"In Infrastructural Attachments, Emma Park argues that the delegatory 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. In making this case, this historical ethnography explores the history of road construction in the late-nineteenth century, efforts to expand a radio broadcasting network in the interwar period through the 1950s, and the consolidation and expansion of mobile phones and digital financial services in the 2000s to offer a novel account of the austere state in Kenya. These histories indicate that company and state officials have long been deeply dependent on African knowledge workers whose expertise and labor has rarely, if ever, been adequately acknowledged or compensated. By detailing the infrastructural forms and knowledges which emerged among the users and citizens who shaped, repaired, and re-made their everyday material worldsin eastern Africa, Park demonstrates both the long legacy and material effects of privatization, austerity governance, and neoliberal policy"--
A close study of infrastructural expansion as a lens onto state capital relations and the politics of expertise in Kenya over the long-twentieth century.
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.
