5: Extensions as Infrastructure: The Temporalities between Subjugation and Liberation in Jayapura, West Papua

Publication Date:
28 Mar 2024
Pages:
95–116
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529229745.ch005
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This chapter engages Jayapura – West Papua’s largest urban region – as a site to explore how the infrastructural intersections of multiple temporalities give specific shape to the city. These temporalities emerge from a tense interplay of continuously revised modalities of domination and resistance, as well as registers that are more ambiguous. The chapter develops an account of ‘Papuan time’ that exposes tensions between contracting and protracting temporalities: between modern development narratives portraying indigenous Papuans as ‘frozen in time’, the lived experience of time as ‘broken’ with the loss of national self-determination, and the extension of differential infrastructures that attempt to reclaim time amid the uncertainty of an ‘interminable present’. It is argued that these vital processes and relations shaping Jayapura serve as an infrastructure for inhabitations that suspend clear trajectories of either subjugation or liberation. Urban ‘extensions’ constitute spatio-temporal infrastructures that lend support to Papuan configurations of temporality, of momentary experiences of freedom enabling at least affective rehearsals for a national liberation that is continuously deferred.

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