Afterplace: The Work of Waiting Along the Dakar-Bamako Railway

In this exquisitely crafted ethnography, Charline Kopf examines how and why railway workers in Senegal and Mali care for a suspended railway. Trains rarely run, yet men continue to attend to the everyday practices that keep the railway alive as a social and political space: they sweep floors, repair wagons, and gather to await the arrival of a new train that might never come. The railway has become an afterplace—a worksite in a post-labor context where infrastructure, no longer fully functi...