From less than three dozen in 1949, the number of small hydropower stations in the People’s Republic of China grew to nearly ninety thousand by 1979. By the early 1980s, these stations were distributed across nearly 1,600 of China’s 2,300 counties. In 770 counties, small hydropower was the primary source of rural electricity generation. This article offers a history and assessment of these developments, unsettling our traditional emphasis on large-scale hydroelectricity. The article begins by reconstructing the PRC’s enormous investments in small hydropower from the 1950s to the early 1980s. This reconstruction, the first of its kind in the English language, not only helps reassess key periods and events in the history of the PRC but also establishes the position of small hydropower in the hydraulic history of the twentieth century. The article then turns to a discussion of the claimed impacts of small hydropower. As electricity became available for the first time in many parts of the Chinese countryside, it affected patterns of economic and social activity for hundreds of millions of people. Finally, the paper explores what the case of small hydropower can offer to conceptual and theoretical problems surrounding development, innovation, and the environment. Returning to the long-standing debate over scale and development, China’s experience with small hydropower reminds us of the important role played by smaller-scale, appropriate, and self-reliant technologies in global energy history.

This article explores the geographical imagination of diasporic activists from Afghanistan. It examines the significance of the historic-geographic region of Khorasan for their attempts to re-imagine Afghanistan and its place in the region and wider world. The article documents ethnographically the forms of intellectual exchange in which these intellectual-activists participate, and their modes of materializing the geographical imagination of Khorasan in everyday life. Rather than analyzing their geographical imagination solely through the lens of ethnicity, it treats it as reflecting the activists’ underlying yearning for sovereign agency and as an attempt to forge politically recognizable subjects capable of action.

It is impossible to understand the phenomenon of disinformation without unraveling the more perplexing notion of “truth.” This article explores how a Bulgarian psychic or prophet named Baba Vanga (1911–1996) became one of the most noteworthy mediums of “truth” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian imagination. With Bulgarian-Russian transnational ties as context, we trace how belief in Baba Vanga’s abilities and prophecies was propagated by witnesses via word-of-mouth, newspaper articles, books, TV programming, and the internet. We periodize the ways Vanga secured a place in Russian “truth worlds,” drawing upon both science and religion or a conglomeration of both. We look deeper into the origins and more recent circulation of a purported Vanga prophecy from 1979: namely, that Russia would rise to be the ruler of the world. The dissemination of this message, we argue, is not a Russian state plot to bolster aspirations in Ukraine and its standoff with the West. Instead it has been transmitted in far more fragmented and mediated ways and even countered by the Russian Orthodox Church. A deeper pondering of these mediations of Baba Vanga can help us better understand what we call the “post”-truth world, in which truth is crafted by online “posts.” In contrast to the notion of “post-truth” that posits a dearth of truth, our concept of “post”-truth recognizes that truth is not just in unprecedented excess today but is built through a complex and participatory bricolage that uses science and religion to build shared realities as never before in history.

This article presents a little-known story of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in Germany after World War Two. Using an ethnographic case study of Frankfurt am Main’s train-station district (Bahnhofsviertel), the analysis investigates long-term and partially forgotten Jewish-Muslim narratives, relations, and neighborhood encounters, paying particular attention to the changing political, spatial, and temporal dimensions that have blurred or closed symbolic boundaries between Jews and Muslims since the late 1960s. Bringing together the scholarship on symbolic boundaries and urban diversity, the theoretical discussion contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the variegated processes of Jewish-Muslim boundary-making and un-making over time, as well as the macro- and micro-level influences which shape these negotiations and outcomes. Studying Jewish-Muslim relations at the neighborhood level by adopting a boundary-related approach brings out more clearly the tensions over groupism and fluidity in theoretical debates and removes the current exceptionalism around Jewish-Muslim themes, making them more easily compared with other boundary processes within everyday life.

Between 1964 and 1985, a military dictatorship in Brazil combined an arsenal of political instruments—surveillance, violent repression, and propaganda, among others—to justify its illegal rule. How did the Brazilian military regime attempt to justify its claim to power for more than two decades? What discursive strategies did it use to win popular support, despite the violence it perpetrated? This paper investigates how discourse is used to legitimize power and create meaning in authoritarian regimes. Using ethnographic content analysis of archival materials, I pinpoint and analyze three key discursive frames employed in regime propaganda: “defenders of democracy,” “Great Brazil” and “model citizenship.” I argue that the Brazilian military regime used these frames to justify its authority, forge national values and social norms, and redefine the boundaries of the national community. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of authoritarian power that is wielded and legitimized through discourse, but also speak to the enduring consequences of authoritarianism in sociopolitical subjects.

