This article theorizes across conventional geographic and scholarly divides to document how energy infrastructures are bound up with projects of both captivity and mutuality in the reverberating wake of colonialism. It examines the production and effects of energy infrastructures in the racialized “organized abandonment” (Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Hale2008) of two energy landscapes: (1) the partial electrification of villages and homes in the East African context of rural central Tanzania; and (2) the disproportionate electricity bills that consume people’s paychecks in the post-plantation Black Belt counties of the southern United States.
These two sites offer prospects from settings of hyper-conservation in the face of resource scarcity. Rural SingidaFootnote 1 is a landscape characterized by a drought-prone ecology, selective grid and water infrastructure expansion, the increasing availability of solar technologies, and a patchy mix of economic development and ongoing hardship. Across a continent, an ocean, and most of the state of Georgia lies the city of Albany (population: 70,000), which has long been the unofficial capital of Georgia’s Black Belt. More recently, Albany has also been the unofficial capital of Georgia’s the utilities justice movement, where residents have been speaking out and taking to the streets to protest their high poverty rates and energy burden (the percentage of their income they must spend on electricity bills) (Farooqi Reference Farooqi2021). The article asks: how might the conceptual and speculative tools of a Global Black Studies—one that takes seriously the historical entanglement of African Studies and Black Studies—assist in conceptually linking the processes of racialization, capital, and colonial remains that connect these two sites? And how might bringing them together into a single frame shed new light on energy’s role in projects of both captivity and mutuality?
To begin, let us travel well beyond rural Tanzania and the deep Southern United States to “Maitu,” the imagined dystopia of Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s Reference Kahiu2009 short film, Pumzi. Pumzi is often associated with Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism (as Nigerian novelist Nnedi Okorafor [Reference Okorafor2024] would have it), which together constitute the speculative backbone of a global Black studies. Afro/Africanfuturist works are known to combine themes of, technology, innovation, ecology and African mysticism to imagine utopias unencumbered by slavery and colonialism (such as Wakanda in Marvel’s Black Panther) or dystopic worlds (similar to Pumzi) that carry contemporary alienation, historical extraction, and ecological devastation to their logical ends.Footnote 2
Maitu, the fictional and futurist city of Pumzi, is an enclosed and self-sustaining East African territory set thirty-five years after World War III, which we learn was called “the Water War,” and that may have involved nuclear disaster, leading to this sealed off colony (Iheka Reference Iheka2021). The film depicts the Maitu colony as a “dehydrated dystopia” (Lamar Reference Lamar2010), an imagined high-tech authoritarian world without water, powered by the kinetic energy of human bodies that is extracted through exercise machines—a world that scholar Aboubakar Sanogo goes so far as to call “postnature” (Durkin Reference Durkin2016).
The enclosed city that Kahiu conjures in Pumzi is both authoritarian and self-sustaining. Water is rationed to a few sips at a time, and urine and sweat are recycled on the spot. While upper-class people like the protagonist Asha work as bureaucrats, citizens of the lower classes produce the colony’s energy on old treadmills and rowing machines, or mop up stray droplets of water in the bathroom. An audio recording plays on loop, “Have you done your part today? Generate electricity for your community.” Water appears to be the currency of state power, as well as of charity and solidarity (a woman cleaning the bathroom receives a quiet tithe from Asha, a few sips of water).
Pumzi’s 22-minute plotline is driven by the mysterious appearance of a hydrated and fertile soil sample with coordinates from the outside world. Asha seeks permission from Maitu’s matriarchal council to locate the sample’s origin and cultivate the Maitu “mother seed.” But the ruling council is uninterested, ultimately disposing of the seed and sample and sentencing Asha to a lifetime of producing energy. In the end, it is the woman who works in the bathroom who saves the seed and sample and returns them to Asha so she can escape and plant life in the outside world. Asha stumbles across the radioactive desert in search of the fertile ground. When she finally comes upon it, she plants the seed and feeds it her last sips of water. The role of women here in regenerating a denuded earth invokes the work of Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, about whom Kahiu has directed a documentary (Iheka Reference Iheka2021). The film ends on an ambiguous note, zooming out from the lifeless Asha and her growing tree to show a lush forest in the distance. The viewer is left wondering— toward what end is all of this labor and energy extraction taking place? Moreover, who else is left in the outside world, to what do they owe their abundance, and what alternative social and political worlds is that wealth fueling?
Some of Kahiu’s most disquieting imagery is that of people in Maitu laboring endlessly on exercise machines to produce energy. Her framing suggests that these lives threaten to be socially reduced to nothing more than metabolism, unless rebellious acts of relationality disrupt that relentless depletion. These images resonate with places and people I know, whose time and work are consumed by either the realization of their energy needs or the mandatory demands of their energy system. Below, I refract the light of Kahiu’s speculative insights into the sociality of infrastructure onto the empirical conditions of the present in the two sites of my ethnographic research on energy: rural central Tanzania (2018–23) and southwest Georgia (2019–25). Through this comparative lens, I theorize how processes of racialization and capitalism scaffold experiences of both infrastructure and of infrastructural abandonment. I go on to highlight the very different forms of energy—what Myles Lennon (Reference Lennon2017) calls “vital relationality”—that see people through.
