The talk “Plotting Sovereignty, Staging Liberation as part of the MIASA Public Lecture Series” develops earthmaking as a framework — attending to the slow and sticky infrastructural reorganization of land, labor, and ecology in the postcolony. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork with original performers of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii’s I Will Marry When I Want (1977) and archival research on the forced resettlement village of Kamĩrĩĩthũ in Kenya’s former White Highlands, it traces how the plot, the plantation, the theatre, and the play became paradoxical instruments of postcolonial sovereignty.

The intervention is twofold: if the plantation rather than the city is the world-making spatial form in much of the global South, our analytical focus must reorient accordingly. And if the most precise theory of plantation afterlives was produced on an open-air stage before the bulldozers arrived, we must reckon with whose knowledge counts as analysis of our planetary crisis — and from what ground.

The MIASA Public Lecture Series features fellows in residence at MIASA. MIASA is dedicated to research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, with ‘Sustainable Governance’ as its central topic. The Institute offers time and space for supporting innovative academic projects of top international quality. It is located on the campus of the University of Ghana at Legon (Accra) and supported by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space with co-funding from the University of Ghana.

Today, Tuesday, March 17 at 16:00 CET