UN3422: Infrastructures of Power | R. Baker

Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Graduate and Undergraduate Seminar
W 10:10AM-12PM

Is infrastructure political? Can infrastructure colonise, dispossess, and cause environmental ruin? We tend to think of infrastructure as useful objects, but can we think of them as built ideologies? Historically, infrastructural projects have been regarded as necessary preconditions of modern and efficient states. So much so that malfunctioning sewers and perennial power cuts have come to invoke images of starved and underdeveloped countries. However, the question of whether infrastructure itself fuels human and environmental underdevelopment is rarely asked. This course proposes a new way of thinking about infrastructure. By studying the histories of various infrastructural projects in the Middle East, we will critically assess their role as sites of political contestation rather than as “neutral technologies”. Infrastructure has been used by colonial states to exploit the natural resources of colonised territories and to control the populations they ruled. At the same time, infrastructure is crucial in the formation of radical political identities and rich cultures and traditions of political struggle. Yet, not all infrastructure is the same. By paying attention to the material qualities and specific cultural and ideological history of each form of infrastructure we study, we will be able to understand how different forms of infrastructure create and foreclose different political possibilities.

Link to Vergil
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