Infrastructural Attachments

Austerity, Sovereignty, and Expertise in Kenya

By: Emma Park

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Paperback | 15 November 2024

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Paperback
300 Pages

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22.8 x 15.3 x 2.0

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Set against critiques of neoliberal capitalism in the present, Infrastructural Attachments argues that the technopolitics of austerity have been the organizing logic of statecraft in Kenya since the late nineteenth century, calling into question the novelty of austerity as a mode of governance and a lived experience. Using infrastructures as a lens to explore state formation over the long twentieth century-roads in the early colonial period, radio broadcasting from the interwar through the postwar periods, and mobile phones and digital financial services in the present-historian Emma Park reveals that as the state drew on private capital to make up for limited budgets, it inaugurated a peculiar political-economic form: the corporate-state. For more than a century-in pursuit of minimizing costs and maximizing profits-the corporate-state crucially relied on the exploitation and expropriation of its subject-citizens. By foregrounding these workers, Park interrogates how Kenyans' knowledge and expertise has been rescaled and subsumed, quietly underwriting the development of infrastructural expertise, the circuits of finance upon which (post)colonial infrastructural expansion has been premised, and the forms of profit-making it has enabled.

Industry Reviews

"Emma Park demonstrates that the state in Kenya has been driven by both economic and political forces that continually cross the boundaries between private and public interests. At the same time, she argues that the infrastructures these entities cultivate have been deeply dependent on African knowledge workers whose expertise has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged or compensated by company and state officials. By linking infrastructure to the Kenyan state and to African knowledge workers, Park carves out new analytical insights while bringing African history into conversation with science and technology studies." -- Lynn M. Thomas, Giovanni and Anne Costigan Endowed Professor of History, University of Washington
"Emma Park's insightful book not only expands the meaning of infrastructure, but pushes the reader to rethink concepts that animate much scholarship today: neoliberalism, sovereignty, austerity, citizenship. She not only brings out the interrelations of corporate and state power, but also their limits and their reliance on the knowledge and creativity of Africans. Her book combines an astute and original theoretical perspective with excellent historical research." -- Frederick Cooper, coauthor of * Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia *

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