Offshore Anthropocene, Archipelagic Affordances: Infrastructure, Imaginaries, and (Re)making Futures
University of Edinburgh, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Biography
Nabanita Samanta (she/her) is a doctoral researcher in sociology/social anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (Mumbai, India). With a distinctive leaning for transdisciplinary research, she locates her research-interests at the intra-section of ecology, society, and the self (broadly conceived). Her research engagements span across the transdisciplinary fields of political ecology and ecological anthropology, critical ocean studies and blue humanities, anthropology of infrastructure, STS, and resistance studies. Her ongoing PhD project seeks to understand the processes of making and unmaking of coastal infrastructures, particularly against the backdrop of Anthropocenic poly-crises on one hand and the proliferating regime of ‘blue-growth’ on the other. More details on her academic profile can be found here. As an EARTH scholar, Nabanita was based at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh.
Introduction
“(I)nfrastructures are … powerful material forms where social consciousness about desired futures and the order of political life are lived, opened up, or closed off .” (Ballestero 2019: 21)
The above quote encapsulates one of the primal considerations that has prompted me to engage with infrastructures – more specifically infrastructures that have been contested on different grounds. In my understanding, the instances of contestations bring into focus how infrastructures remain riddled with diverging imaginaries and anticipations that sustain varying expressions of futurity and diverse political subjectivities – thereby marking some cracks and openings on the foreclosed futurity as imbricated in the singular and homogenous framing of dominant narrative or imaginary. In my EARTH scholarship project, I have tried to unpack and problematize one such dominant imaginary – the infrastructural imaginary of ‘port-led prosperity’ which has remained as one of the mainstays for the proliferating regime of ‘blue growth’. Just as the policy impetus and mainstream narrative continue to figure ports with the promise of ‘prosperity’, the instances of simultaneous mounting of resistance and contestations dispel the seemingly sacrosanct character of the said promise. Foregrounding these plural voices makes it evident that infrastructure as material-semiotic figuration of diverse political subjectivities enables and/or forecloses certain senses and sensibilities, opens up certain futures while closing off other visions of futures. Driven by an inclination to speculate and creatively imagine the temporal horizons for infrastructuring otherwise, I make some preliminary conceptual moves to reimagine ‘infrastructure’ not as a ‘thing’ but an assemblage of relations – through this articulation, I insist on the generative affordances of infrastructural thinking that hinge on alternative affective possibilities of remaking sociotechnical systems by centering more-than-human relationalities and multiplicities of futurities.
Research
Given that I am in early stage of my PhD, the EARTH scholarship provided me with the opportunity to embark on an exploratory journey delving deeper into some of my research questions, reworking them, opening them up for broader horizons of thinking, widening the ambit of my understanding by offering avenues for comparative analysis, and pushing myself to the limits of disciplinary boundaries. As the EARTH scholarship programme is distinctly driven by a leaning for disciplinary crossings to enable pluralizing and un-disciplining of environmental research, it allowed me the space to traverse multiple conceptual terrains while navigating across not only many research questions but also different spacetimes and diverse geographies spanning across the coasts and islands of India to the archipelagic Scotland.
In many ways, my research-orientation for this project has been shaped by critical engagements with the intertwined ‘oceanic turn’ as manifested through the proliferation of blue economy on one hand and the flourishing of blue humanities on the other – interestingly, these two ambits of ‘blue turn’, despite having many divergences, share some common ground in terms of an entrenched yearning for ‘blue fix’ in material and intellectual registers.
Picture credit: Nabanita.
Picture description and additional note: In the picture, there is the word ‘Oceanic’ written in capital letters. The word has been written on the sandy shore, just near the shoreline as the waves dash against the shore; and I wrote it while taking a solitary walk along the teeming shoreline and ruminating over the multiple iterations of oceanic onto-epistemologies. In many ways, my research orientation has been animated by oceanic (be)longing – an existential leaning towards engaging with the ‘oceanic’ in its plural and polymorphous renderings, the oceanic as configured and connected by human and more-than-human relationalities, the oceanic as it is made known or reckoned unknowable through multiple and messy registers.]
