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Party Proliferation and Political Contestation in Africa: Senegal in Comparative Perspective

shifts gears, turning to the communities living alongside the reactor that have experienced “atomic lands” – the spatial infringement of potentially risky scientific activity on proximate social, economic and domestic life and occupation – as restrictive, secretive and disenfranchising. She notes, in particular, that GAEC scientists intentionally cultivated the illusion of larger scale and more risky scientific activity in order to maintain access to land and authority over it. Based on rich historical/ethnographic accounts of life around the reactor, this chapter provides a welcome counterpoint to nuclear scientists’ own views of the symbolic and material value of their pursuits. It does not, in my view, entirely make up for the lack of a more nuanced account of these pursuits, or of who stood to benefit (or not), throughout the book. Readers interested in the political meaning and embedding of nuclear science and technology will find, in Atomic Junction, a wealth of detail extracted from a broad range of archival, oral-historical, media and ethnographic sources that Osseo-Asare collected over the span of more than a decade. Those reading Atomic Junction for its more general, cross-cutting themes – such as scientific equity, postcolonial aspiration and (im)plausibility, or Afro–Soviet cooperation – may, however, find its granularity burdensome. Atomic Junction has much to offer to a broad audience in African, postcolonial, and science and technology studies, that is, unfortunately, not spotlighted to strike the diagonal or hurried reader.