The nation-state is as much a narrative and ideational project as it is a spatial-territorial one. In the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping’s calls to “revitalize” China’s traditional culture, “Sinicize” religions, and “rejuvenate” the Chinese nation reflect a broader effort to reframe the national narrative and strengthen Communist Party control. This article examines the implications of Xi’s revisionist nationalism for China’s fifty-five minority nationalities, in particular the Hui, one of ten Muslim minority groups. It does so by analyzing the rise and demise of World Muslim City (WMC), a development project in western China that mobilized Hui identity and traditions for economic and diplomatic purposes. WMC was facilitated by a multicultural national narrative and by a fragmented authoritarian political system that for many years fostered policy improvisation, and deviation, at the local level. Its suspension underscores the increasingly anti-Muslim, anti-religious tenor of PRC policy, as evidenced by the Sinicization campaign that was a proximate cause of WMC’s demise. Its demise also highlights ongoing efforts to reassert CCP control over government, business, and the Party’s own rank-and-file. The fate of WMC furthermore reveals the spatial dimensions of Sinicization, and of Chinese cultural governance past and present. To paraphrase theorist Henri Lefebvre, Sinicization entails “spatial practices” that impose Xi-ist “representations of space” on lived “representational spaces,” from mosques and businesses to theme parks and luxury resorts.

This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

This paper examines racial income inequality in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. It finds, surprisingly, that Black men had an income advantage relative to White and Mulatto men in 1910–1920. The effect of race on income in Puerto Rico was smaller than that of other covariates such as urban status, sex, and literacy. A comparison with the state of Louisiana and with the United States as a whole in the same Census years shows that Puerto Rico was exceptional by U.S. standards, displaying much lower levels of racial inequality. Most of the income advantage Black men had can be attributed to the fact that they were more urban than Mulatto or White men, but part of this surprising advantage can be attributed to the existence in the countryside of a layer of skilled Black workers. Overall, Black men had equal or slightly higher occupational scores than Whites. The coexistence of slavery with other forms of coerced labor affecting individuals of all races in the nineteenth century, as well as the emergence of a stratum of Black skilled workers which survived into the twentieth century and thrived economically when the sugar industry experienced an explosive boom after 1898, is at the root of Black income equalization in the Puerto Rican countryside and in the island as a whole during the early twentieth century.

In the wake of the establishment of the Portuguese in the region, slavery was fundamentally constitutive of early modern society on the west coast of India. While indigenous hierarchies and existing systems of slavery shaped Portuguese slavery, over time, indigenous society too was transformed by the extensive reliance on enslaved labor facilitated by European trafficking networks. Centering slavery in the study of South Asian history underscores the importance of considering the difference between elite projects of enforcing boundaries, both spatial and social, and the ways in which enslaved people negotiated these projects. Thus, instead of taking for granted the classificatory labels of race, caste, and blackness imposed upon enslaved peoples by elite institutions, a social history of slavery elucidates instead the evolution of these mechanisms for policing identity, and the centrality of the expropriation of labor in identity formation.

Examining the graveside tributes left at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, this article considers the meaning-making work of decay. Green-Wood is a polysemous place, existing as a historical and active cemetery, an arboretum, an arts and performance space, a space of mourning, and a place of leisurely strolling and birdwatching. Through a site-specific analysis of the cemetery, I approach decay as an active and durational phase of material life and explore different decay-temporalities through the tributes left graveside. I argue that orienting ourselves to the decay-life of things necessarily entangles us in a larger ecological ethic and relational ontology of self, land, weather, animals (human and non-human), and time. While advocating for material attention to decay-life, I consider how the aesthetics and taboos of decay shape the cemetery’s relationship to visible and invisible rot and ruin. The cemetery staff, wildlife, visitors, ecology, climate, and the dead create a complex network of active actors experiencing and altering the material decay-life of the left-behind natural and artificial material tributes. Together, this active and entangled decay-life of the site forms a network of temporalities of decay that co-construct the affective and environmental space of the cemetery.

How did it become possible to think of a racism without racists? This article tackles this question by looking at the contested interpretation of a racist incident in France. In 1969, Jewish shop owners in Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. This antisemitic agitation rapidly attracted the attention of local authorities, national media, and social scientists, led by sociologist Edgar Morin. Morin’s study made these events into a famous case-study in disinformation, the “rumor of Orléans.” But Morin was only one of several actors who attributed different causes to racism in Orléans. All of them agreed that racism was a serious problem, but they could not agree on its causes. Compared to other incidents at the time which grabbed media attention, the uncertainty of events in Orléans allowed people to debate this. Morin’s contribution was to turn to communications and social psychology to deploy the concept of “rumor.” He dissolved the problem of racism into a problem of communication. This suggests that in order to understand the emergence of “racism without racists,” we have to pay close attention to the context in which theories emerged to make it thinkable, and to the relationship between analyses of racism and communication.

