Kimari, Wangui, and Henrik Ernstson. “Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations: Centering Race within the Contemporary Large‐Scale Infrastructures of East Africa.” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 825–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12623.
Authors combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large‐scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. They argue that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what they refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, they draw principally on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologizing and resistance to it on the continent.
Source: adapted from article's abstract.
