Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift (London: Penguin Random House, 2019), 3.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 1.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 70.
Ibid.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Luck Makuyana, “Hydrocolonialism: A Hydro-critical Reading of Tonga People, Nyami-Nyami and Zambezi River Representations in Chosen Rhodesian/Zimbabwean Texts,” M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand (2020).
Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Arjun Appadurai, “Beyond Domination: The Future and Past of Decolonisation,” The Nation, March 9, 2021, ➝.
Isabel Hofmeyr, “Provisional Notes on Hydrocolonialism,” English Language Notes 57, no. 1 (2019): 11–20.
Louise Bethlehem, “Hydrocolonial Johannesburg,” forthcoming in Interventions, special issue on “Reading for Water,” Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, and Sarah Nuttall eds. (2022).
Sarah Nuttall, “Afterword,” in Planned Violence, eds. Boehmer and Davies.
Chris Haslam, “The marooned baboon: Africa's loneliest monkey,” BBC News, October 3, 2014, ➝.
Serpell, The Old Drift, 554.
“Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau … would become an island.” Ibid.
Ibid., 563.
For a more detailed, extended, and wide-ranging discussion of Serpell’s novel, see Sarah Nuttall, “On Pluviality: Reading for Rain in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift,” forthcoming in Interventions, special issue on “Reading for Water,” Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, and Sarah Nuttall eds. (2022).
Bronislaw Szersynski, “Drift as a Planetary Phenomenon,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 23, no. 7 (2018): 136–144.
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 10 (2013): 327–343.
See especially Sarah Nuttall, “Pluvial Time/Wet Form,” New Literary History 51, no. 2 (2020): 455–471.
Thanks to Kenny Cupers for his helpful suggestions while revising this essay.
Coloniality of Infrastructure is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel, and the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town.