Infrastructural Attachments

Austerity, Sovereignty, and Expertise in Kenya

Emma Park

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781478031109, 9781478026846
• eBook ISBN: 9781478060093
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Divisible Sovereignty: The Imperial British East Africa Company, the Crown, and the Sultanate in the Competitive World of Nineteenth-Century Eastern Africa
• 2. The Politics of Valuation: Building Attachments, “Taxing” Infrastructures, and Transforming Expert Work into Labor
• 3. “Tropicalising” Technologies: Cable and Wireless Ltd. and Making Broadcasting “Work"
• 4. Broadcasting the Future: Airwaves and the Politics of Affinity
• 5. The Politics of Divisibility: Safaricom and the Remaking of the Corporate Nation-State
• 6. Safaricom’s Austere Labor Regime: The Expropriation and Subsumption of Affective Work
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index