CFP for panel "Road Signs: Toward a Cultural History of Africa’s Infrastructures"
Call for Papers for the Panel:
Road Signs: Toward a Cultural History of Africa’s Infrastructures
As part of the 2018 ACC International Urban Conference
Cape Town, 1-2 February 2018
https://www.africancentreforcities.net/call-submission-acc-international-urban-conference/
Deadline for submission: 15 September 2017
Panel Description:
Infrastructure, especially the physical remaking of Africa’s so-called megacities, has become an important topic in African studies in recent years. This scholarship often focuses on the global politics of exchange—the circulation of materials, people, and capital across vast spaces and different geographies. Such analyses of Africa’s infrastructures and city plans can reveal the hegemonic statecraft of large-scale design, but they also tend to reproduce the logic and technopolitics of capitalist globalization and modernization. In doing so, they risk to not only obscure the human consequences and environmental cost of infrastructure building, but also to naturalize macro-scale perspectives, reducing lived experience to issues of local versus global, and national or foreign politics.
This panel seeks to reorient the study of infrastructure from the geopolitical to the cultural by asking questions about the kinds of modes of being and seeing such material interventions embody and enact in Africa. That is, how are roads, railways, damns, and telecommunication networks sites of cultural inscription and symbolic expression? Beyond facilitating circulation and exchange, how do they address, even constitute people as mobile subjects? How can accounts of infrastructure encompass the politics of the everyday or the creative and imaginary dimension of infrastructural forms? What interpretive frameworks can help us to reveal the practical, aesthetic, and formal qualities of infrastructure that remain unrecognized in mainstream accounts of Africa’s built landscapes? How are highways, bridges, and mobile phones forms of spatial practice? This session invites papers that address these questions in order to critically reposition infrastructure within architectural, cultural, and spatial histories.
Please email the panel co-chairs:
Professor Dr. Kenny Cupers, University of Basel
kenny.cupers@unibas.ch
Professor Dr. Prita Meier, New York University
pritasm@gmail.com
Post a Reply
Join this Network to Reply