Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-9127050
M. Edwards
Recent reforms in Myanmar afforded local Christians new opportunities to more actively share the gospel with Buddhists. In doing so they entered into a public sphere tentatively emerging from five decades of censorship and other restrictions on expression. This article explores the place of misunderstanding and translation in encounters between evangelists and Buddhist audiences. For evangelists, to go public was to open oneself to the possibility, even the likelihood, of being misunderstood. Such misunderstandings emerged in part from the negotiation of similarity and difference entailed by translation practices. Edwards situates these practices in a conceptual and linguistic space partly shaped by nineteenth-century missionary efforts, and also by state attempts to regulate the public use of Buddhist language.
{"title":"Drowning in Context","authors":"M. Edwards","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-9127050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-9127050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Recent reforms in Myanmar afforded local Christians new opportunities to more actively share the gospel with Buddhists. In doing so they entered into a public sphere tentatively emerging from five decades of censorship and other restrictions on expression. This article explores the place of misunderstanding and translation in encounters between evangelists and Buddhist audiences. For evangelists, to go public was to open oneself to the possibility, even the likelihood, of being misunderstood. Such misunderstandings emerged in part from the negotiation of similarity and difference entailed by translation practices. Edwards situates these practices in a conceptual and linguistic space partly shaped by nineteenth-century missionary efforts, and also by state attempts to regulate the public use of Buddhist language.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49414682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9127037
N. Haynes
In October 2015 the Zambian president broke ground on a new National House of Prayer, a building project meant to reaffirm the country's status as Africa's only self-proclaimed “Christian nation.” Over the next four years architects produced three separate sets of plans for the House of Prayer, images of which were circulated among Zambian Christians, primarily church leaders. Each set of plans has provoked conversations about what the House of Prayer should look like. This article shows how discussions of the building's aesthetic features were connected to the theological-political possibilities of Christian nationalism, crystalizing around two competing models of how to go about making Zambia a (more) Christian nation. By tracing the tension between these models through architectural and aesthetic debates, this article shows the link between images and the theological-political imagination. It therefore builds on anthropological analyses of other parts of the world that have emphasized the political power of aesthetics as more than representations of already existing ideas—that is, as an ideologically and politically productive force in its own right.
{"title":"Concretizing the Christian Nation","authors":"N. Haynes","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9127037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9127037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In October 2015 the Zambian president broke ground on a new National House of Prayer, a building project meant to reaffirm the country's status as Africa's only self-proclaimed “Christian nation.” Over the next four years architects produced three separate sets of plans for the House of Prayer, images of which were circulated among Zambian Christians, primarily church leaders. Each set of plans has provoked conversations about what the House of Prayer should look like. This article shows how discussions of the building's aesthetic features were connected to the theological-political possibilities of Christian nationalism, crystalizing around two competing models of how to go about making Zambia a (more) Christian nation. By tracing the tension between these models through architectural and aesthetic debates, this article shows the link between images and the theological-political imagination. It therefore builds on anthropological analyses of other parts of the world that have emphasized the political power of aesthetics as more than representations of already existing ideas—that is, as an ideologically and politically productive force in its own right.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42901145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-9127011
M. Engelke
This essay introduces the special section “Word, Image, Sound,” a collection of essays on public religion and religious publicities in Africa and South Asia. The essays cover case studies in Myanmar, Zambia, Senegal, Rwanda, and Egypt. The introduction situates the essays in relation to the broader fields of work on the public sphere and publics, especially as they relate to recent work in the human sciences that focus on materiality, the senses, and media.
{"title":"Word, Image, Sound","authors":"M. Engelke","doi":"10.1215/1089201x-9127011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9127011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay introduces the special section “Word, Image, Sound,” a collection of essays on public religion and religious publicities in Africa and South Asia. The essays cover case studies in Myanmar, Zambia, Senegal, Rwanda, and Egypt. The introduction situates the essays in relation to the broader fields of work on the public sphere and publics, especially as they relate to recent work in the human sciences that focus on materiality, the senses, and media.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45950341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916939
Steffi Marung
In this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.
{"title":"Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity","authors":"Steffi Marung","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916939","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916939","url":null,"abstract":"In this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"56-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47326364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916918
Elizabeth L. Banks
This article examines negotiations on aid, scholarship provision, and a hoped-for visit by former cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, that took place between the Committee for Soviet Women (KSZh) and the Organization for Mozambican Women (OMM) as a lens into Soviet-African interaction in the late twentieth century. Women's organizations offer a unique perspective as women's rights occupied a central place in socialism, conceptions of modernity, and African nationalist organizing. Drawing on archives, interviews, and organizational publications, the article highlights how the symbolic and pragmatic politics of these connections were woven together through the circulation of gifts. At the same time, the article draws attention to fundamental misalignment in the groups' conceptions of gender and in their ambitions for the relationship. Bound by institutional norms, the KSZh consistently offered OMM the same set of items year after year, while OMM women asked for alternative forms of support with higher material and symbolic value because they believed their relationship should be mutually determined and relevant for local conditions.
