Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces

Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters after Dusk captures the multifarious nature of the urban night and how it is lived, structured, and reflected upon in diverse cultural and artistic expressions. The volume acknowledges the urban night as an often-overlooked key dimension necessary to understand the complexities of today's urban spaces, including the often-polarizing question of migration. After dusk, urban social challenges are often magnified, as questions of who can be where and when, along ethnic, racial or gender lines, for example, gain an additional dimension. The volume underscores, indeed, the multi-dimensionality of night spaces, where bottom-up, grassroot initiatives provide opportunities for self-expression by traditionally marginalized and silenced groups. Chapters span disciplines of urbanism and urban history, literary, film and cultural studies, music, sociology of labour, anthropology of migration, alongside autoethnographic contributions and practice-based photo essays by artists for whom the night is their habitual setting and canvas.

Sara Brandellero is a university lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She explores cultures of the Portuguese-Speaking world, with a particular focus on Brazil. Between 2019–2022 she was Project Leader of the European project Night Spaces: migration, culture and integration in Europe (NITE). Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues is an assistant professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She was a co-investigator in the HERA-funded grant “Night Spaces: Migration, Culture, and Integration in Europe” and is currently leading the ERC project “City Tales: An Art-Based Participatory Framework for Studying Migration-Related Diversity”. Derek Pardue is author of Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop (Palgrave McMillan, 2008/2011), Cape Verde, Let’s Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal (University of Illinois Press 2015) and Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Bloomsbury 2021). He is an Associate Professor in the Global Studies Department at Aarhus University, Denmark.