Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah is an anthropologist and writer. She currently teaches at the African Leadership University (Mauritius) and conducts research at the intersection of knowledge circulations, digital infrastructures, and social transformations in Africa.
A former Iso Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (South Africa), she has carried out ethnographic research in Angola, South Africa, and Mauritius. Her work explores how material and digital infrastructures shape imaginaries of the future, highlighting the ingenuity, innovation, and agency of African actors.
Her writing addresses both academic and general audiences, seeking to deconstruct persistent representations of Africa—too often reduced to the “heart of darkness” or imagined through the myth of Wakanda—and to foreground narratives of autonomy, creativity, and leadership.
During her residency, Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah will draft the first version of her manuscript The Internet as the Southern Cross, to be published by University of California Press in a new series dedicated to digital infrastructures.
Structured around seven accessible essays, the book draws on three years of ethnographic research in Angola, Mauritius, and South Africa. It examines the intersections between digital infrastructures, global geopolitics, local dynamics of extraction, and imaginaries of the future. Its ambition is to propose a reconceptualization of digital futures, grounded in concrete situations where African actors invent, innovate, and act to shape the digital world.
During her stay in Nantes, she will also deepen her long-standing collaboration with Orange Marine, a key player in maritime digital infrastructure in Africa, through visits to Brest and the company’s headquarters—material that also informs one of the book’s chapters.
Read the Rest of World article on the Orange Marine cable ship
To read more: https://jahaj.net.za/