Infrastructures of Exclusion: Authority and Everyday Politics in Urban Uganda, 1945-1972

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Edgar Taylor
Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow
Lecturer in Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Makerere University

This book project charts the entangled fates of racial populism and electoral democracy in the public life of Uganda’s urban centers between the developmental colonialism of the late 1940s through the economic dependency and stagnation of the 1970s. It uses previously inaccessible archives, historical newspapers and interviews to illuminate how urban populism was informed by deep historical conversations over authority and reciprocal obligation among elites and commoners anchored in a Luganda conceptual vocabulary. The project also shows how activists inhabited changing infrastructures – of media, urban commerce, residential segregation, and legal paternalism – to uphold and subvert democratic ideals. The book will be anchored in African social history but will contribute to debates over democracy and racial populism in the wake of colonial violence among political historians and anthropologists of the state.