It is an amalgamation of the conceptual frames of Black Studies and African Studies that renders such a dialogue across these two sites possible. Rural central Tanzania and southwest Georgia can both be understood as what Jarvis McInnis (Reference McInnis2025) calls the Global Black South, a referent that connects the former European colonies in Africa and beyond to histories of plantation slavery in the United States and the Caribbean through their shared experiences of subjection, extraction, and infrastructural abandonment. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Reference Gilmore and Hale2008) terms such locales as “forgotten places, [but] not outside history” (31). Walter Rodney (Reference Rodney1972) might call them both “underdeveloped”; that is, not passively awaiting development, but rather actively and specifically siphoned from, while also hopped over (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006, 47) for infrastructural investment. A focus on the Global Black South enables analyzing in the same frame seemingly disparate and disconnected spaces—be they rural or urban, North or South, agricultural or industrial, uniting them into “a single–though spatially discontinuous–abandoned region” (Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Hale2008, 31). A focus on energy infrastructures allows specific attention to the role of the capacity to do work—so essential to capitalist frameworks—in the production of racial formations. Attending to the role of energy in these two forgotten places highlights how energy systems expose some people to the risk of their time being constantly made available to capital (Mitchell, Marston, & Katz Reference Mitchell, Marston and Katz2003; cf. Goffe and Luke Reference Goffe and Luke2024) and to a tendency toward premature death. But it also highlights energy’s other forms and possibilities, beyond its role as a fuel for capitalism.
Infrastructure, energy, and racial capitalism: Insights from the Black radical tradition
In the past decade, scholars have built upon theorizations of environmental justice (Pulido Reference Pulido2015), energy justice (Jenkins et al. Reference Jenkins, McCauley, Heffron, Stephan and Rehner2016; Sovacool et al., Reference Sovacool, Burke, Baker, Kotikalapudi and Wlokas2017), and Black ecologies (Hosbey and Roane Reference Hosbey and Roane2021; Murphy, Weddington, & Rio-Glick Reference Murphy, Weddington and Rio-Glick2021; Roane and Hosbey Reference Roane and Hosbey2019) to highlight how energy infrastructures both derive from and prop up projects of racial capitalism on the African continent (Adunbi Reference Adunbi2015; Reference Adunbi2020; Degani Reference Degani2017) and elsewhere in the diaspora (Harrison Reference Harrison2013a, Reference Harrison2013b; Hughes Reference Hughes2017; Lennon Reference Lennon2021; Luke Reference Luke2021). These discussions tend to trace bilateral and/or global connections experienced in a single time and place, rather than offering comparative or connective perspectives on race and energy systems in the context of global capitalism. This tendency has produced nuanced single-sited studies linking energy systems with inequality situated in global context (Adunbi Reference Adunbi2020; Dean Reference Dean2020; Doughty Reference Doughty2020; Chalfin Reference Chalfin2023; Cross Reference Cross, Abram, Winthereik and Yarrow2019; Cross and Neumark Reference Cross and Neumark2021; von Schnitzler Reference von Schnitzler2016) as well as distinct regional analyses of the role of race in energy systems (Degani, Chalfin, & Cross Reference Degani, Chalfin and Cross2020).
But engagement with the concept of racial capitalism offers other possibilities for more integrated and/or comparative analysis of energy systems, as I go on to show below. In contemporary scholarship, many attribute a notion of racial capitalism to the work of Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (Reference Robinson1983), which saw a dramatic uptick in citation in the last decade as attention to high-profile state violence against Black Americans intersected with historic levels of economic inequality. There, Robinson argues that race did not emerge simply as a mode of organizing relations between European and non-European people but was always already present in the relations of European peoples themselves. Racialism, he contends, permeated the development and expansion of capitalism from the beginning, latching onto a distinction between Black and white only later. Gilmore puts it succinctly: “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it” (Reference Gilmore2022, 451). In this view, race is not an epiphenomenon of capitalism; it constituted it from the very beginning.
Closer analysis of theories of racial capitalism has shown its emergence from and sustained use across multiple continents over a much longer period, especially between South Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. Levenson and Paret (Reference Levenson and Paret2023) elegantly trace the iterative development of a theory of racial capitalism through three dialectical processes: between centers and peripheries of struggle against apartheid, neocolonialism, and post-plantation police violence and dispossession; between activism and academia; and between the term “racial capitalism” and the broader problematic to which it refers. This longer history is most aptly summed up in Levenson and Paret’s visual depiction of the prevalence of the term “racial capitalism” in books between 1940 and 2020, which shows two “heydays” for the idea: the 1980s and 1990s—owing to anti-apartheid and postcolonial struggles especially in southern Africa—and the 2010s resurgence of protest in the form of #Black Lives Matter in the United States and #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements on the African continent and beyond. The authors’ review of pre-Robinson critiques and recognitions of the historical co-constitution of race and capitalism show its conceptual roots not only in South Africa and the United States, but Namibia (Theodoropoulos Reference Theodoropoulos1978), Kenya (van Zwaneberg Reference van Zwaneberg1974), Tanzania (Nyerere Reference Nyerere1967), as well as in Latin American dependency theory (Gutierrez Reference Gutiérrez2004).
