Infrastructures of utopia: ruination and regeneration of the African future

Abstract

Ruination has recently received much attention as a defining aspect of the materiality of modernity. Less attention is given to the processes of regeneration that occur within sites of ruination. In this article, we examine how processes of ruination and regeneration are folded into each other, by looking at the materiality of a single site, a small village in the vicinity of Dakar, Senegal. By building the University of the African Future at Sébikotane, the Senegalese president has sought to rekindle the spirit of excellence that inspired education at the École normale William Ponty in a Pan-African spirit. As part of a larger plan for urban expansion, the site of Sébikotane has inspired hope for development. Examining how the different temporalities of utopian modernism and Afro-nostalgia intersect in the ruined site, this article reflects on the ruination of African futures on a site of ever renascent utopian infrastructures.

Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

“…Spawning a precarity premised on a dynamic recycling of post-production materials into the stuff of reproduction, those who operate here push the ends and means of urban economic possibility. De Jong and Valente-Quinn's (2018: 333) assertion that African modernity is premised on ruins and their afterlives resonates with the case of Ashaiman. Like ruins, waste offers possibility in the wake of destruction and exclusion.…”

“… 6 Drawing a line between precarious bodies, discarded objects and the dump's fragile infrastructure, this linked array suggests that we should look beyond material conditions of ruination in urban Africa – whether Dakar's half-built campuses (De Jong and Valente-Quinn 2018) or Monrovia's abandoned administrative architecture (Hoffman 2017) – to the shared relations that format the materialities of city, capital and body as one.…”

Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market

“…The promises of progress, prosperity and global connectivity, which the city's various new monuments and construction projects represented, never materialised for the majority of the city's inhabitants. Despite the mirage of infrastructural renewal and neo-modernist rhetoric of development, neoliberal reforms were accelerated during the Wade era, exacerbating social inequalities and enabling unprecedented wealth accumulation (Fredericks 2018: 137;de Jong and Valente-Quinn 2018). During his presidency, Wade's party faced increasing allegations of corruption and nepotism, and the population grew frustrated with his ostentatious spending and megalomaniac public projects in the face of growing unemployment and escalating food costs (Dahou and Foucher 2009;Gaye 2010;Melly 2010Melly , 2017.…”

Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers

“…Writing from the context of a once-storied psychiatric clinic in Dakar, Senegal, Kate Kilroy-Marac (2013) identifies a similar discourse among some long-time workers, who also lashed a sense of now-withered hope onto the early postcolonial years glossed as the modern past. Other recent work explores how a sense of ‘lost’ modernity attaches to incomplete or crumbling infrastructural projects in a range of contexts, and how discourse around these sites serves as terrain both to critique the present and meditate on futures that never quite came to pass (Carse and Kneas, 2019; de Jong and Valente-Quinn 2018; Smith 2020; Yarrow 2017). Celebrating a bygone era of modernization, these works show, is often a mode of identifying the space between the promises of a developmentalist paradigm and their incomplete realization in the present.…”