Floating Power
Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations
Published on 21. April 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
194 pages
978-1-4780-3851-1 (ISBN)
Description
Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Goekce Guenel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Guenel uses the Ayseguel Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.
Reviews / Votes
"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
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
22 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
290 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-3851-1 (9781478038511)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Goekce Guenel 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.
Content
Introduction: Technologies of Deferral 1
1. Cin Fikir 31
2. Liminal Devices 60
3. Leapfrogging to Solar 86
4. Drive Electric 110
Epilogue: A Global Future of Energy 137
Acknowledgments 145
Notes 149
References 163
Index 179
1. Cin Fikir 31
2. Liminal Devices 60
3. Leapfrogging to Solar 86
4. Drive Electric 110
Epilogue: A Global Future of Energy 137
Acknowledgments 145
Notes 149
References 163
Index 179