Acknowledging these deeper roots and the two regions’ shared experiences of subjection, extraction, and infrastructural abandonment sets a precedent for a more integrated theorization of racial capitalism in the realm of energy and energy development across the disparate but connected geographies of rural Tanzania and the deep South of the United States. There is often widespread resistance to an analytical focus on race on the African continent outside of South Africa—especially in a country like Tanzania where people of European and Asian ancestry presently constitute less than one percent of the population. But attention to processes of racialization and capital in contemporary Tanzania follows the lead of Jemima Pierre, who has brilliantly shown that:
it is not so much that race does not matter on the African continent in places outside of South Africa. It is, instead, that research and scholarship on Africa have been unable to address the complexities of race making, particularly key distinctions between race, racialization processes, and practices of racism. (Reference Pierre2018, 213)
Theorists of race have long argued that race is too often designated as an element of social structure or a demographic category, instead of as a mode of thought (Arendt Reference Arendt1944; Glassman Reference Glassman2004). Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Reference Trouillot2003) highlighted the tendency toward a “savage slot” in European thought traditions; that is, a type of race-making that allows for the objectivization of a generic (read: nonhistorically specific) Other by—we might deduce—the subjectivization of a generic civilized collectivity. Similarly, Jonathan Glassman (Reference Glassman2004), writing on Zanzibar, argues that the history of race has involved the production and reproduction of meanings around the categorization of humanity. He argues that since European colonization, but even following independence, race has often been thought through the concept of “’barbarism’ and “its foil ‘civilization’” (Reference Glassman2004, 724). Yet, Glassman argues, it was not only colonizers who determined the terms and effects of racialization, nor only radical African populists seeking to eject them, but also the African intelligentsia, who created new categories of exclusion through promoting ideas of nationhood rooted in ideas about civilization and barbarism (see also Schneider Reference Schneider2006; Hodgson Reference Hodgson2011 on the marginalization of the Maasai under Ujamaa). Racial thought, per Glassman, is thus “a shifting field of discourse, a general set of assumptions that humankind is divided among constituent categories, each of which is distinguished by inherited traits and characteristics” (Reference Glassman2004, 725).
As such a process, or “racial formation” (Omi and Winant Reference Omi and Winant1986), and as a “propensity to categorize” (Brennan Reference Brennan2012, 18), race is thus always historically situated, “an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (Omi and Winant Reference Omi and Winant1986, 68). One need not have white and Black (or pink, tan, and brown) bodies in order to think with racial capitalism; rather, one must simply think with historically rationalized exclusions that attach value, and thus rights or privileges, to some bodies while they attach a debt of alienated labor onto others.
How do racial formations persist over time? Pierre urges us to pay close attention to the “sedimentations of racial difference” and the “established hierarchies of conquest” (Reference Pierre2018, 219) that are entrenched in contemporary social, political, and economic relations. Electric infrastructure is one such sedimentation. Von Schnitzler (Reference von Schnitzler2016) argues persuasively that “infrastructure and urban planning also became central to the production and maintenance of race and racial categories” (14). Kimari and Ernston (Reference Kimari and Ernstson2020) have theorized the “imperial remains” of large-scale infrastructure projects in Kenya, which, they argue, “must be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period” and whose planning, financing, and implementation evidence a “colonial racialism” (825). They argue for the Black radical tradition’s “return to Africa” to theorize racial capitalism, “so as to resist an often implicit geographical alienation” (828).
Contemporary infrastructures like electricity grids have proven to be rich sites for studying the sedimentations of racial difference and the historical contestation and negotiation they instantiate as essentially political networks. Taken as historical artifacts, infrastructures offer “archaeologies of differential provisioning” (Anand, Gupta, & Appel Reference Anand, Gupta and Appel2018, 3), the indexing and congealing of valuations of people, labor, and place at a particular moment in time that will produce future differentiations (a process I have called elsewhere “infrastructural triage” [Phillips Reference Phillips2022, 3–4]). Infrastructures, according to Deborah Cowen, “reach across time, building uneven relations of the past into the future, cementing their persistence (Reference Cowen2017).” In this article I view electric infrastructure as a racial project that produces and reproduces racial meanings across time and space, contributing to the terrain of race-making.
