This week the History Department’s own Asif Siddiqi has been visiting Cambridge University in the UK, participating in a range of events culminating in the 29th annual Rausing Lecture at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
According to the Department’s website, the Rausing Lecture
named in honour of the late philanthropist and friend of Cambridge Hans Anders Rausing, explores the history of technology and industry. Beginning in 1996, it has covered topics ranging from medical science, to colonialism, to breakthroughs in digital technology.
Professor Siddiqi’s lecture is entitled “But Why Here? Space Technologies, the Logic of Location, and the Violence of Infrastructure“. The lecture is a part of a major new project undertaken by Professor Siddiqi, who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading historians of space exploration. His earlier books include The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957, which appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2010 and Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge and The Soviet Space Race with Apollo, which were published by the University Press of Florida in 2003. Siddiqi described his talk as
part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering the Global South as a crucial site for humanity’s first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on Africa, Asia, and Latin America to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across many postcolonial locales, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of people or damage to local ecologies. In looking at the history of this ‘passive’ infrastructure in several locales, including Algeria, Kenya, and India – the talk offers insights along three threads. First it explores the ways in which the selection criteria for locating such technoscientific infrastructure derived from a certain kind of ‘logic of location’ which naturalized exclusionary practices as being ‘rational’ and opposition to them as being antimodern, ahistorical, and against the greater good. Second, it restores ‘history’ to these sites by situating them outside of the space program, thus linking them to broader political economies and colonial geographies, rendering visible the seams and sutures of a larger story of the (re)appropriation of postcolonial geographies in the late 20th century for space exploration. Finally, the talk offers a methodological intervention, situating this kind of technoscientific ‘passive’ infrastructure (and often, their abandoned ruins) as part of a global (and postcolonial) history of technology, one legible at multiple and overlapping registers, including the social, the technological, and the environmental.
As always, the History Department is extremely proud of Professor Siddiqi. Break a leg in Cambridge Asif!