Southern spectrums: the raw to the smooth edges of energopower

Abstract

With a focus on the energy nexus around a nuclear power plant in peninsular south India that has been under construction since 2002, this chapter revisits Dominic Boyer proposals for how 'electropolitics infuse governance' (2015: 534) with reference to his term, 'energopower'. In the postcolonial context, we have a case of modern governmentality entwined with more direct and authoritarian government that follows on from colonial regimes. With the nuclear power plant, the state has intensified its presence in the region through extra policing, paramilitary presence, and attendant development projects. Such recent phenomena have met with an ambivalent if not outright hostile reception among local communities. The politics of electricity apply differentially to varied constituencies marked by local, national and transnational power relations, provisions and sites through, along and against the grid. Accordingly, Boyer's 'energopower' need be further qualified: from Foucauldian notions of modern governmentality that corresponds most closely with Boyer's energy politics to forms of more direct government in what I have called the raw politics of energy: in an adaptation of both Boyer and Achille Mbembe, necro-energopower.