Infrastructural Attachments: Austerity, Sovereignty, and Expertise in Kenya

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.

Emma Park is Assistant Professor of History at The New School.