The market of El Hueco in downtown Lima sits inside a large pit dug out for the foundation of a state building that was never built. The below-ground corridors and crammed vending stalls in this poorly regulated market are usually flooded with shoppers, yet government officials and the media frequently condemn it as a vile and dangerous place. But how and why does El Hueco offend? Through an ethnographic account of a day's events, cast against a discussion of Marxism's “lumpenproletariat” and Hernando de Soto's “informality,” I argue that implicit in El Hueco's challenge of state bureaucracy is a class critique that resists conventional class analysis and that affirms the “lumpen” as a politics in its own right. “Lumpen” here does not refer to categories of people but to a resource that can be appropriated and deployed freely. Linked to the anti-political tactics of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, lumpen as a resource has changed the face of postwar Lima by defying and deforming from within the bourgeois ideals of urban development and bureaucratic form. It has also arguably changed the face of politics and played a role in the revival of fujimorismo during and since the 2016 presidential elections.

I unpack the “potter's field” as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of “worthlessness” as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter's fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror. I then ask how the rise of the uncertified potter's field—a burial field for disposable bodies, not made legal by the state—is inseparable from recent historical and contemporary conditions of political abandonment. The uncertified field is made easy by a politics of abandonment, and becomes useful to state institutions as a material invocation of responsibility, interred elsewhere, while nonetheless advancing a larger logic of governance and political will in our times.

Recent scholarship on Indian, African, and Caribbean political thinkers and leaders emphasizes the era leading up to and immediately after decolonization as one saturated with awareness of time and history. While much of this scholarship focuses on temporalities that open up the future, this article instead foregrounds imaginings of the present in the currency of news reports. By examining newspaper reports, we can attend in a different way to renderings of time and freedom. This article applies theoretical work on genre and addressivity to analyze how location, space, and time were simultaneously grounded and overcome by Nigerian newspaper columnists, and how this dynamic of bounded transcendence facilitated an array of social and political projects in the time-space of 1930s and 1940s colonial Nigeria. The pseudonymous writers examined in this article applied the trope of flying to exist in an alternate reality. Each “reporter” outstripped the normal logic of time and space through their ability to “jump” from place to place, and even to be in more than one place at once. By existing, as they claimed, “everywhere and nowhere” they literally and figuratively rose above the material reality of the everyday, thus ordaining an exclusive capacity for revelation.

This article explores the history of an experiment in architectural education that took place at what is today the University of Nairobi, between 1965 and 1967. Organized by Selby Mvusi, a South African industrial designer, and Derek Morgan, a British expatriate architect, what was known as the “Foundation Course” was both an experiment in architectural education in postcolonial Africa and a serious attempt to think through the African experience of time and equip students with the tools to recognize and respond to the unique conditions of the postcolonial African present. Based on archival sources, including those in private collections, and oral interviews, the article situates the Foundation Course within African intellectual history as an exercise in social theory and phenomenology. I examine the content of Mvusi and Morgan's intellectual partnership and project by tracing their individual trajectories, and especially the pedagogical scheme they developed at Nairobi, which came to focus more on humanity in dialogue with the material environment than on material objects themselves. I trace the intellectual lineages of their concepts and explore their articulation within the postcolonial university until the course was cancelled in 1967. I conclude by considering how Mvusi imagined the Foundation Course as a laboratory for both being and building in postcolonial Africa, drawing from a conference paper he delivered just weeks before he died in 1967.

Questions of responsibility are central to the politics and metaphysics of history. This paper examines the creation of different histories from alternative formulations of personal and collective responsibility among urban Ndyuka Maroons in present-day Suriname. Tracing conflicting attempts to assign accountability for a senior man's sickness, I argue that a distinctly Ndyuka conception of history emerges from the dialectical relation between the material qualities of misfortunes and the practices Ndyuka use to affix responsibility. Ndyuka efforts to assuage history as embodied by ghosts and other spirits that seek revenge on corporate kin groups simultaneously use the symptoms of misfortune to make history and attempt to contain or deny the transmissibility of collective responsibility to future generations. Understanding this process demonstrates how distinct perceptions of historicity emerge from different conceptions of responsibility, and the extent to which intergenerational sociality is defined by conflicted attempts to redefine historical accountability as much as to acknowledge it.

The article uses the first population census of postcolonial Ghana to analyze the relationship between statistics and the process of imagining the nation-state. In contrast with much historical and sociological literature, which conceptualizes the relationship between census-taking and state formation in terms of identification, classification, and quantification, the departure point of this analysis is the importance of gaining the trust of the counted subjects. In Ghana, where the possibility of obtaining accurate population returns had been severely hindered by people's distrust in the state, the 1960 population census saw the organization of a capillary education campaign in schools and in the press. By dissecting the iconographies emerging from the Census Education and Enlightenment Campaign, the article makes three contributions. First, it shows that understanding the concrete ways in which statistics inform political imagination requires an expansion of the field of observation beyond the statistical machinery and other “centers of calculation.” Second, complementing James Ferguson's understanding of “development discourse” as an “anti-politics machine,” it is argued that the possibility of making the people of Ghana “census minded” depended on the construction of a much richer set of inherently political representations about the nature of the postcolonial state. Finally, it shows the importance of critically interrogating the political implications acquired by the reception of global statistical practices. It does so by documenting the multiple ways in which the international standards promoted by the United Nations became entwined with the transformation of Ghanaian politics through the mobilization of children and press propaganda.

In late 1837 and early 1838 the British imperial government was preparing for an empire-wide transition from bonded to nominally free labor. This article builds upon recent scholarship that promotes a holistic, global approach to this transition, by narrowing the temporal frame and expanding the spatial. We emphasize interconnectivity and simultaneity rather than chronological succession, and we analyze the governance, rather than the experience, of this transition. Our approach is founded upon analysis of correspondence passing from every British colonial site through the Colonial Office in 1837–1838. We suggest that this hub of imperial government sought to reconcile the persistence of different conditions in each colony with the pursuit of three overarching policy objectives: redistributing labor globally; distinguishing between the moral debts owed to different kinds of bonded labor, and managing tradeoffs between security, economy, and morality. We conclude that the governance of the transition to free labor is best conceived as an assemblage of material and expressive elements of different spatial scales, whose interactions were complex and indeterminate. Through these specific governmental priorities and a particular communications infrastructure, these elements were brought into critical alignment at this moment to shape a significant transition in relations between people across the world.

A once-dominant family of interpretations of the beginnings of Japanese and Russian development claimed that policies adopted by the two states were inadequate to modernize agrarian property relations, and so both states were required to mediate between premodern agriculture and “hot-house” modern industry. More recent accounts have insisted that despite the limited reforms to agrarian property relations, agriculture in both countries in fact dynamically participated in economic development. This paper contends that these revised accounts’ one-sided focus on market opportunities leaves unresolved key puzzles. Why did productivity growth jump higher after the Meiji reforms in Japan? Why did only some regions participate in agricultural development in Russia? To answer these questions, this paper argues it is necessary to return attention to the ways agrarian property relations did and did not change following reforms adopted by the two states in the 1860s and 1870s. The key theoretical upshot of this analysis is that the initiation of capitalist development required a political process in which institutions that had previously guaranteed non-market access of rural households to subsistence were dismantled in favor of the domination of market relations.