Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the temporal transformation of an electricity crisis in Accra, Ghana into a "trend", exploring the postcolonial "chronopolitics" of infrastructure through the remaking of a fashionable present.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I look at the transformation of a 2014-2016 energy crisis in Accra, Ghana (colloquially known as Dumsor, Twi for off/on), experienced as a moment of economic stagnation and social paralysis, into a popular trend (abaso, meaning "what has come on top"). Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, I explore the ways in which a vernacular poetics of crisis turned an instance of infrastructural decline and failure into what Johannes Fabian (1998) has called "moments of freedom", creating opportunities for self-exposure, forms of desire, laughter and pleasure through idioms of resilience expressing the ability to stay afloat and to "keep moving" in moments of enforced shutdowns. In Ghana, as elsewhere in Africa, the political temporality of infrastructure has been deeply embedded in discourses of modernity, acting as economic indicators of growth and development, as visible manifestations of "good governance". Infrastructures are often taken as the most objective signs of success and international recognition, and have therefore become critical to claims of "global membership" and demands for "comparability" (Ferguson 2006) in the global economy. The "chronopolitics" (Klinke 2013) of Dumsor, emphasizing an unflinching commitment to the present and an apparent resistance to speculating or divining the future, acted as a temporal "trick" (Morosanu 2016) and tripping of linear time into forms of attraction that opened up possibilities of intervention in postcolonial temporalities of modernity.