Contextual as it is to mention here, ‘blue growth’ as an umbrella term refers to wide-ranging techno-capitalistic ventures aiming at harnessing marine resources and turning the oceans into a new frontier for economic growth. The term ‘blue growth’ has gained significant traction in the contemporary policy lexicons as several countries have started adopting this term in their national economic plans while many of the transnational organizations have been pushing for concerted efforts towards promoting blue growth. It is important to note here that the term ‘blue growth’ is often invoked almost synonymously with ‘blue economy’, thereby underscoring the dominant imaginary of premising ‘economy’ on a ‘growth’-centric paradigm. Just as I have been looking at the policy discourses around ‘blue growth’ in the Indian context, the EARTH scholarship provided me with the opportunity to explore some bits of how ‘blue economy’ is shaping up in Scotland.
Setting out long-term ambitious visions for 2045, ‘The Blue Economy Vision for Scotland’, a vision document published by the Scottish government, foregrounds the necessary impetus for ‘economic prosperity’, as the said document emphasizes that “Our seas can, and should, create and maintain economic prosperity for the nation, especially in our remote, coastal and island communities” (page 1). This vision document, however, acknowledges that a narrow focus on economic growth is not adequate, more so for human wellbeing being multidimensional, which is why blue futures should strive for a ‘wellbeing economy’ beyond a narrow focus on economic growth (page 2). While this striving for rethinking economy beyond economic growth is a welcome move, it needs to be seen how this is being actualized, and also whether and to what extent the wellbeing economy might account for the more-than-human relationalities.
[Picture credit: Marine Scotland, Scottish Government. https://www.gov.scot/publications/blue-economy-vision-scotland/documents/]
While infrastructural development seems to be the leitmotif that deftly weaves together the varied components of the blue economy, the infrastructural assemblage of maritime ports features prominently as one of the mainstays for the proliferating regime of ‘blue growth’, as it is evident from the explicit thrusts on building of new ports as well as expansion and modernization of existing ones. This has given stimulus to a wide array of port-related projects across the coastal stretches all over the globe – for instance, in the context of Scotland, there has been a recent initiative, carried out jointly by the UK and the Scottish governments, to develop a number of ‘green free ports’; and two locations have been selected for this: Inverness and Cromarty Firth, and the Firth of Forth. Likewise, in the Indian context, a flagship scheme called ‘Sagarmala’ has been launched with the catchy objective of ‘port-led prosperity’.
Picture credit: Nabanita. Cromarty harbor located at the Cromarty firth which has garnered renewed interest due to the currently unfolding ‘Inverness & Cromarty Firth Green Freeport’ project. Additional note: While being based in Edinburgh, my interest in understanding the historical as well as contemporary dynamics of port-making prompted me to visit a number of ports and harbours in Scotland – including Cromarty, Dundee, and Leith. For the visit to Cromarty, I am thankful to Michelle Bastian and others in the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network (EEHN) for allowing me to be a part of the EEHN Cromarty residential retreat (May 2024) which made it possible for me to visit the Cromarty harbour as well as the museum to explore the historical shaping of the harbour.
Ports, as historian Lasse Heerten expounds, are the “intermediary spaces defined by the juncture between motion and stasis, fluidity and friction, mobility and immobility” (Heerten 2021: 352). Be it about mapping the trajectory of global capitalism through the rise and fall of port cities, or about narrativizing multiple iterations of global connections spelt out through the mobility and cosmopolitan exchanges across the oceanic tides, or an inquiry into the expansion of the empire as well as the violence and frictions that followed – in any of the considerations, ports appear to be a convenient entry-point to render intelligible multiple strands of the pasts, the presents, and the futures.
The evolving trajectory of port as a material conduit of global circulation has been inextricably grounded in imperial history. Some of the recent works (which I don’t have the scope to elaborate on here) – for instance, Chua et al. 2018; Cowen 2020; Ranganathan 2020; Khalili 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020; Davies 2021; Zeiderman 2021; Lesutis 2023 – have unraveled this nexus between enduring imperial logics and infrastructures of global circulation. Designing and working of maritime transport networks and allied infrastructural systems continue to bear the imprints of racialized histories of empire-building which has historically shaped global circulation and transoceanic exchanges.
