This presentation centers on Diamniadio, the new urban hub southeast of Dakar, as a site through which Güner analyzes the entanglements of Turkish capital, state power, and urban futurity in contemporary Senegal. Diamniadio is a flagship project of the Plan Sénégal Émergent (PSE), the state’s development agenda adopted under President Macky Sall in 2014 for realization by 2035. Focusing on Turkish construction companies’ role in urban megaprojects developed in partnership with the Senegalese state, I argue that Diamniadio is shaped by both a temporality of emergence, tied to national development and global visibility, and a temporality of emergency, marked by the urgent pressure to complete unfinished projects and deliver turnkey projects on tight deadlines. The paper shows how Senegal’s developmental future and Turkey’s expanding role in Africa are articulated through intertwined, if unequal, projects of emergence.

Ezgi Güner is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Haverford College. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology, with a minor in African studies, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She previously held the Alwaleed Fellowship in Contemporary Muslim Societies in a Globalised World at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the transnational articulations of race, empire, and Islam across Africa and the Middle East, with a particular focus on Turkey’s contemporary engagements with Africa south of the Sahara. She has published in journals including Africa, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Culture and Religion, and Religions, and has also contributed to MERIP and POMEPS Studies. Her latest article, “Humanitarian Statecraft in Turkey: Racialized Conjurings of Islamic and African Political Futures,” is forthcoming in Culture, Theory and Critique.