The 1922 Rand Rebellion was the only instance of worker protest in the twentieth century in which a modern state used tanks and military airplanes, as well as mounted infantry, to suppress striking workers. These circumstances were unprecedented in their own time and for most of the century. The compressed and intensely violent rebellion of twenty thousand white mineworkers in South Africa’s gold mines had several overlapping features. Within a matter of days—from 6 to 12 March—it went from a general strike to a racial pogrom and insurrection against the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Throughout all these twists and turns, the battle standard remained, “Workers of the world unite and fight for a White South Africa!” Race and violence were integral features of South Africa’s industrial history, but they do not explain the moments when discrete groups of people chose to use them as weapons or bargaining tools. At the close of the First World War, for instance, South Africa’s white mine workers demanded a more comprehensive distribution of the privileges of white supremacy, but in a manner that was both violent and contentious. Consequently, South Africa’s immediate postwar period became one of the most violent moments in its history.

Through an ethnographic rendering of the Catholic Church at the Detroit-Windsor borderland, this article foregrounds the ways elemental forces, including water, earth/soil, and air, form an interconnected entity that constitutes part of the theopolitical and religious scaffolding of Holy Infrastructures. We argue that the repetitive inscription of social and affective flows within an urban terrain generates infrastructure projects that contract forces of variable intensity into alliance or disjuncture. The interrelation of these forces as Holy Infrastructure, offers vital information on (dis/en)abling racialized forms of hosting and being hosted by the divine within urban settings, specifically as it pertains to theological labor at multiple scales. Indeed, we understand holiness in Catholic Detroit as a performative sovereignty of partition that mediates a desire for unbrokenness and spatiotemporal rapture. The topologies of Holy Infrastructure thus give rise to overlapping but divergent “wholes” within the racialized urban terrain, offering insight into the Church as a loose network of horizontal alliances that may enforce or subvert hierarchy. Our focus on elemental forces allows us to move beyond abstractions and focus on how theological projects take shape in physical space within an urban ecology. Indeed, Holy Infrastructures come into focus most clearly in relation to the intersection of theology with environmental, climatic, and territorial projects. By approaching Church and State as co-constitutive, we show how Holy Infrastructures offer insight into the racialized and gendered terrain of contemporary Detroit.

In 1833, Rammohun Roy, the so-called “Father of Modern India,” died abruptly while traveling in England. Because cremation was then illegal in Britain, he was buried rather than immolated according to brahminical norms. This article situates the micro-history of his colonial corpse within the genealogy of secularism. I take secularism as a formation of the body in the most morbidly literal of ways—fused to embodied formations of race, caste, class, and gender and entangled with the transcolonial networks of nineteenth-century heterodoxy. Roy’s ritually indeterminate flesh was a site for cultural improvisation around a Victorian-colonial secularity formed in and through the body.

Drawing from publications by Swami Achutanand and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha press between 1916 and 1940, this article examines the role of this north Indian Dalit organization in creating language and categories of liberalism in the Hindi vernacular. The Mahasabha poet-activists published numerous song-booklets in a variety of Hindi song genres to intervene in ongoing discussions on the subjects of representation and equality which they characterized as mulki-haq and unch-niche. Histories of liberties in late colonial India have typically examined its emergence within dominant Hindu and Muslim middle-class groups. This article uncovers the unique contributions of Dalit poet-activists who recognized the value of liberal ideas and institutions in challenging caste and abolishing “Manu’s Kanun” (lawgiver Manu’s Hindu law codes). It highlights the methodological importance of mohalla (neighborhood) sources usually located in Dalit activists’ houses in untouchable quarters. The chapbooks found in mohalla collections have enabled the writing of a new history of the Mahasabha’s activism and of the initiatives taken by poet-activists in founding a new Dalit politics in northern India. I explore the emergence of a Dalit literate public which sustained the activities of the Mahasabha and which responded with enthusiasm to its articulation of the new social identity of Achut (untouched) and a new political identity of Adi-Hindus—original inhabitants of Hindustan (India). Offering a new methodological approach in using mohalla sources and song-booklets composed in praise of liberal institutions, this essay makes a significant contribution to the recovery of a forgotten Dalit public sphere in early twentieth-century India.

