Floating Power

Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. She is the author of Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi, published by Duke University Press, and co-author of Patchwork Ethnography.

“This masterful ethnography of Ghana’s floating power plants challenges the very categories through which we apprehend the material world. It dissolves boundaries between the fixed and the flexible, the infrastructural and the ephemeral, the old and the new. In doing so, it reveals the paradoxes of sustaining power amid uncertainty and the deferrals of modernity.”—Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, author of, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy“This quirky-smart book about a floating Turkish ‘powership’ off the West African coast disrupts multiple narratives: teleological stories about energy futures, racist renderings of Africa as ‘always behind,’ ethical-political worries about the intersection of business and politics, methodological fretting about immersive versus patchwork ethnography. A singular and original contribution to scholarship on South-South affiliations and alliances today.”—Charles Piot, author of, The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles

• Introduction: Technologies of Deferral 11. Cin Fikir 312. Liminal Devices 603. Leapfrogging to Solar 864. Drive Electric 110Epilogue: A Global Future of Energy 137Acknowledgments 145Notes 149References 163Index 179