Picture credit: Nabanita. The picture was taken during my visit to the display of the Dundee Tapestry at the V & A, Dundee.
This is one of the hand-stitched panels displayed as a part of collaborative project called The Dundee Tapestry, a handcrafted collection of tapestries capturing some strands of the past, present and future of Dundee. While Dundee’s international connections – including well-known trade in jute and linen industries – primarily anchored through the port of Dundee are well-known, this panel through the intricate stitching acknowledges the inextricable linkage between Dundee’s linen industry and enslavement of people from Africa & the Indies. The panel explores the historical connections across Dundee’s trade and industries, colonialisation and enslavement, and how these histories linger on in the material remains including the city’s statues, street names, buildings etc.]
The regimes of spatiotemporal control, territorialities, and technopolitics produced and perpetuated by the empires are sustained in varied forms, insofar as port continues to hold unfading significance, given that shipping constitutes the ‘life blood’ of the global economy – about 90% of global trade happens through oceanic shipping. Underlining the primacy of maritime supply chain and shipping, Thomas Reifer has even gone as far as to speculate that had Marx been alive today, he would have started his theoretical analysis with container in place of commodity (Reifer 2011: 7)!
With the circulatory imperatives driving the mutual shaping of oceanic trade and economic globalization, ports have remained crucial nodes facilitating and sustaining the spells of globalization while in turn being refigured by the changing dynamics of logistics and global commerce. Port entails, within its material-semiotic figuration, the promises of globalized ‘growth’. This impetus for economic globalization has shaped history as much as it continues to shape the contemporary. The burgeoning momentum for blue economy has instilled further impetus in this stride for economic growth propelled by maritime trade and globalized markets.
The dominant narratives around port and allied infrastructures often remain replete with anticipations of ‘prosperity’, as the government and other actors (including corporate stakeholders and often the political parties in power) assure that such mega-infrastructure projects would boost economy, generate employment opportunities, strengthen connectivity by way of facilitating infrastructural networks and easing movement of cargoes, and promote urban growth. For instance, the catchy promise of “port-led prosperity” as promoted through the flagship scheme of Sagarmala has been restructuring the coastal and archipelagic spaces in India. It is against this backdrop that I set out this exploratory journey anchored in an attempt to unpack and problematize the notion of ‘port-led propsperity’ by asking – what does ‘prosperity’ entail and who defines its contours? Prosperity for whom? And, prosperity at what cost?
The dominant narrative of port-led prosperity can be rendered as a form of ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2013) which alludes to the entrenched relation between technological assemblages and sociopolitical order, both being imbued with the capacity for mobilizing certain figuration of future. Sociotechnical imaginary, as initially defined by Jasanoff and Kim, refers to “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfilment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (2009: 120). The conceptual notion of sociotechnical imaginaries has been formulated by drawing on two related analytical threads: one, the notion of social imaginary (Taylor 2004, Castoriadis 1987) – that is, the idea of imaginary being a potent source of meaning-making hence a glue to bind together a particular configuration of the social; second, the conception of the nation as a collectively imagined community (Anderson 1991).
While the policy impetus continues to figure ports with the promise of ‘prosperity’, there are visible disruptions in the lives and lifeworlds of people and ecologies due to the increasingly globalized and corporatized ventures of port-making. This has given way to growing disquietude materialized in varied forms of protests, resistance and contestations which unsettle the dominant imaginary of port-qua-prosperity. From Vizhinjam in Kerala to Durban in South Africa, from Vadhavan in Maharashtra to Buenaventura in Colombia, from Kirkenes in Norway to Makassar in Indonesia, and many more places across the globe have been witnessing resistance sprung up from among the common people whose dissident voices, arguing against the grain of the dominant imaginary of port as portal to proclaimed visions of ‘prosperity’, bring into attention the working of ports as conduits of protracted precarity and extractivism, of exploitation and expropriation. I have particularly been looking at four such cases of resistance against port-making as unfolded in four different parts of India, namely – Vizhinjam (Kerala), Vadhavan (Maharashtra), Tajpur (West Bengal), and the Great Nicobar Island.
