Foreword: Attending to Infrastructure, Thinking from within the Blackout
By Omar Jabary Salamanca and Aya Nassar*
June 2023
Blackouts — worrying as they might be— are evocative of contradictory realities, sentiments, and imaginations…
A blackout might be a sudden lull, a quieting down, where our attention tugs at what is in the background.
A blackout often is an indication of malfunction — for some, exceptional and temporary, for others, ordinary and ongoing.
A blackout might be the tip of the iceberg of depleting incompetence and political abandonment.
It might also be a carefully targeted and calculated infliction of violence.
A blackout equally suggests a loss of consciousness, sight or memory, a moment of disorientation in time and space.
Within a blackout we might be terrified or lulled into resignation.
Within a blackout, when obscurity and opacity provide a cover, we can also imagine openings, workarounds, makeshift and patchwork solutions to keep on going.
A blackout is perhaps an apt metaphor for the contemporary moment in the so-called Arab world–a time of political darkness that follows or rather accompanies the promise of revolutionary emancipation. In the aftermath of the popular uprisings which spread like wildfire, shaking authoritarian rule from Tunisia to Bahrain, the region has been plunged back into a time of counter-revolution, authoritarian retrenchment, imperial wars, sectarianism, deepening economic crises, forced displacements and ecological devastation.
However, for those on the receiving end of these forms of violence, a blackout is no metaphor. As we were finalising this special issue, military clashes erupted in the Sudanese capital city and our friends in Khartoum could barely communicate that they were in a blackout amidst shelling, fighting and uncertainty. Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer from nearly two decades of Israeli colonial siege and military bombardments which have resulted among other things in a chronic electricity deficit with devastating consequences. The people of Iraq and Libya, whose countries have been devastated by imperial wars and sit atop the largest oil reserves in the world, regularly protest enduring electricity cuts of up to 18 hours a day. In Syria, where the current regime crushed the revolutionary momentum while the US continues to loot the country’s oil reserves, there is no fuel for powering domestic generators, factories and universities and long power outages have become a daily routine in Damascus. In Yemen, electricity shortages have contributed to exacerbate the famine and other dire effects of the Saudi blockade. Before the explosion in the port of Beirut, the streets of the capital had become accustomed to night shadows and the buzzing of electricity generators which cry of chronic corruption. Meanwhile, refugees and migrant workers across the region continue to live in makeshift accommodations which are often unsafe, overcrowded, and lacking basic amenities such as electricity to live through uncaring winters and scorching summers.
Whereas these sombre geographies speak to neglected, widespread and normalised crises across the region, they say little about the genealogies, relations, forces and actors that produce the contested material and imaginary conditions of a blackout. Thinking, or rather imagining, from a blackout, attunes us towards noticing the complex relations that tie us to the material world, bringing us together or apart. It pushes us to ask questions about how our everyday lives are unevenly sustained? On whose labour are we dependent? On what relations of care are we reliant? And in which relations of power are we enmeshed? Crucially, it also orients us to think more explicitly about our material and ecological lives; how our lives and societies are entangled with the material world in ways that are politically meaningful. Matter matters. Materiality structures, sustains, connects, fractures, and gets undone. Materiality also attaches itself to particular imaginaries, hopes, promises, as well as residues, threats, and toxicities, and therefore it is bounded by nonlinear temporalities and fragmented spatialities and ecologies. These themes and questions are at the core of the invitation the editors of this special issue extended, and it is what the contributors respond to in a myriad of ways. In following the material and imaginary lives of infrastructure from within a blackout, this special issue and its contributors politicise what might otherwise appear as inert, neutral, or a background: not just grids, cables and poles, pipelines, stones, rubble, roads, dams, and bridges but also the circulations of goods, people, knowledge and capital.
In this special issue, the collection of essays and their inspirited approaches and lenses help us to tease out the lives of infrastructure in a variety of contexts from North Africa and the Middle East. These contexts often have little echo in mainstream studies on infrastructure and the environment. Equally important, these contributions offer a path to work creatively towards unbounding infrastructure from its disciplinary and methodological moorings. Far from an orthodox attachment to narrow understandings of infrastructure, the pieces included in this issue draw from eclectic perspectives by geographers, urbanists, architects, designers, filmmakers, educators and poets who often straddle the line between academia and arts to tell meaningful stories of urban life. Grounded in the region’s contexts and realities, this work contributes to reassessing critical questions that continue to define contemporary explorations of infrastructure and the material world. These accounts problematise for instance the modern promise of infrastructure as compromised futures which are profoundly entangled with the material legacies of empire across the region. The theme of visibility and invisibility is also addressed in ways that contest the idea that we only notice infrastructure when it fails. Thinking within a blackout, the question of ‘what happens when infrastructure fails’ is turned on its head to consider instead how infrastructure failure is precisely what is intended in situations of engineered abandonment.
