Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity

Abstract

AbstractBuilding on critical geographical scholarship on racialism and coloniality reiterated through infrastructure systems, this article explores how inherently colonial constructs of ethnicity‐as‐identity—as sub‐genres of humanity and further biopolitical differentiation of Blackness—are reworked through contemporary mega‐infrastructures. Focusing on the development of Lamu Port in Kenya, it analyses how infrastructures entrench pre‐existing symbolic and material divisions between ostensibly different ethnic groups and how they perceive themselves within Kenya's body politic. Doing this, the article demonstrates how mega‐infrastructures actively reproduce the sub‐genres of humanity that were set in motion during the colonial period as categories inscribing the racialised, constitutive otherness to Whiteness. The coloniality of power, therefore, endures, reverberating through infrastructures into materialities of the present and the everyday of peoples who continue to rely on colonial grammars of sub‐humanisation to maintain a sense of self in the world of not their own making.