Picture: Local fisherfolks in Vizhinjam, carrying the banner ‘Adani Go Back’ to mark their discontents and resistance against the corporatized port-making. Picture credit: Outlook web desk, https://www.outlookindia.com/national/explained-why-protests-are-intensifying-against-adani-port-in-vizhinjam-news-240786
Protest rally against the Vadhavan port, in Mumbai on World Fisheries Day, 21st Nov, 2022. Picture credit: Prayag Arora-Desai; https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/thousands-voice-against-vadhavan-port-project-at-azad-maidan-101669049323464.html
Local women from Palghar expressing their dismay over the Vadhavan port project which they vehemently oppose. Picture credit: Shubham and Neha, ‘On the way to Vadhavan’ documentary
Protest rally in Purba Medinipur, West Bengal demanding cancellation of Tajpur port project. Picture credit: Dakshin Banga Matsyajibi Forum.
Picture credit: The first picture – ‘Nicobar Nightmare’ – is the cover page of Frontline magazine, January 27, 2023. The second picture is the cover page of the recently published book titled ‘The Great Nicobar Betrayal’ curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria. Both the works bring into attention the ruinous implications of the mega-infrastructure project planned for the Great Nicobar
For my EARTH scholarship project, I have delved a bit deeper in the Nicobar context as much for the empirical salience of the case as for the contextual relevance that it offers for some of the conceptual rubrics that have animated this project – for instance, the conceptions of ‘Offshore Anthropocene’ and the affordances of ‘Archipelagic thinking’ which I draw on to reimagine infrastructure otherwise. In ‘Allegories of the Anthropocene’, Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2019) draws on the allegory of the island to ‘provincialize’ the grand narrative of the Anthropocene. Much of the theoretical deliberations on the Anthropocene has revolved around discourses of ‘rupture’, thus making a claim onto the “novelty of crisis”, which, as DeLoughrey aptly ascertains, fail to account for the “historical continuity of dispossession and disaster caused by empire”. An attempt to address this erasure of historical depth can perhaps start with recasting the Anthropocene not just as a geological epoch but more of a placeholder for critical discourses. And, in refiguring the Anthropocene in critical terms, it becomes crucial to turn our attention to the postcolonial islands which, while being at the forefront of climate crises, embody “a complex history of staging paradoxical relations between the local and global” (DeLoughrey 2019: 2), more so for such island spaces continue to bear the long histories of ecological imperialism, extinction, and multiple forms of socioecological precarity. These considerations have prompted me to take a closer look at the infrastructural politics unfolding in the Nicobar archipelago.
As a strategic move to turn the Great Nicobar into a South Asian equivalent of ‘a new Hong Kong’, there is a mega-infrastructural plan of which a large transshipment port constitutes the center-piece, while the additional infrastructural components include a power plant, ancillary industries, a greenfield township with several thousand people relocated from mainland India, and an international airport. The entire socioecologies of the Great Nicobar along with the indigenous inhabitants of the islands and their lifeworlds – particularly the Shompen and the Nicobarese – are going to bear the brunt of the multi-component mega-project euphemistically labeled as the ‘Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island’. The proposed project, said to span over a fifth of Great Nicobar, extends to the Galathea Bay which hosts nesting-sites for the giant Leatherback sea-turtles, world’s largest marine-turtle, a species marked as ‘critically-endangered’. Apprehensions loom large that infrastructural developments along the Bay will spell doom for this significant turtle nesting-site. The project is likely to threaten the Nicobar Megapode, a unique terrestrial bird endemic to the Nicobar group of islands. Furthermore, the Galathea Bay, which is home to 117 species of corals, will now be dredged and developed into a container terminal, pushing the entire web of marine life into perils. All of these raise larger questions and concerns regarding multispecies futures.