As infrastructures, modern energy systems import historically emergent political rationalities into the present. In her landmark genealogy of energy, Cara New Daggett (Reference Daggett2019) explores the “birth of energy” as an imperial logic—what Boyer (Reference Boyer2014) calls “energopower.” This logic, Daggett argues, governs access to and the use of fossil fuels with the goal of expanding colonial realms, maximizing productive work, and eliminating waste. “In the logic of energopolitics,” Daggett argues, “life … becomes secondary to making things work” (Reference Daggett2019, 130). Building on the anti-work scholarship of Kathi Weeks (Reference Weeks2011), Daggett identifies the way energy logics undergird both neocolonialism and late capitalism:
the dominant political rationalities of “energy” and “work” have naturalized the particular ways in which Westerners have sought to arrange energy-things and work-activities in the Anthropocene, mostly into fossil-fuel-soaked waged work for the purposes of productivity and profit. (Reference Daggett2019, 198)
Such valuations (and negative valuations) of different kinds of work emerge embraided into race-thinking itself. I go on to show how such logics—unconcerned with life and thus often dealing death (cf. Gilmore Reference Gilmore2002, 16)—come to organize the spatialization and selectivity of the distribution of infrastructure and its costs.
Sinwell, Ngwane, & Maggott (Reference Sinwell, Ngwane and Maggott2022) provide an example in South Africa, where a young boy was electrocuted by an illegal grid connection and died. Taking up the Black radical tradition, the authors challenge the state-owned utility’s displacement of responsibility onto illegal connections. They argue that it is the ongoing exclusion and marginalization of Black citizens from vital infrastructures in South Africa that has undermined safe and equal access to basic energy services, resulting in the boy’s death.
David Hughes’s (Reference Hughes2017) case study of the oil industry in Trinidad illustrates the mandatory structures associated with “making things work,” and connecting contemporary energy systems to the structures and practices of racial capitalism. Hughes traces a “thinning” of the idea of energy from a once “multiplex notion of divinity, life, and rightness” (28) to what he calls the “first fuel” of human slavery. Enslavement, he argues, stored energy for the first time “in a measurable, countable, transportable, and salable form (30),” leading to today’s portfolio of fuels like oil, coal, gas. But the horror and tragedy of enslavement, he argues, had other inconveniences. Today’s fuels and today’s energy systems have evolved to provide, “terawatts without drama” (60), that is, the resources for capitalist production and consumption, rendered standardized and socially disembedded in a way that “narrow[s] vision enough to obscure sin” (39–40).
Similarly, anthropologist Myles Lennon (Reference Lennon2017) draws on research among anti-racist activists and solar energy experts in New York City to argue that modern energy systems bear the legacy of colonialism’s tendency to turn energy into a “commoditized form that makes certain lives not matter” (19). But Lennon complicates any straightforward relation between energy and racial capitalism, drawing on Lohman’s distinction between Big-E and Little-E energy—that is, fossil fuels for industrialized capitalism so politically and technically obfuscated that their social context is invisible—versus lower-case energies entangled with times and places—seasons, rivers, forests, daily cycles of light. By studying little-e energies that entangle material technologies, activist political discourses, and social relations—Lennon showcases energy’s other potentialities, including a vital relationality between all forms of life and matter. Below, I argue that zooming out to the geographic scale and historical time of a global Black studies makes transparent the relationship between energy infrastructures and lives not mattering, and between vital relationality and regeneration in the face of capitalist depletion.
Triage and abandonment in rural Tanzania
In Tanganyika, electricity was introduced in 1908 to supply power to the colonial administration and settlers, and to plantation agriculture and extractive industries. Van der Straeten (Reference van der Straeten2014, 275) notes that “Africans” in colonial Tanganyika “were not considered eligible as customers nor thought to be able to pay for electricity.” If, as Lennon argues, colonialism turned energy into a commodity that “made certain lives not matter,” the colonial grid certainly reflected Britain’s apathy. By independence in 1961, Tanganyika was producing a mere 50 MW of electricity that was transmitted through a few isolated grids to plantations, railway workshops, and settler homes. Singida, designated early on as a labor reserve, was mined only for its human labor power and remained entirely off grid. President Nyerere’s independent socialist government built the first hydropower dam with a different aim—to deliver energy services to rural farmers in their newly villagized settlements. But in the short years of socialism, grid expansion didn’t get far. When I began my research in 2004, the national grid still passed directly by villages to reach sites of industry and extraction. The changing productive efforts of three very different but interconnected households I have known over these two decades illustrate the diverse energies that people wring, recycle, and metabolize from—as well as reinfuse into—their environments to fuel their everyday lives before, between, and alongside national energy infrastructures.
When I first arrived in Singida, I lived for three months with the primary school head teacher and his younger wife and children. Nyaiddi was one of the most privileged women in the village, with a salaried husband and the capital to run a weekly brewing business. While she worked from sun-up to sundown to farm, feed her family, and generate income through brewing and farming cash crops, she outsourced some of the drudgery of rural subsistence, paying other women to fetch water and charcoal, gather and clean wild greens, or send her grain to the electric mill in the grid-connected next village. These financial arrangements, born from social affinities, provided a minimal means of income to the few women who assisted her and also secured a relationship of mutual aid between them.
