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Publication: "Upending coloniality: Race and infrastructure from Ghana's urban gold-mining hinterlands"
Ernest Sewordor's article questions the linear and determinist way coloniality has been deployed in the extant literature on infrastructure, by expanding the term to reflect a spectrum of racial politics dominated by metropolitan mining capitalists in 20th-century Ghana and how colonial subjects shaped the urban mining hinterlands.
Abstract
This article explores how the intersection between infrastructure and racialization shaped the urbanization of gold-mining enclaves in colonial Ghana to rethink coloniality. The coloniality of infrastructure has often been tied to the idea that colonial relations of power are historically perpetuated via sociotechnical networks with unequal consequences globally. This position presumes an almost inescapable dilemma for those with limited access to political power especially in the global South and argues that colonial hangovers continue to shape contemporary life through infrastructure. Yet, redefining coloniality to mean multilayered, differentially constituted relations of power that are often incoherent, contested, and negotiated through anticolonial Indigenous struggles against white hegemony or dispossession elicits fresh insights. Ultimately, this article questions the linear and determinist way coloniality has been deployed in the extant literature, by expanding the term to reflect a spectrum of racial politics dominated by metropolitan mining capitalists in 20th-century Ghana and how colonial subjects shaped the urban mining hinterlands in ways that reconfigure the received meaning of coloniality.