The Urbanization of Conflict in the Twenty-First-Century Congolese Novel

ABSTRACT: A steady rise in urbanization and, concomitantly, of urban conflict in sub-Saharan Africa has prompted some to theorize that the largely rural "peasant wars" of the twentieth century have come to be replaced by a host of different forms of violent urban conflict. This article analyzes what the novels Tram 83 and Congo Inc . show about the ways urban spaces give particular concrete spatial form to the flare-ups of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); about the relationship between urban violent conflict and past or ongoing rural warfare; about the specifically urban character of psychological, physical, and infrastructural trauma; and about the hopes for future peace after long periods of protean rancor and bloodshed. Salient among these novelistic representations of violence in the DRC are the ways violence becomes socially ambient, is bound up in hegemonic forms of masculinism, and is connected to the transnational flows of capitalist globalization.