Abstract Bisi Silva reconfigured the epistemic foundations of contemporary art from Africa by building institutions that relocated intellectual authority to the continent itself. Through CCA Lagos and Àsìkò Art School, she created the conditions under which African art could be researched, taught, archived, and exhibited beyond the mediating frameworks of the Global North. Drawing on fieldwork in Lagos and engaging strategic Southernness and epistemologies of the South, the paper argues that epistemic authority is sustained through institution building, pedagogy, and curatorial practice. It advances an institutional framework for understanding knowledge production in African studies.
Abstract An analysis of two diverse landscapes—the partial electrification of villages and homes in rural central Tanzania and the disproportionate electricity bills that consume people’s paychecks in the US South’s Black Belt—highlights the role of energy infrastructure in “organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2008). The triaging of racialized places and people distributes and extracts energy resources, enhancing life and labor for some, while rendering others more vulnerable to premature death. The ongoing reactivation of infrastructural sedimentations of inequality constitutes “race-making,” so that it is not only infrastructure that is racialized; racemaking also becomes infrastructuralized.
