Browsing by Author "Kar, Bodhisatva"

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    Omeya: Water, work and infrastructure in Ovamboland from 1915 to 1968
    (2020) Vigne, Benjamin; Kar, Bodhisatva
    This dissertation seeks to explore the ways in which the multiple layers of infrastructure and archive have been coconstituted in Ovamboland from 1915 to 1968 in an effort to store, circulate and redirect water and its knowledge, which in turn seemed to frequently escape and exceed them. In the existent historiography of Ovamboland, infrastructure has usually been taken as a passive background to policies, designs and intentions of an all-knowing colonizing state. In foregrounding infrastructure as its analytical object, this thesis attempts to challenge such self-images of the state, to complicate the standard political chronology of rule, and to examine the various ways in which technical assemblages were both constituted by and productive of broader social, political and economic configurations. Methodologically, the dissertation is attentive to the spiral and palimpsestic nature of infrastructure – in other words, the ways in which new layers of infrastructure had to necessarily rely on, adopt and adapt to older sociotechnical strata. This awareness also allows the work to interrogate the received binary between the Europeans and the natives, pointing instead at their multiple entanglements and imbrications. The first chapter looks at the early attempt of the South African officials to master the underground borehole and well technology, and shows how in the process of extending their political and economic control over the hydroscape, they were necessarily reliant not only on local labour but also on indigenous knowledge and experience. The emergent borehole and well infrastructure of the region was critically connected to older social, political, A b s t r a c t epistemological and technical forms, and embedded in entrenched configurations of cattle, agriculture and land. The second chapter, as it were, moves closer to the surface in order to analyse the production of dam infrastructure as a form of famine-relief work, and eventually the introduction of the Tribal Trust Fund System. It shows how this dam infrastructure, while drawing from precolonial designs and local knowledge, established and acted out new relations between money, grain and labour. Crucially embedded in the colonial refashioning of ‘tribal' economies, the financial infrastructure of the Tribal Trust Fund System, superimposed on the well and dam infrastructure, was devised to operationalise a particular managerial regime of the flows of labour, grain and cash. The third chapter looks at such forms of water infrastructure where the state took a more centralised and developmental approach. It shows that in the attempts to manage the water infrastructure in a self-described scientific and technical manner, the new infrastructure still necessarily adapted to and adopted earlier knowledge, techniques and practices, while older layers of infrastructure continued to operate beside and within it. This chapter explores how the introduction of major canals and hydroelectric power generation led to a new intense developmentalist approach by the state where attempted to design a total integrated water infrastructure and economy.
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    Tempered Tempos: The Politics of Waiting for Public Services in Contemporary Cape Town
    (2019) Pakleppa, Yoni; Kar, Bodhisatva; Garuba, H
    This dissertation recognises that waiting for public services in South Africa is becoming an increasingly important point of contestation between the state and its citizens. Rather than exploring the spectacular expressions of this tension seen in ongoing service delivery protests, it foregrounds the everyday experiences of waiting for public services at three key sites in Cape Town: the dispersed everyday waiting for public transport at train stations; the queues at the Department of Home Affairs regional office for South African Identity Document applications; and the waiting room of the Chapel Street Community Health Clinic. In relation to each of these sites, it engages the ethnographic method to investigate who waits for what and for how long, what this waiting entails, and the meanings that those who wait draw from these lengthy and repeated experiences. The dissertation consists of three chapters which put into conversation the connections between postcolonial infrastructural crises, socially fractured temporal experiences, and the everyday culture of interaction with the state. By tracing the history of how infrastructures and systems of delivery were designed to support first the project of colonial modernity, and later the project of apartheid, it explains why the experience of waiting is so prominent in accessing public services in this particular context. It then moves away from the contextual to focus on how these broad frameworks manifest in individuated everyday experiences of waiting. It finds that despite the fact that the modes of waiting vary significantly between sites, in all three, waiting is socially fractured and decidedly uneven, in both obvious and unseen ways. Lastly, it considers the diverse effects of waiting to conclude that although waiting can impel people to patiently endure, there are also moments when waiting is challenged, resisted, and redeployed in the popular domain to take on new and empowering meanings.
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    The Infrastructures of Occupation: Iraq, 2003 – 2012
    (2022) Cannard, Jonathan; Kar, Bodhisatva
    The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, beginning a nine-year-long military engagement and occupation. Alongside more orthodox military activity, the US occupation attempted to rebuild and reshape Iraq's infrastructure networks, most of which had been severely damaged during the 2003 invasion, the United Nations sanctions, and previous wars. This dissertation is a critical history of the efforts of the US occupation to produce new infrastructures in Iraq. Drawing on a specific range of primary sources (namely, the documents of the various institutions of the occupation), the dissertation attempts to write a new narrative of the so-called reconstruction of Iraq. It rejects the absolutist understanding of state sovereignty as reflected in the state-building discourse as a productive analytical frame, and instead offers to look closely at the material, social, and cultural contingencies that shaped the state's agency. This narrative explores the materiality and the performativity of discourse in examining the effects of infrastructure on Iraqi politics, economy, and subjectivity. The first chapter focuses on material infrastructures, exploring the materiality of power and the interactions of US discourses and practices with Iraqi material and social actants. The second chapter examines financial infrastructure, analysing the occupying regime's attempts to produce the instruments of monetary policy, while conjuring a new figure of financial subjectivity. The third and final chapter focuses on political infrastructure, examining the process of drafting of the constitution and the production of civil society organisations through an infrastructural lens. All three chapters are linked by explications of the political and economic assumptions built into technical objects, the deployment of infrastructure as a counterinsurgency strategy, and revelations of the limits of state agency.
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    Wits imagined: an investigation into Wits University's public roles and responsibilities, 1922 - 1994
    (2020) Odendaal, Rehana Thembeka; Hamilton, Carolyn; Kar, Bodhisatva
    This thesis examines the public roles and responsibilities of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in the period 1922-1994. It does this through a close investigation of four moments in the history of the University, namely the foundation of Wits (1910s and 1920s); early debates about the entry of Black staff and students (1930s and 1940s); the Academic Freedom protests (starting in the mid-1950s) and the formation of the Wits History Workshop (from 1977 to the early 1990s). In each of these moments, social roles and perceptions of public responsibility were actively asserted or challenged through engagements between internal-university constituencies and external communities. The thesis identifies three core roles for Wits University over this period: providing technical and professional training; generating and authenticating expert knowledge and shaping people's ideas of citizenship. The practical and conceptual understandings of these three roles, however, have shifted over time as the University's conceptualisation of the communities it serves has changed. These shifts have happened in conversation with different civic and state actors. The thesis has found that ideas of the public roles of Wits are informed by an institutional sense of self-referential authority accumulated through various moments and practices in the University's history. This self-referential authority depends on a selective recalling of particular events and the ability of multiple narratives about the University's identity to circulate simultaneously. This self-referential authority draws on Wits' origins as an institution of late-Imperial modernity and its legacy as a so-called ‘open' university. Understanding the practices and legacies that have created these narratives through an examination of the University's history, is particularly important in the present moment when the future public responsibilities of South African universities are being vigorously questions and debated.