Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity

Abstract

Building on critical geographical scholarship on racialism and coloniality reiterated through infrastructure systems, this article explores how inherently colonial constructs of ethnicity‐as‐identity—as sub‐genres of humanity and further biopolitical differentiation of Blackness—are reworked through contemporary mega‐infrastructures. Focusing on the development of Lamu Port in Kenya, it analyses how infrastructures entrench pre‐existing symbolic and material divisions between ostensibly different ethnic groups and how they perceive themselves within Kenya's body politic. Doing this, the article demonstrates how mega‐infrastructures actively reproduce the sub‐genres of humanity that were set in motion during the colonial period as categories inscribing the racialised, constitutive otherness to Whiteness. The coloniality of power, therefore, endures, reverberating through infrastructures into materialities of the present and the everyday of peoples who continue to rely on colonial grammars of sub‐humanisation to maintain a sense of self in the world of not their own making.

Queering as (un)knowing: Ambiguities of sociality and infrastructure

“…In this sense, large-scale infrastructure developmentsregardless of their violence (Lesutis 2022c;Rodgers and O'Neill 2012) also constitute affective economies of anticipation, for people expect, as well as mobilise to ensure, positive changes in their lives. Anticipating future megadevelopments, they try to secure access to land and other natural resources (Elliot 2016), attempt to practice new livelihoods (Lesutis 2021) or make political claims about governance and autochthonous belonging (Enns 2019;Lesutis 2023). The fleeting fragments of the everyday in Lamu, such as the one above, indicate that these economies of anticipation also intermesh with deeper intimate layers of self.…”

“…Oswin 2008;Puar 2017;Smith 2018). Regarding Kenya's mega-infrastructures, amongst other power vectors such as race (Kimari and Ernstson 2020) or class and ethnicity (Lesutis 2022b(Lesutis , 2023) that deepen socio-economic differentiation, these dynamics also intersect with the experiences of gender that are lived as precarious expressions of hegemonic masculinity. In this sense, mega-infrastructures and challenges brought by them bolster orthodoxies of masculinity.…”