While Nyaiddi’s life was exceptional in its access to cash and capital, most of the women she knew and worked alongside lived a more modest life. Nyazakaria, for example, resided with her husband and daughters in a homestead of mud brick and thatched roof buildings. She kept chickens and sold their eggs every few days to purchase a few ounces of oil for cooking and kerosene to light candles for evening work. With her husband and in-laws, she took turns herding their few cattle, goats, and sheep. With her husband, she farmed several acres of maize, millet, and beans, so that so long as the rains fell, the harvest would feed them for much of the year. Other waking hours were taken up cooking or brewing beer for sale, hiking for water or firewood, gathering greens, or grinding grain at the mill, which, though grueling, also offered opportunities to mix, mingle, commiserate, and socialize.
But although all women in the village carried a daunting burden of work, there were also a few who remained in more dire circumstances. One of the women who carried charcoal to Nyaiddi was Nyaasha, whom I have written about before (Phillips Reference Phillips2020). In 2004, Nyaasha was known as a woman who hana hata kuku (“does not even own a chicken”—the Nyaturu idiom for the poorest of the poor). I interviewed Nyaasha in 2005 and again in 2006. Her three children had been identified by a village committee as “Children from the Most Vulnerable Environments” (a designation known as “MVC”) as part of a United Nations-supported effort to channel school supplies and food aid to the youngest and most vulnerable of villagers. The small dirt yard outside her mud-roofed house was littered with pits of the wild watery zambarau fruit. Nyaasha had been widowed very young with no farmland or livestock, leaving her with little more than her labor to access food, healthcare, school fees, shoes, and clothes for her growing children. For work she relied on agricultural day labor, picking wild leafy greens to sell to nearby households, or hauling gunnysacks of charcoal 12 km to town by foot to afford a bit of grain for her children. “I earn 50 shillings [approximately 5 cents] for one bowl and need to sell 8 bowls to get 1 liter of grain a day” (about one-third of her family’s food needs). Despite the hardship she remained determined to keep her children in school, eking out money to purchase eyeglasses for her seventh-grader, who was studying for the all-important gateway exam to secondary education. Along the way, Nyaasha often relied on the small kindnesses of neighbors—a liter of flour here, an ounce of kerosene or a hundred shillings there.
In 2004, energy supply for Nyaiddi, Nyazakaria, and Nyaasha was different more in quantity than in form. They all cooked with firewood or charcoal, lit homes with kerosene candles or lanterns, and sent or took their maize to the electric mill in another village by foot. Each night, all three women would bury the hot red embers of their cooking fire in a large pot of cool ash, where they would be roused in the morning to start a new fire, or to light a neighbor’s fire, sparing the use of kindling or matches. Despite the similarities in their lives of hyper-conservation, Nyaiddi’s and Nyazakaria’s intense labor fueled a livable life for them and their families. Nyaasha’s labor, in contrast, was driven by (and practically reduced to), supplying other people’s demands to provide her family with a far more sparing subsistence.
More recently, a rather seismic shift in energy possibilities and policies occurred with the 2010 discovery of natural gas reserves in Tanzania and the newly opened Julius Nyerere Hydropower Station at Stiegler’s Gorge Dam that is expected to produce over 2000 MW. The government is now exporting electricity and considering contracts to use “surplus” energy to host new American data centers, while 54 percent of Tanzanians remain unconnected at home (United Republic of Tanzania 2025). Tanzanians get this irony, and backlash and popular demands prior to the 2015 elections threatened the ruling party’s precarious but tenacious hold on Tanzanian electoral politics since independence in 1961. The result was a flurry of energy and electrification policies, to the extent that in 2015, Tanzanian politics blogger Ben Taylor questioned if the 2015 presidential election debates “might be summed up in a single issue”: electricity (Taylor Reference Taylor2015). Following the 2015 elections, the late President Magufuli, known widely as “the bulldozer” for his aggressive politics, ushered in an era of ambitious electricity policy, popularly referred to as “REA,” as part of his plans to make Tanzania a middle-income country by 2025.
Although REA (the Rural Electricity Agency) has sought to achieve universal electrification and may be seen as part of what Elizabeth Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee2019) has termed “fossil developmentalism” (state-led electrification projects pursued as a national good and moral project), productive logics inform who has a “right” to electricity. While the grid has expanded, to be sure, REA policies never promised universal access, and instead lay out clear plans for infrastructural triage (based on settlements’ “socioeconomic development potential”) that reflect the sedimentation of race-making in the past and the present (Phillips Reference Phillips2022). Because such triage picks off the most lucrative markets for government electrification (sometimes even after private investment for renewable energy mini-grids have begun), private sector renewable energy companies and even nonprofit actors investing in rural energy solutions have become discouraged, leaving questions about how those left out of state rural electrification will ever be connected at the household level (Phillips Reference Phillips2022).
