The City Electric

“The circuits that connect and convey, whether power or collective aspiration, stretch and bend in order to keep their shape, modified to a constantly volatile outside world and to how they are variously and not always judiciously used by rulers and ruled. In a wondrous ethnography of how Tanzanian power ecologies both conjoin and fracture, Michael Degani links the social, technical, and imaginary dimensions of infrastructure in unprecedented ways to understand what it means to exist as a socially productive nation.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture

“Michael Degani’s use of the energy sector to study the fraught and shifting relationship among citizens, the state, and public utilities is both novel and ambitious in scope, as the power grid proves a fruitful site to analyze responses to the privatization of electricity at different scales. Employing rich ethnographic observation and astute theoretical analysis to understand the complexities of Tanzanian nation building, postsocialist transformation, and day-to-day efforts to sustain urban collective life, The City Electric is a tremendous accomplishment and contribution to ethnographies of infrastructure.” - Christina Schwenkel, author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam

"As The City Electric so expertly shows, infrastructure then becomes a way to explore the moral economy of provisioning, from the headline grabbing corruption scandals over multi-million dollar contracts to everyday negotiations where people decide by what means, and to what extent, they will bend the rules to gain access to the electricity grid. In Degani’s hands, the channel where electricity sometimes passes and sometimes doesn’t, is an incredibly rich site for analysing movements of power more generally." - Emily Brownell, Journal of Development Studies

"Degani’s The City Electric is useful not only to energy anthropologists but also to the larger STS community. It is an outcome of meticulous research and uses persuasive English to convey its substance." - Frank Edward, Technology and Culture

"Degani’s work combines both archival and ethnographic analyses into a coherent and engaging narrative helping us to gain unique perspectives on the everyday life of neoliberalism and the post-socialist state in Tanzania. The book will be of great interest and utility to scholars interested in the critical analyses of contemporary infrastructures and for those interested in the politics of neoliberalism in the Global South more generally."

"The ethnographic and other empirical data in the book is extraordinarily rich, and Degani is a talented wordsmith weaving a compelling and critical narrative across the book’s chapter. The book is a powerful contribution to the fields of urban infrastructure, energy studies, and postcolonialism among many other areas." - Paul G. Munro, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

"As The City Electric so expertly shows, infrastructure... becomes a way to explore the moral economy of provisioning, from the headline-grabbing corruption scandals over multi-million dollar contracts to everyday negotiations where people decide by what means, and to what extent, they will bend the rules to gain access to the electricity grid." - Emily Brownell, Journal of Development Studies

"This is an important masterpiece on infrastructure that is worth the time of African scholars, graduate students, and keen followers of Tanzania’s postcolonial infrastructural history and politics." - David Olusanjo, Journal of Global South Studies