Emma Park’s latest book, Infrastructural Attachments: Austerity, Sovereignty, and Expertise in Kenya (Duke University Press, 2024) is one of the most recent books to be indexed by Southwest Humanities. Another excellent African studies monograph from Duke University Press, Park’s book expands our understanding of infrastructure and urges us to reconsider such concepts as neoliberalism, sovereignty, austerity, and citizenship. “Set against critiques of neoliberal capitalism in the present, Infrastructural Attachments argues that the technopolitics of austerity have been the organizing logic of statecraft in Kenya since the late nineteenth century, calling into question the novelty of austerity as a mode of governance and a lived experience. Using infrastructures as a lens to explore state formation over the long twentieth century—roads in the early colonial period, radio broadcasting from the interwar through the postwar periods, and mobile phones and digital financial services in the present—historian Emma Park reveals that as the state drew on private capital to make up for limited budgets, it inaugurated a peculiar political-economic form: the corporate-state.” Infrastructural Attachments will be available for purchase on 22 November 2024. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 