In Singida, in this era of late electric capitalism, people are finding their place in national and local economies, exporting cash crops, and engaging in commerce and skilled service provision with their neighbors. The national grid has followed, lighting the homes of Nyaiddi and other families deemed to matter, and opening new opportunities for income generation for women like Nyazakaria, what development agencies fetishize as “the productive use of energy.” For the rest, small solar technologies and systems light the homes that can afford them. But for Nyaasha, consumption and production, energy source and energy expenditure, remain so tightly coupled that they threaten to become indistinguishable. She meets her basic needs so that she may labor to meet her basic needs, and so on. While the labor is the same, the costs of her daily needs have risen alongside others’ improved livelihoods. This infrastructural abandonment is ever more inscribed into the leanness of her limbs, born into the strength of her spine, worried into the furrow of her brow, wasted into the peachy fuzz of her hair. Like the energy generators of Maitu, the bodies of people like Nyaasha are reduced to being the infrastructure for others (cf. Simone Reference Simone2004; Gastrow Reference Gastrow2024): in Brian Larkin’s words, the “objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate” (Reference Larkin2013, 329), or, per Gretchen Bakke (Reference Bakke, Abram, Winthereik and Yarrow2019, 31), “a thing that doesn’t move, in order that other things may move summarily along,” making them the final frontier of extraction.
Debt and abandonment in the Deep South
For another perspective on the racialization of energy and capital in the Global Black South, I turn to the city of Albany, the capital of Georgia’s Black Belt. The origins of the Black Belt toponym point to two historical referents, depending on whom you ask: either the black soil in a crescent-shaped region stretching across the South that drew white plantation farmers for cotton-growing in the early nineteenth century; or, alternately, the concentration of the Black population in parts of the rural South between emancipation in 1863 and 1880. In a 1903 essay in The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that the emergence of this concentrated demographic Black Belt between 1863 and 1880 was about “a huddling for self-protection—a massing of the black population for mutual defence” ([1903] Reference Du Bois2018). Since that time, Dougherty County has represented a safe haven with its majority-Black population that boasted its own brilliant Black lawyers, who ensured that not a single lynching took place within its borders. Albany also became a center of the national civil rights movement between 1961 and 1963.
Today, Albany is a city of about 70,000 mostly Black residents. Du Bois’s 1903 essay captured the “curiously mingled hope and pain” of Georgia’s Black Belt, its “capital” Albany, and surrounding Dougherty County. “How curious a land is this—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia” ([1903] Reference Du Bois2018, 95). In the essay, Du Bois presents a meticulous portrait of the social and economic space of the Black Belt in 1903. He writes of the summer’s “dull, determined heat” (137); of economies of sharecropping and convict labor with bodies now as depleted as the soil; the “forlorn and forsaken” (91) former Cotton Kingdom, a beautiful land of forests and swamps and a ruin of oaks and lawns and castles, “now ragged and wild” (97). The piece captures a sense of the Black Belt’s Southern country culture, as well as its ecology of relative isolation, historical burden, and economic neglect. As Du Bois wrote: “It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty … But a pall of debt hangs over [it] … and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all” (99).
In today’s Dougherty County, among people’s heaviest burden is their energy burden—the percentage of income they spend each month on gas and electric bills. The cost is heaviest for low-income people in the South and of these, Black, indigenous, and elder households on fixed incomes bear disproportionate costs. The average energy burden in the United States is 3 percent. According to the US Department of Energy, a high energy burden is 6 percent, and a severe energy burden is 10 percent. According to the US Department of Energy (2026), 23 percent of households in Albany live below the Federal Poverty Level with an income of less than $9,832 a year or $819 a month. These households pay an average of 16 percent of that income on energy. Dougherty County has the highest rate of food insecurity in the state at 27.3 percent, rendering it a likely site for what is known as the “heat or eat conundrum,” or even what we might call the “heat or rent conundrum.”
Why and how are energy prices so high in Albany? Due to Georgia’s conservative regulatory framework for utilities, Albany’s residents are locked into a territorially based, monopoly-driven utility contract negotiated through 2050 in a virtually indecipherable web of contracts between the City of Albany, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG), and Georgia Power, which produces most of the energy in the state and over the last fifteen years, undertook a $32 billion expansion on the Vogtle nuclear plant. In Georgia’s system, utilities are guaranteed a rate of return on capital investments, which means Georgia Power makes money when it spends money, incentivizing megaprojects like Plant Vogtle that, as Rachel Goffe and Nikki Luke (Reference Goffe and Luke2024, 1313–15) have brilliantly argued, render utility customers captive, with their future wages serving as collateral for the utility. This contract means that the city of Albany is responsible for paying approximately $80 million to MEAG each year for power, a cost that is directly transferred onto Albany residents, whose population (and tax base) has decreased by one third in the last twenty years due to outmigration (and white flight) of salaried residents to surrounding counties and job flight from southwest Georgia.
