Assembling a Regional Community: Infrastructuralization, Regional Integration, & Triumphalism in Southern Africa

What happens when regional unity is made infrastructural? This dissertation uses the analytic of infrastructuralization to ethnographically examine the seemingly contradictory political, economic, technical, and affective processes and experiences of regional integration. Taking the region of southern Africa as a unit of analysis and as a still-unfolding and continuous negotiation of the radical (impossibilities of overcoming colonialism and uneven development in southern Africa between the 1980s and 2063, this dissertation advances an ethnographic study of regional integration and a new decolonial "anthropology of southern Africa" by bringing into critical analysis what identify as an imagined and contested techno-utopian geography still under political and infrastructural assembly. Through three parts and six chapters, the dissertation examines the implications of assembling southern Africa as a techno-utopian geography and a regional community through historic and unprecedented investments in corridor-connectivity infrastructure (transnational or intraregional roads, railways, and border posts) and by political chokepoints emergent in regional cooperative projects and international technical assistance. This dissertation is based on one year of ethnographic research at the Kazungula Bridge One Stop Border Post (OSBP) at the quadripoint where four borders - Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe - meet along the largest trade corridor in sub-Saharan Africa. Further ethnographic and historical evidence includes a technical assistance archive, planning documents, regional and continental development plans, and global frameworks for development including those advanced by the United Nations and the World Bank. As a flagship regional integration and regional development project Kazungula OSBP is methodologically a node from where I observe the everyday business of managing and experiencing regional circulations through participant observation of government officials, regional and international development consultants and other experts, customs officers, customs clearing agents, cross-border traders and cross-border truck drivers and border communities.

Analytically, infrastructuralization centers not the infrastructure, but instead shows the imaginative implications of how the anti-colonial aspiration of regional collaboration itself becomes an infrastructure through which the political idea of the region is expressed. Assembling a Regional Community thus draws attention both to the material scaffoldings and technical promises of corridor connectivity infrastructure as well as the political utility of the region as a techno-utopian postcolonial geography. I conceptualize and critique infrastructural triumphalism in this dissertation as a mode of instrumental reasoning which rests on the assumption that infrastructure, technology, and technical expertise are sufficient conditions for the realization of postcolonial futures. This is an ethnography of a regional community under assembly. 

Meeting ID: 980-3816-5698

Password: 091960