{"id":542,"date":"2024-05-21T09:10:19","date_gmt":"2024-05-21T09:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ercforagency.eu\/?page_id=542"},"modified":"2024-05-21T09:17:49","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T09:17:49","slug":"public-lecture-prof-dr-kwame-edwin-otu-colonial-inhalations-e-waste-work-and-wastemen-in-necropolitical-ghana","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ercforagency.eu\/index.php\/events\/public-lecture-prof-dr-kwame-edwin-otu-colonial-inhalations-e-waste-work-and-wastemen-in-necropolitical-ghana\/","title":{"rendered":"Public lecture: Prof. dr. Kwame Edwin Otu – Colonial Inhalations: E-waste work and Wastemen in Necropolitical Ghana"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Public lecture by Prof. dr. Kwame Edwin Otu Colonial Inhalations: E-waste work and Wastemen in Necropolitical Ghana<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

13 June 2024, 4-6 PM, Hoek 38, room Gogotte<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Free attendance, mandatory registration via this link <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

FORAGENCY<\/a>, the SHOC<\/a> research Group and the Atelier Genre(s) et Sexualit\u00e9(s)<\/a> from the Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles are thrilled to welcome Prof. dr. Kwame Edwin Otu (Georgetown University) for an exceptional lecture on his ongoing research with e-waste pickers in Accra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Prof. Otu<\/a> is a cultural and environmental anthropologist working on the politics of sexual,
environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and their intersections with
shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. His first monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-
Making in Neoliberal Ghana<\/a>, was published by the University of California Press in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lecture abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 30th<\/sup> 2024, I received news that one of the electronic waste workers participating in my ethnography on the effects of e-waste work in Agbogbloshie and Sodom and Gomorrah, in Accra, Ghana, and allegedly the location of the world\u2019s largest e-waste dump, had died. Until his demise, he had been working for nearly half of his life on the dump. This talk is my tribute to him and an opportunity to highlight the \u201cslow violence\u201d at the core of the postcolonial nation-state. In this presentation, I examine how colonial configurations of power and dispossession internal to the Ghanaian nation-state interact with e-waste workers in ways that reduce them to waste. I explore how e-waste workers\u2019 exposure to toxic fumes from burning obsolete technology both conceals and makes visible the necropolitical matrix of the postcolonial nation state. Colonial inhalation is used here to describe how the inhalation of toxic fumes exemplifies how the nation-state adjudicates the rhythms of breathing for its subjects. I draw on Frantz Fanon\u2019s notion of \u201ccombat breathing,\u201d which captures how the colonized hold on to their last breath for survival amid the unyieldingness of coloniality and the Ghanaian writer, Amu Djoleto\u2019s novelization of the \u201cvampire state\u201d in his book Money Galore<\/em>. Reading Fanon and Djoleto together, I illuminate how the colonial state\u2019s metamorphosis into a postcolony recalibrates the logics of extraction and deposition. The question guiding this presentation is twofold: How does e-waste work articulate the ways in which the unyielding nature of coloniality induces combat breathing? And in what ways is coloniality predicated on wasting, wasted, and waste as the lives of e-waste workers reveal?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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