On top of this debt service, high energy burden is also widely recognized to be related to the housing structures in which low- and middle-income Black families live. Fifty-three percent of houses in the southeast were built before the earliest energy codes were developed. Energy burden maps have been shown to be correlated with historical redlining maps, demonstrating the broader impacts of long-term racial segregation on housing. With 60 percent of Albany’s residents renting their housing, they cannot directly control its energy efficiency. Without home ownership, they are not eligible for energy efficiency programs that homeowners can access to improve their residences.
Finally, the city utility was founded, like many city utilities, as a money-maker to fund the city’s budget in order to keep property taxes minimal. As former Albany utility board member Rambo Orlando explained at a 2023 meeting of the city’s Black Caucus, the city’s overall budget is $320 million, and $170 million of that comes from the utility. The city’s budget is balanced each year by the transfer of $17 million in utility profit to the city’s general fund and reserve funds. No wonder that when Albany residents hit the streets in 2021 to protest these costs, placards read: “Light bills shouldn’t be higher than rent;” “It’s a poverty tax;” and “Find a better way to fund the city’s budget!” People’s awareness of the connection between the city budget and utility costs manifests as pervasive and perennial complaints about a January spike in light bills owing to the city’s downtown Christmas light display.
A woman whom I’ll call JanineFootnote 3 responded to my call for research participants struggling to pay their utility bills. Janine was in her 60s, on a breathing machine,and living in a small one-bedroom apartment. She had worked for years as a phlebotomist, but had to stop working when she slipped on a wet floor and suffered an excruciatingly painful back injury. Janine lived on a $900/month disability check from the government. This money was swallowed each month by a $550/month rent bill and a utility bill which ranged from $205 to $285/month. This comes out to an energy burden of 22–33 percent. Janine also received $125 in food stamps which paid for a shockingly minimalist grocery bill. Her daughter paid her phone bill and brought her paper towels and some other household supplies. Medicaid, thank goodness, covered her medications and healthcare. I asked Janine how she felt every month when she opened her utility bill. She said “I dread it. Dread it real real hard, hoping it’s not too high. And then hoping it’s just right, and I have a little change left. If I have a little bit left over, I buy a little more meat and bread. Otherwise, I have to get that little small loaf and make it last.”
There are many reasons people need energy to survive and thrive: to cook food, regulate temperature, to heat water and run water pumps. They need energy to function economically, to light domestic and work spaces; to power laptops, phones, wi-fi connections, alarm clocks, and other electronics needed to participate in the economy. COVID 19 brought into sharp relief the need for energy to work or attend school from home. There are social reasons for energy’s importance as well: to participate in social life; to power basic needs for communication and social connection; and to power the home as a social space that meets basic expectations for lighting, cooking, hosting, and temperature regulation. But for many people in Albany, the energy system seems to deplete their life force far more than it fuels it. In the household interviews I conducted between 2023 and 2025, I witnessed again and again the opportunity costs of spending a disproportionate amount of one’s income on energy. When you need to spend money to keep the lights on, that is money that can’t be spent on other things. And the smaller one’s income, the more likely that energy costs will encroach on the ability to pay for other basic needs: housing, nutritious food, medicine, healthcare, transportation.
When I spoke with a pillar in the housing community who directs a housing shelter for families and youth who are experiencing or are vulnerable to homelessness, she told me that one of the biggest impediments in her rapid rehousing work was old utility bills in the thousands of dollars. She was angry: “How are people supposed to get ahead? You have utility bills that are higher than people’s rent. How are they supposed to live? They know to plan a third of their income toward housing, but they don’t know to plan the same for utilities, because it shouldn’t be that way!” Indeed, one of the director’s temporary shelter tenants was Ms. Yolanda and her two small children who were unable to move into the free public housing she had been offered because of a $1,200 accumulated light bill. The shelter director also noted the connection between foster care and utility disconnection: “To keep your kids you have to have housing and utilities. Because if a child does not have water and heat, that’s neglect, by Family Services’ definition. So that’s another kid going to foster care because of these high bills. If you fix these problems, you can fix the problems with foster care.”
