This starter kit will be useful to anyone who wants to think about theories of repair/maintenance/care/innovation alongside objects/things that undergo infrastructural/cultural transformation in the postcolonial setting.
There are several things in history for which repair practices have been forgotten or that need to be remembered and re-included into the epistemology of Repair, Maintenance, and Care. Steven J. Jackson, in his chapter titled ‘Rethinking Repair’, explores the Ship breaking industry of Bangladesh as captured in Edward Burtynsky’s photographs and makes a crucial observation: that ships are most often represented in their “moments of birth, or heights of strength and glory: the christening before the maiden voyage, rounding the cape, facing down the Spanish fleet, and so on” (226). Jackson through Burtynsky helps visualise the processes of dismantling ships post their glory days by asking the simple question: “But what happens (or happened) to these ships?” (226).
I find the question “what happened?” to be of great service to me in thinking about repair practices. The question helps think about events post-production and post-consumption and to simultaneously demonstrate care. I begin by wondering about the broad question: What happened to the machines that were instrumental to colonisation? This question leads me to think specifically about the WWII Willys MB jeeps and its transformation into the Filipino Jeepney.
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1, 1980, pp. 121–36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652.
ARNOLD, DAVID, and ERICH DeWALD. “Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia: An Introduction.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–17., https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article.
Literature and Poetry
Meñez, Herminia Quimpo. “The Art and Language of Manila’s Jeepney Drivers”. Explorations In Philippine Folklore. Quezon City: Ateneo de University Press, 1996.
Gemino H. Abad. “Jeepney”. Carbó, Nick. Returning a Borrowed Tongue: Poems by Filipino And Filipino American Writers. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press , 1995. (link to poem).
From the Abstract:
“In the early years of U.S. colonization, Filipino poets were forced to “borrow” a foreign tongue; today, fifty years after independence, they return the borrowed tongue with lyrical poems about migration, immigration, exile, nostalgia, desire, poverty, exploitation, racism, American culture, love, and invisibility.”
Photography, Art and Aesthetics
Claudio Sieber/Barcroft Media. “Farewell to jeepneys: Philippine transport changes gear – in pictures“. The Guardian. May 2019.
Chattopadhyay, Swati. “The Art of Auto-Mobility: Vehicular Art and the Space of Resistance in Calcutta.” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, Mar. 2009, pp. 107–139.
Repair, Maintenance, and Care Approaches
Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, 221–40. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014.
Mattern, Shannon. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal, 2018, https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/.
Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 3, 2007, pp. 1–25.
The Maintainers. https://themaintainers.org/
Colonial and Neo-colonial Transport Infrastructure
Hyde, Charles K. Arsenal of Democracy : The American Automobile Industry in World War II. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013. Print. Great Lakes Books.
Zwick, Austin. “Welcome to the Gig Economy: Neoliberal Industrial Relations and the Case of Uber.” GeoJournal, vol. 83, no. 4, 2018, pp. 679–691.
Ty, Michelle. “Trash and the Ends of Infrastructure.” MSF Modern Fiction Studies 61, no. 4 (2015): 606–30. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/605503.