Uroš Kovač (Future Rural Africa Project B04 Projecting Futures) and Anna Lisa Ramella (Future Rural Africa Project C06 Testing Futures) edited a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, sponsored by the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 228 Future Rural Africa, titled “Living with ruins: ruination and future-making in Kenya (and beyond)”.
Abstract
In the first quarter of the 21st century, much future-making in Kenya is taking place in ruins of unfinished promising projects, failed capitalist enterprises, and decades of colonial and postcolonial exclusion and marginalization. When discussing future-making in Kenya specifically and Africa more generally, especially in the context of vision-driven developmentalist narratives that rely on visions of linear progress and growth, analysts and social scientists need to account for ways that futures emerge from ruins and rubble of undelivered and uncertain promises, collapsed industries, and colonial and postcolonial dispossession of land and rights. This special collection—which engages with key theoretical concepts like ruination, infrastructuring, and future-making—examines ruins and ruination in key economic and political domains that make claims to Kenya’s future: capitalist boom-and-bust economies, mega-scale infrastructure projects, and urban development. In all these domains, futures are emerging through assemblages of people’s everyday practices of maintenance and the ruins that surround them, complicating facile proclamations of Africa’s rising or abjection.
Table of Contents
- From ruins and rubble: promised and suspended futures in Kenya (and beyond)
Uroš Kovač (Future Rural Africa Project B04 Projecting Futures) & Anna Lisa Ramella (Future Rural Africa Project C06 Testing Futures) - Bursting pipes and broken dreams: on ruination and reappropriation of large-scale water infrastructure in Baringo County, Kenya
David Greven (Future Rural Africa Project C02 Energy Futures) - Resisting imperial erasures: Matigari ruins and relics in Nairobi
Wangui Kimari (Institute for Humanities in Africa) - The politics of skeletons and ruination: living (with) debris of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach, Kenya
Franziska Fay (JGU Mainz) - In the ruins of past forest lives: remembering, belonging and claiming in Katimok, highland rural Kenya
Léa Lacan (Future Rural Africa Project A04 Future Conservation) - Suspending ruination: preserving the ambiguous potentials of a Kenyan flower farm
Anna Lisa Ramella (Future Rural Africa Project C06 Testing Futures), Mario Schmidt (Future Rural Africa Project C06 Testing Futures) & Megan A. Styles (University of Illinois at Springfield)
Reference
Kovač, U., Ramella, A.L. (Eds.), 2023. Living with ruins: ruination and future-making in Kenya (and beyond) (Special Issue). Journal of Eastern African Studies (2023). Link
