From ruins and rubble: promised and suspended futures in Kenya (and beyond)

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

In the first quarter of the twenty-first 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 article establishes the overarching argumentation and framing of the “Living with Ruins” special collection, outlines key theoretical concepts like ruination, infrastructuring, and future-making, and 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
OriginalspracheEnglisch
ZeitschriftJournal of Eastern African Studies
Jahrgang17
Ausgabenummer1-2
Seiten (von - bis)141-164
Anzahl der Seiten24
ISSN1753-1063
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 11.2023
Extern publiziertJa

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
Research for this article was carried out within the Collaborative Research Centre 228 “Future Rural Africa”, based at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Project-ID 328966760–TRR 228. We would like to thank first and foremost the authors of our special collection “Living with Ruins: Ruination and Future-making in Kenya (and beyond)” for their valuable contributions and input throughout the course of this publication project. This project started with a workshop in March 2019 at the British Institute in Easter Africa (BIEA) in Nairobi, and we would like to thank BIEA for their hospitality and support, as well as additional participants of the workshop, namely Prince Guma and Eric Kioko. We are particularly thankful to the two reviewers for providing useful comments, to a reviewer who commented on the entire collection, and not least to the editors of JEAS for the opportunity to frame our collection with this paper.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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