The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space

Abstract

This paper addresses an intersection between postcolonial studies and science studies, examining the greater colonial context of space exploration. In response to Chakrabarty’s call to ‘provincialize Europe’, I ask what it might mean to ‘provincialize’ outer space, considering locality relative to extra-planetary distance, and the asymmetries of history next to the symmetrical methodology advocated by Latour. By way of a brief reading of fictional texts that played an important role in the technical imagination leading up to spaceflight, I sketch the colonizing impulse that underwrote space exploration through and beyond the age of empire. I then turn to the French/European launch site at Kourou, French Guiana, where a sparsely populated former colony became a preferred launching ground for communication satellites into equatorial orbits. Here the representation of outer space as a final frontier crosses the remains of older colonial projects, uneasily confronting the landscape of their human legacy. In opposition to the space centre’s focus on adventure, political focus within French Guiana stresses development and strives to confront the space project with the local legacy of colonial failure. A conflict over the closing of a stretch of road provides a situated moment to illustrate these contrasting understandings of the place of outer space. In this conflict, I suggest, the very length and orientation of the space centre’s network affect the locality of its representation, revealing after-effects of earlier formations of geography and history. Thus, in resituating outer space against the ground, it remains important to distinguish between local knowledges and techniques that are more or less expansive, and keep in sight the different spatial and temporal frames within which ‘the local’ takes shape.