In Waste Works, Brenda Chalfin examines Ghana’s planned city of Tema, theorizing about the formative role of waste infrastructure in urban politics and public life. Chalfin argues that at Tema’s midcentury founding, a prime objective of governing authorities was to cultivate self-contained citizens by means of tightly orchestrated domestic infrastructure and centralized control of bodily excrement to both develop and depoliticize the new nation. Comparing infrastructural innovations across the city, Chalfin excavates how Tema residents pursue novel approaches to urban waste and sanitation built on the ruins of the inherited order, profoundly altering the urban public sphere. Once decreed a private matter to be guaranteed by state authorities, excrement becomes a public issue, collectively managed by private persons. Pushing self-care into public space and extending domestic responsibility for public well-being and bodily outputs, popularly devised waste infrastructures are a decisive arena to make claims, build coalitions, and cultivate status. Confounding high-modernist ideals, excremental infrastructures unlock bodily waste’s diverse political potentials.

Brenda Chalfin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida and author of Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa and Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets, and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity.

List of Illustrations  vii
Preface  xi
Acknowledgments  xix
Introduction. Infrastructural Intimacies: The Vital Politics of Waste in Urban Ghana  1
1. Assembling the New City: From Infrastructure to Vital Politics  45
2. Tema Proper: Infrastructures and Intimacies of Disrepair  96
3. The Right(s) to Remains: Excremental Infrastructure and Exception in Tema Manhean  133
4. Ziginshore: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste  181
5. Dwelling on Toilets: Tema's Breakaway Republic of Ashaiman  212
Conclusion. From Vital Politics to Deep Domesticity: Infrastructure as Political Experiment  268
Notes  295
References  315
Index  339