The special issue draws inspiration from and includes work that explores infrastructures as an object of study, materialised social relations, affective experiences, repositories of memory, contested assemblages, as well as a lens to disentangle individual and collective political imaginaries. Collectively these essays provide valuable insights into the region while offering meaningful engagements and contributions to ongoing and global debates on infrastructure. In particular, the collection brings several themes to the fore that we would like to highlight here.
First, that attending to infrastructures within the blackout is always enmeshed with reckoning with erasures. For we cannot understand infrastructure and its political complicities without attending to its relations with multiple forms of erasure, including violence, displacement, alienation or more piecemeal forms of repurposing, alterations and transformations. To follow extensions of infrastructures is thus to attend to what it swipes away, replace, and rewrite. Second, to focus on infrastructure and its materiality is to consider how it is engendered corporeally, in the flesh. In other words, to entangle hegemonic scalar politics with the everyday practices of living with (or without) infrastructure and the necessary relations of care, maintenance, labour, investment and coping that the presence and absence of infrastructure demand. Third, to explore infrastructures is also to consider their ecological entanglements, be it the landscapes which they transform, nature on which they capitalize or which they aim to master, and the systems of extraction or toxicities and ruin they might bring about. Finally, a critical account of the collapse of infrastructure is necessarily a critical investigation of particular lacks and gaps, such as relations of complicity and accountability as well as ownership and responsibility of those collaborators near and far implicated in modern forms of social and ecological ruination.
In many of the pieces in this special issue, the authors stay with the question of what people do within a blackout. Conditions future uncertainty mobilise actions in the present, in the here and now. These might be read as making do and getting by, working around depletion and abandonment to reach out to others, or setting in place mechanisms of defence and contestation. Contributions to this issue thus stay with different practices of our broadly conceived “blackout”: from pirating and circumventing, archiving and commemorating, storytelling and poetic narrations, to organised resistance through demonstrations and strikes. Together these individual and collective practices provide a rich and incisive account of the intersecting and uneven geographies of infrastructure provision, their failures, weak points, and how ⎯far from being fixed entities⎯ infrastructures are malleable, always becoming, reworked, reconfigured and contested.
What the pieces also insightfully demonstrate is how infrastructure complicate notions of temporality: that is how the past, present and future intersect and are remembered, what we might term as infrastructural traces. Several pieces for instance attach themselves to the legacies of past projects, or anticipated infrastructures that never materialize. Others follow the trajectories and temporalities of specific infrastructures noting their mutations, their afterlives, the traces they leave materially, ecologically, or affectively. The memory of infrastructure therefore is central to the ways in which this special issue engages with the built environment and the material world. Approaching the traces of infrastructure also allows us to think poetically and speculatively about the different futures and geographies of our part of the world: past-futures, alternative futures, impossible futures or desired futures. Indeed, some of the pieces in this issue take this speculative invitation seriously by rereading the past or re-telling it anew in generative ways.
Ultimately, this issue collectively asks: can we tell stories of infrastructure that on the one hand engage with the uneven and complex social, political, economic and environmental realities of the region and on the other do not reinforce orientalist, doom-and-gloom representations of our spaces and times? Through their critical and creative engagement, we believe that the essays included in this issue offer a preliminary yet affirmative answer. There are politics to narrating the stories of our blackouts, and this volume is an important first step to shake the lexicon and the grammar in which these stories are often told. Having said that, we still face erasures and omissions despite the best intentions: readers of the issue will note the predominance of submissions in English. More importantly, readers as well as editors will be aware of how a particular geography of knowledge production privileges specific sites of narration while others remain underrepresented. Infrastructures of knowledge production, writing and dissemination are therefore also with their own blind spots and glitches, this one is no exception. We hope however, that some of the threads resonate and weave a picture; partial and incomplete as it might be, about how infrastructure is engendered, contested and imagined in our part of the world.
*These authors contributed equally to this work and greatly enjoyed their collaboration. The order of author names was randomly determined by the alphabet.