In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of racial slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability.

The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife

“…Kendra Strauss has noted that ‘scholarship on infrastructure has had relatively little to say about labour’ (Strauss, 2019). This is beginning to change, as we can see what Lugones calls the ‘thorough meshing of labour and race’(Lugones, 2007: 191) inside the infrastructural labour analyzed by Zeiderman(2020). In terms of the material analyzed here, we can see racialized divisions of labour clearly in the film Veneza Americana.…”

“…This racial division of labour has deep roots in slavery, and in the longer dur ee of the Northeast of Brazil. As Zeiderman has recently explored on the Magdalena river, these logics manifest in specific, articulated forms within infrastructural labour: what he calls the 'situated afterlives of race and labour' (Zeiderman, 2020). In Brazil, as elsewhere, the legal abolition of slavery did not mean abolition of the social relations of racialized labour exploitation, nor the abject conditions of life of many Black and indigenous Brazilians (Gonzalez, 2019;Ratts, 2007).…”

“…Infrastructure was financialized from its invention, and the relationship between engineering and finance was deep: projects selling stocks in new railway companies used the good names of engineers to drum up support among possible investors (Edmundson, 2016). Though infrastructural labour is almost exclusively male (see Zeiderman, 2020), drawing on Lugones' interpretation of coloniality, we can see how chains of finance bring to bear particular modalities of gender. Lugones went beyond Quijano to show how colonialism produced system not only of race, but of gender and heterosexualism.…”

“…In recent years, infrastructure studies have ranged widely in geography and cognate disciplines (Anand et al, 2018; Schouten et al, 2019; Siemiatycki et al, 2019). My articulation of the coloniality of infrastructure builds on research that has begun to explore how ‘the work of securing the conditions of global circulation is deeply rooted in imperial history’ (Chua et al, 2018: 620; Cowen, 2019; Khalili, 2020; Ranganathan, 2019; Zeiderman, 2020). As Deborah Cowen shows – drawing on the Black Marxist tradition – transatlantic histories of finance, infrastructure and slavery are connected.…”

New horizons for dredging research: The ecology and politics of harbor deepening in the southeastern United States

“…Political ecologists have recently emphasized attention to the materiality of resources (Bakker & Bridge, 2006; Richardson & Weszkalnys, 2014), physical geography (Lave, Biermann, & Lane, 2018), and infrastructure (Carse & Lewis, 2017). However, scholars have only begun to explore how transportation and logistics articulate with cultural, political, and ecological processes (Bear, 2015; Schouten, Stepputat, & Bachmann, 2019; Tsing, 2000, 2015; Zeiderman, 2020). Research on shipping, for example, might attend to the spatial margins of networked connectivity and the role of underwater depth in economic connection (Peters, 2020).…”