Waste Works: Vital Politics in Urban Ghana

by Brenda Chalfin

Overview

In Waste Works, Brenda Chalfin examines Ghana’s planned city of Tema, theorizing about the formative role of waste infrastructure in urban politics and public life. Chalfin argues that at Tema’s midcentury founding, a prime objective of governing authorities was to cultivate self-contained citizens by means of tightly orchestrated domestic infrastructure and centralized control of bodily excrement to both develop and depoliticize the new nation. Comparing infrastructural innovations across the city, Chalfin excavates how Tema residents pursue novel approaches to urban waste and sanitation built on the ruins of the inherited order, profoundly altering the urban public sphere. Once decreed a private matter to be guaranteed by state authorities, excrement becomes a public issue, collectively managed by private persons. Pushing self-care into public space and extending domestic responsibility for public well-being and bodily outputs, popularly devised waste infrastructures are a decisive arena to make claims, build coalitions, and cultivate status. Confounding high-modernist ideals, excremental infrastructures unlock bodily waste’s diverse political potentials.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024217
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	80 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Brenda Chalfin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida and author of Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa and Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets, and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  vii
Preface  xi
Acknowledgments  xix
Introduction. Infrastructural Intimacies: The Vital Politics of Waste in Urban Ghana  1
1. Assembling the New City: From Infrastructure to Vital Politics  45
2. Tema Proper: Infrastructures and Intimacies of Disrepair  96
3. The Right(s) to Remains: Excremental Infrastructure and Exception in Tema Manhean  133
4. Ziginshore: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste  181
5. Dwelling on Toilets: Tema's Breakaway Republic of Ashaiman  212
Conclusion. From Vital Politics to Deep Domesticity: Infrastructure as Political Experiment  268
Notes  295
References  315
Index  339

What People are Saying About This

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine - Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

“Brenda Chalfin illuminates the great variety of arrangements to which solutions to the accumulations of human excrement can give rise, demonstrating the radical contingencies of waste politics. Her extensive elaboration of the political theories of the public and private and the politics of materiality situate this book at a unique intersection of Africanist anthropology and major philosophical debates of our time. Offering sophisticated, complex, and far-reaching theoretical takeaways, Chalfin compellingly argues that excrement is political in ways that help us to rethink public life anywhere.”

Deborah Atobrah

“In this book, Brenda Chalfin highlights the complexities of how bodily waste and waste infrastructure are insistent loci for the negotiation of urban political order. She succinctly demonstrates how the complexities and ambivalence of a seemingly well-planned city conflate with indigeneity and urban poverty to produce a complex sanitary political paradox in Ghana. Her ethnography of the immediate postcolonial growth of a small fishing village to a harbor city in Ghana is insightful. This book is a timely addition to postcolonial scholarship on community planning and development and excreta infrastructure politics in Africa.”

Editorial Reviews

"Waste Works is an exciting scholarly work that will prove useful to city planners, urbanization and sanitation experts, social scientists, and others in some such related fields including environmentalists, city and waste management officials, donor agencies, and so on. It is certainly an important addition to the growing gamut of scholarly research on the city of Tema as a paragon of Ghanaian, and therefore, African progress."

Journal of Global South Studies - Kwaku Nti

"Chalfin’s book is rich in both ethnographic detail and theoretical analysis and insight. . . . It is an important contribution to the growing critical conversation about infrastructure, urban development, and modernism in Ghana, across Africa, and throughout the Global South, and it joins a growing interdisciplinary body of scholarship that challenges us to reflect on our infrastructural and spatial assumptions in both addressing the inequalities and inefficiencies of the present and imagining more just urban and infrastructural futures."
 

Journal of West African History - Jennifer Hart

"Across the chapters, written in an engaging and sympathetic tone, we can see how the vital infrastructures of Tema reassemble publics and state-citizen relationships in new political experiments. While the book participates and contributes in fresh ways to anthropology’s 'excremental turn' over the past decade, it thus stands chiefly as an elegant and vital contribution to ongoing discussions of infrastructural politics, as a way to think about contemporary urban life across time and scales."

Anthropos - Jon Schubert

". . . this substantial, well researched study presents an engaging account of the vitality of West African urbanism and the resourcefulness of Tema’s inhabitants. Moreover, by documenting the afterlives of Tema’s sanitary infrastructure, Chalfin makes an important contribution to the growing scholarship on the urban politics of modern architecture and planning in West Africa."

Architectural Theory Review - Rixt Woudstra

"Waste Works provides scholars of waste, sanitation, and the region plenty of food for thought and an invitation to rethink sanitary infrastructures as sites of political experimentation grounded in bodily rhythms."

Anthropology Book Forum - Patrick O’Hare

". . . this substantial, well researched study presents an engaging account of the vitality of West African urbanism and the resourcefulness of Tema’s inhabitants. Moreover, by documenting the afterlives of Tema’s sanitary infrastructure, Chalfin makes an important contribution to the growing scholarship on the urban politics of modern architecture and planning in West Africa."—Rixt Woudstra, Architectural Theory Review

"Across the chapters, written in an engaging and sympathetic tone, we can see how the vital infrastructures of Tema reassemble publics and state-citizen relationships in new political experiments. While the book participates and contributes in fresh ways to anthropology’s 'excremental turn' over the past decade, it thus stands chiefly as an elegant and vital contribution to ongoing discussions of infrastructural politics, as a way to think about contemporary urban life across time and scales."—Jon Schubert, Anthropos

"Chalfin’s book is rich in both ethnographic detail and theoretical analysis and insight. . . . It is an important contribution to the growing critical conversation about infrastructure, urban development, and modernism in Ghana, across Africa, and throughout the Global South, and it joins a growing interdisciplinary body of scholarship that challenges us to reflect on our infrastructural and spatial assumptions in both addressing the inequalities and inefficiencies of the present and imagining more just urban and infrastructural futures."
 —Jennifer Hart, Journal of West African History

"Waste Works is an exciting scholarly work that will prove useful to city planners, urbanization and sanitation experts, social scientists, and others in some such related fields including environmentalists, city and waste management officials, donor agencies, and so on. It is certainly an important addition to the growing gamut of scholarly research on the city of Tema as a paragon of Ghanaian, and therefore, African progress."—Kwaku Nti, Journal of Global South Studies

"Waste Works provides scholars of waste, sanitation, and the region plenty of food for thought and an invitation to rethink sanitary infrastructures as sites of political experimentation grounded in bodily rhythms."—Patrick O’Hare, Anthropology Book Forum

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