This article analyses taxation practices in colonial, post-colonial rebel-led, and independent South Sudan and argues that the ethos of taxation in the region has been and remains primarily oriented around predatory and coercive strategies of rule. This overarching pattern endures because the fundamental structure and rationale of revenue-raising practices, which collectively constitute South Sudan’s revenue complex, have not changed since at least Anglo-Egyptian occupation of the region in 1899. The paper explains how tax collecting as predation began when the first colonial administration deployed taxes to acquire loyalty from customary authorities such as chiefs and sheikhs, who personally benefitted from their taxation powers. From the early 1960s to 2005, armed groups in the region periodically fought against Khartoum-led rule, and rebels extorted taxes from the population to help fuel their war efforts. Taxes in today’s South Sudan, which acquired independence in 2011, are not collected to raise revenue except to pay off the individuals collecting them, and they continue to generate predation. The rise of international aid and windfalls from oil revenues have further diminished taxation’s financial significance for the national government and have altered local authorities’ coercive demands for payment. The portrait that emerges from the practices of South Sudan’s successive war-makers and state-makers is one of taxation wielded as a technology of rule, one of coercion and often extortion, to fulfil the self-interests of tax collectors. The article is based on archival research in Sudanese and South Sudanese national archives, British colonial archives, and 205 interviews conducted in South Sudan.

Scholarship on the political economy of natural resources in the Global South has often relied on the concept of the “resource curse” to explain the negative features of extractive economies and their alleged tendency to promote rent capture at the expense of national sovereignty and development. Such theories link the behavior of social actors to an excess of “unearned income,” with little reference to the concrete forms of political and cultural mediation that reproduce this structure of growth. This article explores the role of the devil symbol in populist discourse in Venezuela and how this spectral figure comes to mediate subaltern consciousness. Tracing the origins of this image to colonialism and efforts to grasp the dynamics of the modern petrostate, the analysis shows how use of this symbol to mediate the forecast transition from a rentier to a productive economy has given workers in a state enterprise a potent set of signs to articulate opposition to unjust labor conditions. Venezuelan leaders have deployed figures drawn from local folklore to divide society into two competing power blocs. Yet, while these discourses are effective at forging coalitions and justifying specific reallocations of oil wealth, they do not obviate the tensions of this transition, and a counternarrative using these same figures has arisen in response. The article concludes with an analysis of parallels between global theories of the resource curse and local Venezuelan iterations of this discourse as well as a discussion of the role of translation in theories of culture and modernity.

Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.

From Iran and Mozambique to France’s Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such “fuel riots,” the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets. To do this, it sketches an energy-centered approach to class with both structural and subjective axes. This analytic is applied to a comparative history of two of the best-documented energy protests of the last half-century. During the 1970s, independent truckers blocked American highways to protest the high price of motor fuel. A decade later, half a million North Indian farmers mobilized to demand cheaper and more reliable electricity. Half a world apart, the two movements shared key characteristics. They were the expression of specific class fractions whose material interests were conditioned by heavy dependence on state-mediated energy supplies. Awkwardly located between big capital and wage labor, both truckers and farmers owned stakes in the carbon-intensive means of production that left them exposed to volatility in energy quality and pricing. Both mobilized in reaction to perceived breaches of state-centered moral economies of energy which threatened this dependence, leveraging their power to interrupt supplies within the circulatory systems of fossil fuel society. Even as both movements failed in their own terms, their political resistance helped to lock in place consumer subsidies for cheap carbon-intensive energy. Such energy protests deserve a central role in our environmental histories of fossil fuel society.

Research on psychiatry in the United States has shown how, since the 1980s, the discipline has sought to increase its prestige and preserve its jurisdiction by embracing biomedical models of treatment and arguing it is a medical specialty like any other. While this strategy is consistent with what the literature on professions would expect, this paper analyzes an alternative case: French public psychiatry, which has remained in a position of marginalized autonomy, combining low status and economic precarity with state recognition of its specificity. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of fields, I analyze how the persistence of specialized psychiatric hospitals in France—most of which have closed in the United States—has shaped the conflict between psychiatrists favoring autonomy and actors in university hospitals and the Ministry of Health seeking to reduce it. These specialized hospitals have functioned as institutional anchors that contribute to maintaining the discipline’s autonomous position in the medical field in three ways: by socializing psychiatrists into viewing themselves as a distinctive branch of medicine, linking psychiatry to powerful actors in the state interested in maintaining the discipline’s distinctive role in social control, and concentrating a population of chronically ill persons not amenable to traditional medical interventions. This analysis expands on the literature on professionals and field theory by emphasizing the role of institutions in structuring the reorganization of jurisdictions and relationships between fields.