Waste Works: Vital Politics in Urban Ghana

Brenda Chalfin

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In 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 infrastructures are a decisive arena to make claims, build coalitions, and cultivate status. Confounding high-modernist ideals, excremental infrastructures unlock bodily waste's diverse political potentials.

Book Details

Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: May 5th, 2023
Pages: 376
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.90in - 1.50lb
EAN: 9781478019589
Categories: • Sociology - Urban• Africa - General• Anthropology - Cultural & Social

About the Author

Brenda Chalfin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida and author of Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa and Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets, and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity.

Praise for this book

". . . this substantial, well researched study presents an engaging account of the vitality of West African urbanism and the resourcefulness of Tema's inhabitants. Moreover, by documenting the afterlives of Tema's sanitary infrastructure, Chalfin makes an important contribution to the growing scholarship on the urban politics of modern architecture and planning in West Africa."--Rixt Woudstra "Architectural Theory Review" (3/19/2024 12:00:00 AM)