Another very exciting title that will be published by Duke University Press, Brenda Chalfin’s Waste Works: Vital Politics in Urban Ghana, is one of the most recent books we have indexed at Southwest Humanities. In this unflinching and thorough-going study, 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.” Please take a look at the publisher’s website here for more information about Waste Works, which is scheduled to be released in May 2023.
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