If I had more space here, I’d also tell you about Tamara, a professional recruiter who became unemployed after severe COVID, and couldn’t pay her accumulated $600 light bill; I’d describe what her house smelled like in the 95 degree Georgia spring with no refrigeration, running water, or air conditioning and how Tamara’s next door neighbor—a wheelchaired hero—connected an extension cord that ran from his apartment to hers so she could have a single light and charge a phone. I’d sing a praise song to Nikki, the community advocate who has kept Tamara in this world, connecting her to both mental health resources and the utility fight. I’d tell you about Maleah, who declared bankruptcy to buy more time to pay off her utility bill, so that her kids could keep their apartment home. You’d hear from Shatiqua, who kept as a trophy all the batteries she used during a three-month winter power shutoff; how she used candles and stove burners to heat her apartment and donated plasma until her utility account was back in the black. And I’d tell you about the late City Commissioner Demetrius Young, who represented Albany’s poorest district and whose constituents frequently called upon him to intervene with the utility company and the people he knew who are now choosing to live in the dark rather than worry about getting a $600 light bill. For now though, I want to think through what putting these forgotten places in the same frame can tell us about the role of energy systems in sites where, in Jemima Pierre’s words, “the actual contours of white power … [are] obfuscated” (Reference Pierre2018, 217). It is through zooming out to the geographical scale and historical time of a Global Black South that the stakes of differentiation and patterns of not mattering become most clear.
Zooming out: Infrastructural abandonment at the scale of a Global Black Studies
In this article, I have highlighted across these disparate energy worlds the shared experience of infrastructural abandonment, the commonsense triaging of places and people to distribute and extract resources, enhancing life and labor to some in alignment with the needs of capital, while abandoning others and rendering them more vulnerable to premature death. Here, electricity is capital—the foundation of a rural business, the fuel for internet and phone connectivity, and the necessary infrastructure for both rural and urban life that facilitates seeing, reading, working, moving, transporting, cooling, warming, charging, communicating, connecting, and eating. But grids also map capital, and direct and extract future capital across sedimented geographies of inequality, as Cross’s (Reference Cross, Abram, Winthereik and Yarrow2019) study powerfully shows in the case of Odisha, India, where electicity is mapped onto income and caste. These hierarchies persist in eking and extracting labor and resources from the very people whom they have devalued. The ongoing reactivation and use of these infrastructural sedimentations of inequality thus constitute the elusive race-making that Pierre (Reference Pierre2020) notes is often difficult to pin down in African contexts. It is not only that infrastructure is racialized, but that race-making is infrastructuralized.
Infrastructural abandonment scaffolds accumulation; but it is equally important to note that it scaffolds too the experience of those who are not accumulating. Abandonment should not be confused with the anti-historical idea of a “lack of development,” as has all-too-often been invoked in postcolonial contexts, especially in relation to infrastructure. Rather, abandonment represents the material and historical consequences of being reckoned as not mattering, or mattering only insofar as one’s time and labor holds potential for future capitalist growth. Not mattering does not just scaffold an absence of services. In a world driven by accumulation, it leaves people ever more susceptible to premature death as deprivation coupled with debt service become inscribed onto bodies—especially, but not exclusively, Black ones.
So what light does Pumzi’s Maitu refract onto the workings of racial capitalism in Singida and Albany? Maitu posits a future of planetary decimation, wholly mediated by technology, a society of ever-increasing individualism, unremitting extraction, and bio-power where conservation consists of “[wasting] human capital to preserve meager resources” (Lamar Reference Lamar2010). This futuristic and dystopic world refracts a critique of our contemporary one, where technological and political innovation, climate crisis, and a carefully orchestrated and racialized inequality produce landscapes that are habitable but dehumanized—for some more than others. In such settings of infrastructural abandonment, inequality manifests as a differentiation in labor, in autonomy of time and body, and in access to knowledge.
The comparison between the disparate energy worlds of rural Tanzania and southwest Georgia highlights the shared experience of infrastructural abandonment. The commonsense sorting and ranking (or triaging) of racialized places and people distributes and extracts energy resources, enhancing life and labor for some in alignment with the valuations of racial capital, while abandoning others to a systemic siphoning of their unenhanced labor that renders them more vulnerable to premature death. The great irony revealed is that where energy infrastructures do not serve (forgoing the enhancement of the capacity to do work), they appropriate and extract work, rendering those people the extensions of infrastructure rather than its beneficiaries. The people producing energy on the exercise machines in Maitu, Nyaasha’s endless labor and slow wasting, the taxation through electricity bills of untaxable poor households in Albany—each of these groups is rendered immobile by the distinctions of the political order so that, to paraphrase Bakke, other people may move summarily along (Reference Bakke, Abram, Winthereik and Yarrow2019, 31). Here we see carcerality in some of its most literal forms.
But energy in Maitu, as well as in Singida and Albany, has other potentialities beyond relentless depletion—the vital relationality and materiosocial forms that see people through their organized abandonment and fuel radical place-making: in Maitu, the tithing of water and the smuggling of a seed; in Singida, the sharing of embers and kerosene to light cooking fires or candles and the slanted reciprocities that bind people into extra-household alliances; in Albany, the electric umbilical cord to Tamara’s disconnected apartment and the sizzle of organizing discontent about utility politics. Hints of redemption and regeneration are found in the remnants of reciprocity—unauthorized collaborations between people from similar and different social strata. The energy of this relationality and its radical place-making offer hope for some alternative to seepage, exhaustion, and decline: the germination of a new kind of order.
Open access