{"title":"Sewing Machines for Socialism?","authors":"Elizabeth L. Banks","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916918","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines negotiations on aid, scholarship provision, and a hoped-for visit by former cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, that took place between the Committee for Soviet Women (KSZh) and the Organization for Mozambican Women (OMM) as a lens into Soviet-African interaction in the late twentieth century. Women's organizations offer a unique perspective as women's rights occupied a central place in socialism, conceptions of modernity, and African nationalist organizing. Drawing on archives, interviews, and organizational publications, the article highlights how the symbolic and pragmatic politics of these connections were woven together through the circulation of gifts. At the same time, the article draws attention to fundamental misalignment in the groups' conceptions of gender and in their ambitions for the relationship. Bound by institutional norms, the KSZh consistently offered OMM the same set of items year after year, while OMM women asked for alternative forms of support with higher material and symbolic value because they believed their relationship should be mutually determined and relevant for local conditions.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"27-40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45474051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-26DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916960
Foad Torshizi
Abstract:This article examines the works of the Iranian contemporary artist, Ghazaleh Hedayat. It argues that her turn from figural representation to nonfigural abstraction and consequently to what Laura Marks has called "haptic visuality" demonstrates a careful and systematic aesthetic strategy that attempts to confront and at times even exit representation. It shows that Hedayat's works since the early 2010s offer an affective approach to feminism in contemporary Iranian art that doesn't hinge on representational modes of expression, which are of en susceptible to assimilation into identitarian narratives and inadvertently complicit in various forms of marginalization (gender, ethnic, etc.). Hedayat's affective feminism not only complicates clichéd interpretations of her work as a non-Western woman, but it also materializes a new form of knowledge more in tune with feminism. Focusing on the female body as a site of pain, friction, tension, love, maternality, and, more significantly, as a site where self and its other—both in terms of gender and ethnicity—encounter each other, Hedayat undermines visibility by way of pushing it across the borders of sight into the realms of visuality, haptic experience, and proprioception.
{"title":"The Affective Feminism of Ghazaleh Hedayat","authors":"Foad Torshizi","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916960","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the works of the Iranian contemporary artist, Ghazaleh Hedayat. It argues that her turn from figural representation to nonfigural abstraction and consequently to what Laura Marks has called \"haptic visuality\" demonstrates a careful and systematic aesthetic strategy that attempts to confront and at times even exit representation. It shows that Hedayat's works since the early 2010s offer an affective approach to feminism in contemporary Iranian art that doesn't hinge on representational modes of expression, which are of en susceptible to assimilation into identitarian narratives and inadvertently complicit in various forms of marginalization (gender, ethnic, etc.). Hedayat's affective feminism not only complicates clichéd interpretations of her work as a non-Western woman, but it also materializes a new form of knowledge more in tune with feminism. Focusing on the female body as a site of pain, friction, tension, love, maternality, and, more significantly, as a site where self and its other—both in terms of gender and ethnicity—encounter each other, Hedayat undermines visibility by way of pushing it across the borders of sight into the realms of visuality, haptic experience, and proprioception.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"106 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44242165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-26DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916967
L. Abu-Lughod, Rana Bishara
Abstract:In this interview conducted by Lila Abu-Lughod on October 17, 2020, Palestinian artist Rana Bishara discusses the three artworks that appear on the covers of volume 41 of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as numerous other multidisciplinary and multimedia artworks she has made and exhibited from the 1990s to the present, focusing specifically on art as a form of political activism.
{"title":"Art, Activism, and the Presence of Memory in Palestine: Interview with Palestinian Artist Rana Bishara","authors":"L. Abu-Lughod, Rana Bishara","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916967","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this interview conducted by Lila Abu-Lughod on October 17, 2020, Palestinian artist Rana Bishara discusses the three artworks that appear on the covers of volume 41 of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as numerous other multidisciplinary and multimedia artworks she has made and exhibited from the 1990s to the present, focusing specifically on art as a form of political activism.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"122 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45730417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-26DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916946
Owain Lawson
Abstract:This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon's postindependence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite "consortium" espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon's national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and underexamined countercurrent advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the postindependence era as an opportunity to claim their profession's status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium's environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.
