CDS Seminar Event -Silicon Elsewhere. Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital

In Silicon Elsewhere, Andrea Pollio traces China’s digital presence in Nairobi, Africa’s celebrated Silicon Savannah. A booming postcolonial city often portrayed as ungovernable and chaotic, Nairobi is a cradle of innovation but also the experimental site of techno-political shifts in an increasingly turbulent and multiplex digital world. Across Nairobi's exhilarating innovation scene, the book follows the techno-optimist experts that punctuate the value chains of China’s digital industry in Kenya, from cautious venture capitalists to renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats and ambitious data scientists. Moving between leafy coworking gardens and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Silicon Elsewhere brings together Global China studies with Clapperton Mavhunga's call to provincialize Silicon Valley in the study of digital technology. The Silicon Savannah, the book argues, is neither a periphery striving to catch up, nor a frontier of innovation from elsewhere, but an elsewhere itself of technicity and reinvention, a geography from which new techno-economic forms originate and emanate. 

Biography

Andrea Pollio is assistant professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and a research associate of the African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is one of the founding editors of Platforms & Society, and a co-curator of UTA-Do - Urban Theory Workshop-Africa.