Columbia University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa invites you to our events & seminars for AY 2024-25
Asif Siddiqi: "Theater of the Cosmos: Infrastructures of Space in Africa"
This talk is part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering Africa as a crucial site for humanity’s first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on African soil to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across the African continent, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of local populations or damage to the local ecologies. The talk offers a (re)reading of the imprint of this enormous infrastructure through the voices of Africans, many of whom viewed the siting of such technology in their countries as extensions of older forms of extractive colonial violence but rendered now under the cloak of scientific 'progress.'
Asif Siddiqi is a professor of history at Fordham University and specializes in the history of science and technology. He has written several books and articles on the history of Soviet science, including on the Stalinist Gulag and the Soviet space program. More recently, his interests have gravitated to the study of techno scientific infrastructure in Africa and South Asia. He is the author of the forthcoming Departure Gates: Global Histories of Space on Earth (MIT Press, forthcoming).
Please contact [email protected] to RSVP
This year's seminar is dedicated to our dear colleague, Elleni Centime Zeleke,
author of Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016
