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In this exquisitely crafted ethnography, Charline Kopf examines how and why railway workers in Senegal and Mali care for a suspended railway. Trains rarely run, yet men continue to attend to the everyday practices that keep the railway alive as a social and political space: they sweep floors, repair wagons, and gather to await the arrival of a new train that might never come. The railway has become an afterplace—a worksite in a post-labor context where infrastructure, no longer fully functional, still organizes memory, politics, and collective life. Generations meet here with different temporal horizons: older workers recall futures once promised through stable employment and national ambition, while younger, precariously employed men confront futures never secured. These tensions raise urgent questions about what remains when work recedes along with the possibilities it once carried. Tracing connections and fractures across Senegal and Mali, the book offers a new lens on the afterlives of transnational infrastructure in Africa and beyond.
Charline Kopf is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
“Afterplace offers a nuanced and powerful rethinking of infrastructure not as fully functional, nor as failing/failed or museumified ruin, but as suspended—inhabited, cared for, and contested, and kept alive by those who refuse to let it be forgotten.”—Katie Kilroy-Marac, author of An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic
“In this engaging and poetic ethnography, Charline Kopf offers a major rethinking of postcolonial infrastructure through the analytic of the afterplace, and shows how sites of apparent obsolescence remain vital arenas of labor and social life. By foregrounding 'temporal labor,' the book makes a powerful contribution that challenges linear notions of work and political action.”—Julie Kleinman, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Fordham University
“With eloquent prose and clear writing, Charline Kopf tells a devastating story of a dream deferred and the efforts to maintain dwindling future possibilities that sustain it.”—Bettina Ng’weno, author of No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi