| Abstract |
In this article, I discuss the ways in which infrastructures of statecraft reverse the social
purpose that they ideologically embody. I focus on the road EN140 and the village of
Cusseque in Southeast Angola. EN140 was a long-sought popular aspiration, finally
concretised in 2010. Since then, it has been promoted, conspicuously by the
Angolan government and national media, as an instrument of extending progress,
social union, and equality into rural areas. However, rather than spreading it, EN140
helps convert progress into a field of personal quests, individually privatised in rural
societies. In Southeast Angola, the social ideal of progress advocated by the national
politics of (re)construction is unfeasible by the effects of certain material
infrastructures built in the name of such an ideal. Although it is based on a regional
perspective, this article demonstrates a universal phenomenon: the role of inorganic
materiality in the production of subjectivities. |
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