Event Description
In 1896, the nebulous colonial state in Kenya began the construction of the Uganda Railway, a haphazard project that critics would come to call the “Lunatic Express.” This production of “colonial state space” was accompanied by and relied upon a series of conjunctural, ecological, epizootic, epidemic, and demographic dislocations. While the crises were conjunctural, creating a palimpsest of overlapping forms of suffering, they were shot through with relations of power, ultimately facilitating the state’s consolidation of its revenue regime as well as subsidizing new regimes of white accumulation. Lunacy might have guided the construction of this infrastructure, but there was a patterned method to the madness. Pace Marshall Sahlins, this “structure of the conjuncture” ultimately produced the historical geography of colonial capitalism in the East African Protectorate.
Event Speaker
Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History at the New School
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders. Please email Elizabeth Branscum
at [email protected] for the reading.
Hosted by the Seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science at Columbia University.
