Event Description
This talk is part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering Africa as a crucial site for humanity’s first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on African soil to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across the African continent, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of local populations or damage to the local ecologies. The talk offers a (re)reading of the imprint of this enormous infrastructure through the voices of Africans, many of whom viewed the siting of such technology in their countries as extensions of older forms of extractive colonial violence but rendered now under the cloak of scientific 'progress.
Event Speaker
Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History at Fordham University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required by emailing [email protected]. Please visit the Faculty House website for directions.
Hosted by the Seminar in Contemporary Africa at Columbia University.
