“Poverty” and the Politics of Syncopation

By means of an ethnographic “urban acupuncture” of a specific building within the city of Kinshasa, this article explores how poverty effects emerging publics in the city. Poverty “rhythms” city life in specific ways, and these rhythms may be best understood in terms of a politics of the syncopated and the suspended through which urban publics are constantly splintered and reassembled. The suspensions and missed beats that thus punctuate urban daily living often produce violence, closure, and isolation, but simultaneously they also generate unexpected accents that form openings into the “something else” of the offbeat track, thereby hinting at the (always vulnerable and equally problematic) possibility of alternative collective action and the ad hoc creation of new groups, publics, and public spaces.