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

Abstract

Geographical scholarship has, since the late 1990s, shown how infrastructure was central to the making of urban modernity and the metabolic transformation of socio-natures. Meanwhile, the work of Latin American scholars including Aníbal Quijano and Maria Lugones has focussed attention on the imbrications between modernity and coloniality, in particular through the international racial division of labour. Moving between these ideas, I argue that there is intellectual and political ground to be gained by specifically accounting for the coloniality of infrastructure, in both its material and epistemic dimensions. I ground the analysis in the history of Recife, Northeast of Brazil, analyzing the role of British engineering in the production of the city's landscape and infrastructure, and address the epistemic dimensions of the coloniality of infrastructural by exploring infrastructural spectacle in 1920s Recife. Finally, I explore how the coloniality of infrastructure directs our attention to race, labour and finance.

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State, Environment, and Race in Lerma, Mexico

“…“Constitutive of” insofar as infrastructures enable the spatial separations that constitute race, class, and gender (Candiani 2014; Nemser 2017; Ranganathan 2022; Salamanca and Silver 2022); the forms of socio‐environmental appropriation and dispossession that underpin capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and state power (Bhambra 2022; LaDuke and Cowen 2020; Moore 2015); and the differentiated mobilities and fixities of bodies and resources across imperial space (Distretti 2021). “Constituted by” insofar as their financing relies on imperial and colonial credit flows (Bernards 2022); their design on colonial/modern aesthetic registers and normative goals (Davies 2021); and their construction and operation on racialised forms of labour, which they have in turn produced (Cowen 2020). Infrastructures are therefore integral to colonialism and imperialism as historical and material processes that link the global to the intimate (Ranganathan 2020), and as enduring forms of difference, domination, and exploitation that connect present to past and future.…”

“…Like coloniality, internal colonialism argues that the relations of oppression and domination that existed in the formal colonial period persist after the formal end of direct colonialism. Unlike coloniality, which highlights the epistemic dimensions of colonial power in the making of the modern world (Davies 2021; Maldonado‐Torres 2016; Mignolo 2007; Nemser 2017; Quijano 2000), internal colonialism focuses on the political‐economic and political‐ecological dimensions of colonial power. This does not imply that there are no epistemic dimensions to colonial domination, or that coloniality negates the existence of material forms of domination.…”

“…This requires conceptualising labour, as process and practice, both as being produced through the logics of colonialism, and as productive and reproductive of colonial relations of spatial production, resource appropriation, commodity production, and state making. In the case discussed here, it involves critically analysing how labouring bodies are relationally constituted through the racial logics of internal colonialism (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Segato 2007); how the historical making of the labour force is itself racialised, signalling a structural entanglement of race and class (Davies 2021; Lugones 2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010b); and how this racialised labour makes up infrastructure both as ossified dead labour (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mitchell 2000, 2003), and as the living labour that, through incremental and improvisational practices (Silver 2014; Simone 2013), makes infrastructures work (Addie 2021; De Coss‐Corzo 2021). In doing so, this article suggests that internal colonialism, and colonialism at large, endure through infrastructures and infrastructural labour.…”

Infrastructural Unrest

“…Nelson and Bigger question the casting of nature and ecosystems as infrastructures as an ontological trick of and problem in development conservation and green capitalism (Nelson & Bigger, 2021). The white-supremacist, racist and colonial making of urban modernity and metabolizing of nature are part of the "The Coloniality of Infrastructure" initiatives of Nick Axel, Kenny Cupers, Nikolaus Hirsch (Hirsch, 2021) and others, along with Davies' work on the coloniality of engineering (Davies, 2021).…”

“…There are, according to Barney, "pipeline nations" and Canada is most definitely one of them (Barney, 2017). The vast and ample natural resources that attracted Canadian settlers to Canada over past centuries, and the brutal and rapacious way that the people who already lived there were moved around and killed to take advantage of these resources, is part of the modern expansionism and desire for interconnectivity at-all-costs that underlie technologies of infrastructure (Davies, 2021). As a reckoning with the nation of my own birth and my upbringing in the highly industrial, economically faltering landscape of the Windsor-Detroit area in the late-1980s and early 90s, this framing has shifted my sense of home and how I can act on and against the brutalities of infrastructural colonialism.…”