Designing The Authority: Dams, High Modernity, and Colonial Temporal Containment

Abstract

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s dams are the culmination of a high modern design ideology, spatio-temporal land-use imaginary, and geography of containment. Many hydroelectric dams were erected in the 700-mile watershed. The energy fueled the manufacture of bombers, missiles, and the atomic bomb. The Authority had unprecedentedly broad purview, from constructing fertilizer factories, coal-fired plants, and nuclear facilities to becoming involved in education and public health. The Authority model crafted a developmental reasoning for militarized involvement across the Earth. The dams were called a pathway to liberal democracy, yet environmental devastation, racism, and Indigenous displacement were inherent, as documented by the NAACP, and the flooding of Indigenous cities. MoMA’s 1941 exhibit named the settler-colonial infrastructure an art object. The dam is a hydraulic monument to coloniality. Art institutions, engineers, and designers are implicated. As these containers decay, we must begin to see once-modern futures as already breached, leaking, shattered.

Keywords:

• settler colonialism
• infrastructure
• dams
• curatorial practice
• water politics
• modernism
• environmental racism
• temporality

Acknowledgements

Immense love and gratitude to the 2020 Masters cohort at the NYU Department of Performance Studies, and André Lepecki for editorial guidance and encouragement. Nasser Abourahme’s conversation connected the global dots, along with Jasbir K. Puar and Lisa Duggan’s radiant class. Many colleagues have entertained this conversation with me, despite its rambling nature: thank you. My dad would love this.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It seems Morgan later came to regret hierarchal approach to social change, but never formally renounced his views. When he was in his nineties, he published Dams and Other Disasters (1971), admonishing the Army Corp for its inability to handle public works. For more details on TVA’s internal politics, see Hargrove’s Prisoners of Myth (1994).

2 See also Dalal Musaed Alsayer’s (2022) recent work on the TVA model in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which sought to override desert life-ways with irrigated farming, as well as reorient desert sociality to fit a more Americanized form of domestic rurality. Also, Vandana Shiva writes that the theory of “equitable use” by the standards of global capitalism ultimately undermined water sovereignty in India, and prioritized the “use” and “appropriation” of the river basin over the protection of the river or its inhabitants, resulting in the Krishna Valley Authority. The KVA does not protect or conserve the Krishna River; it mediates all relationships with the resource of water, under the rhetoric of the municipal (Shiva 2002).

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Zane Porterfield

Zane Porterfield’s work follows the flows of performance studies, environmental studies, curatorial practice, critical theory, and archival remnant. She received her BA and MA from New York University’s Performance Studies Department. Her writing spans genre, from a new materialist approach to mountaintop-removal coal mining to the study of algorithmic marking of women in the folk music canon as categorically “lost.” Her time in the Gulf Conservation Corp in South Texas has birthed new projects on the living costs of Superfund sites and the expansion of SpaceX and Tesla, which closely mirrors the petrochemical buildout. Her move back to the Texas Hill Country has been profound.

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