AFTERWORD HANNAH APPEL
The Licit Life of Capitalism,
12/2019
Book Chapter
This book has engaged a specific capitalist project — US oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea — to make an argument about global capitalism more broadly. Refusing both totalizing ...theories that attribute to capitalism an intrinsic systematicity or logic, and arguments for an endlessly varied, specific, and fractured form, this book traces the work required to make Equatorial Guinea into an oil-exporting place. In so doing, it attempts to show the relationship between capitalism’s coherence and power and the radically heterogeneous sites through which those qualities are made — and made again. Methodologically, this approach asks us
INTRODUCTION HANNAH APPEL
The Licit Life of Capitalism,
12/2019
Book Chapter
Capitalism is not a context; it is a project.¹
This book offers an ethnographic account of the daily life of capitalism. It is both an account of a specific capitalist project — US oil companies ...working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea — and an exploration of more general forms and processes (the offshore, contracts, infrastructures, something called “the” economy) that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Each of these forms and processes, which organize the book, chapter by chapter, is both a condition of possibility for contemporary capitalism and an ongoing entanglement with the raced and gendered histories
THE Economy HANNAH APPEL
The Licit Life of Capitalism,
12/2019
Book Chapter
The first months of 2008 were dark in Malabo. The capital city went for days without electricity, stretching at one point to two weeks. Those who could afford it used private generators in the days ...sin luz (literally, without light) to keep businesses running, keep homes cool, or allow electric light, music, or television. The city filled with the clattering roar of generator motors fighting their flimsy steel containers, along with the stench of diesel exhaust. My neighbors — a Lebanese-owned restaurant and nightclub complex — had a powerful generator, the noise and fumes from which sometimes filled my small
