the architect meditates upon the meanings and possibilites of his Lagos Project, now fifteen years old.