Affect and the dialectics of uncertainty: Governing a Paraguayan frontier town

Abstract

This article discusses the affective politics enabling urban development in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, a young frontier boomtown where the volume of the extralegal transborder trade once exceeded the GDP of the entire nation. Against stereotypes of the city as lawless, I demonstrate how governing practices work through affect and emotion. I argue that local strategies of governing have temporal and spatial dimensions that produce an affective field of uncertainty for hawkers and street vendors. Paradoxically, the legal and spatial ambiguities that produce uncertainty as a disciplining structure of feeling are also the grounds from which vendors make claims to urban space. Yet vendors develop their own registers of need and entitlement through a politics of affective interconnection. This paper contributes to debates on the government of precarity and to geographical studies on emotion and affect by exploring how this dialectics of uncertainty enables exclusionary urban development.