摘要：本文将工程师们带入黎巴嫩政治经济思想史。黎巴嫩独立后时期的历史学家强调，一个狭隘的精英“财团”是如何支持一种国家意识形态的，这种意识形态授权了自由放任的货币和贸易政策。这些知识分子和商人援引环境决定论，声称贸易、旅游业和服务业是黎巴嫩的国职。这篇文章揭示了工程师们形成了一股有影响力的、未经充分审查的、提倡国家主义发展主义的逆流。工程师官僚们将后独立时代视为一个机会，可以宣称自己的职业地位，并根据他们的现代性概念重新定义资产阶级文化及其与治理机构的关系。水文工程师Ibrahim Abd El Al通过重新解释该财团对黎巴嫩历史的环境叙事，将水资源和农业的合理开发描绘成国家身份的有机表达。这些努力培养了一批具有批判性和技术素养的读者，他们支持国家主义，并塑造了公众如何理解他们的国家主体性以及与自然世界的关系。
{"title":"A National Vocation: Engineering Nature and State in Lebanon's Merchant Republic","authors":"Owain Lawson","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916946","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon's postindependence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite \"consortium\" espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon's national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and underexamined countercurrent advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the postindependence era as an opportunity to claim their profession's status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium's environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"71 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46283962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-26DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916925
Andrew Ivaska
Abstract:This article explores the place of the USSR in the imagination, circuitry, and everyday practice of the early Mozambican nationalist movement configuring itself in exile in Dar es Salaam. Soviet plans, like those of the US, for engaging African liberation movements were ambitiously imagined, but superpower influence cohered within relatively narrow, if global, corridors. This impact (through funding, scholarships, and more) was at once significant and unfolded in unpredictable ways. The article traces these contingent forms across scales of "comrade life," from the leadership rivalries playing out between Dar, Accra, Moscow, Washington DC, and Cairo, to the "view from the veranda": the aspirations, grievances, and material strug les that marked the daily rhythms of life for rank-and-file cadres. What emerges is a less-familiar face of the USSR in Africa. Rather than the Cold War superpower confidently guiding its impact, it appears here as an intimate part of an African-managed infrastructure of political exile.
{"title":"Leveraging Alternatives: Early FRELIMO, the Soviet Union, and the Infrastructure of African Political Exile","authors":"Andrew Ivaska","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916925","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the place of the USSR in the imagination, circuitry, and everyday practice of the early Mozambican nationalist movement configuring itself in exile in Dar es Salaam. Soviet plans, like those of the US, for engaging African liberation movements were ambitiously imagined, but superpower influence cohered within relatively narrow, if global, corridors. This impact (through funding, scholarships, and more) was at once significant and unfolded in unpredictable ways. The article traces these contingent forms across scales of \"comrade life,\" from the leadership rivalries playing out between Dar, Accra, Moscow, Washington DC, and Cairo, to the \"view from the veranda\": the aspirations, grievances, and material strug les that marked the daily rhythms of life for rank-and-file cadres. What emerges is a less-familiar face of the USSR in Africa. Rather than the Cold War superpower confidently guiding its impact, it appears here as an intimate part of an African-managed infrastructure of political exile.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"11 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41883078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-26DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-8916932
A. Siddiqi
Abstract:This article explores the biography of a network of Soviet telescopic cameras stationed across the African Sahel during the Cold War. Through joint Soviet-African cooperative programs, scientists used these advanced cameras in Egypt, Somalia, Mali, the Sudan, and Chad to photograph satellites flying overhead to gather data to produce a new model of the Earth, one that Soviet scientists hoped would be an alternative to Western models. I argue that these technical artifacts in Africa, connected into a single global network, represented examples of "infrastructural irruptions" of Cold War technopolitics into African geography, wherein the superpowers placed networked technologies inside postcolonial spaces for the collection of data. Although these technologies were nominally Soviet in origin, the story could also be read as one of Africans who invested their geography with agency in the production of scientific knowledge. Like the socialist moment in Africa and indeed the Soviet Union itself, this camera network no longer exists, its data compromised and its material imprint disappeared. But this "failure" should not blind us to the immanent power of possibility embedded in this incomplete project. I argue that this combination of unbounded aspiration and incomplete materiality was a powerful manifestation of the African-Soviet Modern.
{"title":"Shaping the World: Soviet-African Technologies from the Sahel to the Cosmos","authors":"A. Siddiqi","doi":"10.1215/1089201X-8916932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8916932","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the biography of a network of Soviet telescopic cameras stationed across the African Sahel during the Cold War. Through joint Soviet-African cooperative programs, scientists used these advanced cameras in Egypt, Somalia, Mali, the Sudan, and Chad to photograph satellites flying overhead to gather data to produce a new model of the Earth, one that Soviet scientists hoped would be an alternative to Western models. I argue that these technical artifacts in Africa, connected into a single global network, represented examples of \"infrastructural irruptions\" of Cold War technopolitics into African geography, wherein the superpowers placed networked technologies inside postcolonial spaces for the collection of data. Although these technologies were nominally Soviet in origin, the story could also be read as one of Africans who invested their geography with agency in the production of scientific knowledge. Like the socialist moment in Africa and indeed the Soviet Union itself, this camera network no longer exists, its data compromised and its material imprint disappeared. But this \"failure\" should not blind us to the immanent power of possibility embedded in this incomplete project. I argue that this combination of unbounded aspiration and incomplete materiality was a powerful manifestation of the African-Soviet Modern.","PeriodicalId":51756,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East","volume":"41 1","pages":"41 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43643651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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