This lecture by Rebecca Bryant (Utrecht University, Netherlands) had to be cancelled.

In early European imperialism, trade and resource exploitation financed lavish building projects in metropolitan centers and fueled further colonial expansion. Today, rising economic powers with global ambitions rely on building the infrastructure of other states to drive reconstruction in their own capitals and to create “soft power” empires. This lecture will turn an ethnographic lens on Turkey’s infrastructural imperialism, particularly megaprojects, and will propose a set analytical terms that may be extrapolated to comparative cases such as China, India, and increasingly Russia. All of these countries have construction sectors that are reshaping the Global South and have driven economic booms at home. The presentation will propose that spectacular megaprojects create infra-imaginaries, infra-power, and infra-subjectivities and that these ideas are reshaping the ways that people around hte world imagine global futures. Moreover, understanding them requires a language beyond that of neoliberal globalization with its teleological assumptions of increasing political and economic liberalization. The paper will conclude by suggesting that the relationship between infrastructure and empire offers a window onto a fundamentally new understanding of power relations in a globalized world.

Rebecca Bryant is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and an anthropologist of politics and law. She studied Philosophy (B.A.) and Cultural Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Chicago and has since held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, the American University in Cairo, and other institutions. Through her research on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey, her work investigates the state and sovereignty with a special focus on temporality, historicities, and the future.

The lecture will be held in a hybrid format. For participation on site at ZMO no registration is needed. To participate online, please follow this link: tinyurl.com/summer-colloquium