Description
Book SynopsisIn
Waste Works, Brenda 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. Once decreed a private matter to be guaranteed by state authorities, excrement becomes a public issue, collectively managed by private persons. Pushing self-care into public space and extending domestic responsibility for public well-being and bodily outputs, popularly devised waste infrastructur
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction. Infrastructural Intimacies: The Vital Politics of Waste in Urban Ghana 1
1. Assembling the New City: From Infrastructure to Vital Politics 45
2. Tema Proper: Infrastructures and Intimacies of Disrepair 96
3. The Right(s) to Remains: Excremental Infrastructure and Exception in Tema Manhean 133
4. Ziginshore: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste 181
5. Dwelling on Toilets: Tema's Breakaway Republic of Ashaiman 212
Conclusion. From Vital Politics to Deep Domesticity: Infrastructure as Political Experiment 268
Notes 295
References 315
Index 339
