As another electricity outage rolled through the northern reaches of Dakar, Lamane abandoned the computer modem with which he had been tinkering and sat beside me. Urban residents had become quite accustomed to making the most of these interruptions in daily routine.
Now, he was flirting with the idea of liquidating his computers and investing elsewhere. His dream was to start a fashion boutique, he confessed. To that end, he hoped to find work abroad, save some money, then import jeans and sneakers to get his business off the ground.
But every attempt he had made to secure a visa or migrate through clandestine channels had failed. He resented being stuck in the city where roads were rife with traffic bottlenecks, electricity outages were frequent, and opportunities were few. Perhaps we could become business partners, he suggested after some thought, and I could help him secure an American visa.
Like Lamane, many residents of Dakar Dakarois linked their daily struggles to the inability of infrastructures—concrete overpasses, investment channels, or clandestine migratory routes—to accommodate the pressure placed on them. Increasingly, they described this state of infrastructural overload with the term embouteillage. But urbanites also used the word in more inventive ways to describe many other sorts of impasse, from bureaucratic lags, unpaid salaries, and weak investment flows to resource shortages, internet failures, and overcrowded neighborhoods.
Experiences of impasse are not peculiar to 21 st -century Dakar. The bottleneck has become a feature of everyday life around the world. It is a local, material manifestation of often quite abstract, global processes. In cities of all sizes throughout the world, people spend their days navigating traffic-clogged streets and tedious bureaucratic systems. Migrants continue to be routed into camps, detention centers, and various dead-ends, where life and movement are halted in an interminable state of liminality.