Picture credit: Nisarg Prakash and Diviya Mehra, https://roundglasssustain.com/infographics/nicobar-megapode-facts
Picture credit: Kartik Shanker, https://frontline.thehindu.com/environment/proposed-great-nicobar-project-makes-a-mockery-of-the-national-marine-turtle-action-plan/article66349653.ece
Having grounded my exploratory journey in a meandering across these multiple spacetimes of port-making, I draw on infrastructural thinking not only to unravel the many strands of port-making but also to make an attempt to reimagine and re-assemble infrastructure otherwise. “The promise of infrastructure”, as anthropologist Brian Larkin contends, “refers to a political rationality, made up of expectation, desire, temporal deferral, sacrifice, and frustration that takes us into the realm of discursive meaning” (2018: 178, emphasis mine). Insofar certain form of political rationality drives the anticipatory claim of ‘prosperity’ which most often operates like a spectacle that masks the underbelly of the said infrastructural promise dotted with lurking ruinations and lingering precarity, I insist that remaking our collective futures hinge on alternative imaginaries to unsettle the prevailing political rationality and open up the possibilities for refiguring sociotechnical systems. Larkin’s oft-quoted definition renders infrastructures as “things and also the relation between things” (Larkin 2013); but, in my attempt to reimagine infrastructural futures otherwise, I redefine infrastructure by reformulating the above definition (wherein ‘thingness’ of infrastructure, rather than relations, seems to hold more valence) – infrastructure are relations and the things between relations! The primary consideration of reworking the definition of infrastructure by centering relations is to open up the possibilities for alternative temporal horizons and different forms of political rationality that accord primacy to more-than-human relationalities and render these vital relationalities as the ‘critical infrastructure’. To foster capacious renderings of and critical engagements with relationalities as elemental to infrastructuring, I have particularly been tapping into the generative affordances of archipelagic thinking (Stephens and Miguel 2020) which is concerned about taking the archipelago as not just a geological form but an imaginary, an episteme, a mode of being-in-the-world.
References:
Ballestero, Andrea. (2019). ‘The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal’. In Kregg Hetherington (ed.). Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Benedict, Anderson. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Chua, Charmaine, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowen, and Laleh Khalili. (2018). ‘Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(4): 617–629. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818783101.
Cornelius, Castoriadis. (1987). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cowen, Deborah. (2020). ‘Following the Infrastructures of Empire: Notes on Cities, Settler Colonialism, and Method’, Urban Geography, 41(4): 469-486. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2019.1677990.
Davies, Archie. (2021). ‘The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape, and modernity in Recife’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(4): 740–757. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211018706.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. (2019). Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Heerten, Lasse. (2021). ‘Mooring Mobilities, Fixing Flows: Towards a Global Urban History of Port Cities in the Age of Steam’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 34(2): 350-374. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/johs.12336.
Khalili, Laleh. (2020). Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London and New York: Verso.
Kimari, Wangui, and Henrik Ernstson. (2020). ‘Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations: Centering Race within the Contemporary Large-Scale Infrastructures of East Africa, Antipode, 52(3): 825–846. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12623.
Larkin, Brian. (2018). ‘Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure’. In Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (eds.), The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press.
Larkin, Brian. (2013). ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42: 327–343. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
Lesutis, Gediminas. (2023). ‘Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity’, Antipode, 55(6): 1781-1801. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12947.
Ranganathan, Malini. (2020). ‘Empire’s infrastructures: racial finance capitalism and liberal necropolitics’, Urban Geography, 41(4): 492-496. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2019.1659054.
Reifer, Thomas. (2011). ‘Unlocking the Black Box of Globalization’. In Nelson Lichtenstein (ed.), The Traveling Box: Containers as the Icons of Our Era. New York: New York Press.
Sheila. Jasanoff and Sang-Hyuan, Kim. (2009). ‘Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea’, Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 47 (2): 119–146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4.
Sheila. Jasanoff and Sang-Hyuan, Kim. (2013). ‘Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies’, Science as Culture, 22 (2): 189–196. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786990.
Stephens, Michelle and Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel (eds.). (2020). Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Taylor, Charles. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Zeiderman, Austin. (2021). ‘In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(3): 441-458. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820970945.