Brenda Chalfin

Public things, excremental politics, and the infrastructure of bare life in Ghana's city of Tema

American Ethnologist · 2014-02-01 · 230 citations

ABSTRACT In Ghana's planned city of Tema, public toilets and sewerage systems are a formative terrain of urban political praxis giving tangible form to what Henri Lefebvre calls “the right to the city.” Revealing the political potentials and determinations of both waste and municipal infrastructure, excreta and the systems devised to contain and channel them serve as res publicae , or “public things.” At the same time they embody the inequities of bare life and biopolitical proscription in Tema'…

‘Wastelandia’: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste in Urban Ghana

Ethnos · 2016-01-19 · 82 citations

Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. At the heart of the analysis is an expansive privat…

Governing Offshore Oil: Mapping Maritime Political Space in Ghana and the Western Gulf of Guinea

South Atlantic Quarterly · 2015-01-01 · 59 citations

Ocean spaces are a dynamic arena of political transformation and claims-making essential to the unfolding of late capitalism. Indicative of the expanding geography of oil prospecting in the South Atlantic Ocean, the deep waters of the western Gulf of Guinea map a political economic frontier encompassing the maritime zones and resources of a swath of West African nation-states stretching from Senegal to Benin. In Ghana, the country at the leading edge of this extractive front and a harbinger of r…

On-shore, off-shore Takoradi: Terraqueous urbanism, logistics, and oil governance in Ghana

Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2018-09-25 · 46 citations

This paper places an empirical focus on logistics to link three strands of inquiry: Ghana’s deep-water oil economy, the built environment of Ghana’s oil-city of Takoradi, and the character of governance at their confluence. Moving beyond the land and sea, off-shore/on-shore dichotomy, logistics provides a means of instantiating and interpreting the regulatory terrain of off-shore extraction within a historically constituted urban landscape. Highlighting an array of urban locations—from military…

Introduction

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology · 2020 · 40 citations

The introduction to this special issue begins by surveying the significance of what we call Africa’s internal energy frontiers for understanding a global energy realignment marked by experiments in renewable technologies as well as revanchist investments in fossil fuels. It then discusses capture as a concept rooted in both Marxist informed accounts of global energy regimes as well as the political histories and practices of African populations. Finally, it discusses the articles as spanning thr…