Reading Infrastructure / Kelly Mee Rich, Nicole M. Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger -- Spatial Histories of Racial Capitalism -- Roads, Bridges, and Ports: Infrastructures of Plantation Agriculture in the British Caribbean, 1627-1840 / Ramesh Mallipeddi -- Internal Empire: The Neoclassical Architecture of Racial Capitalism / Louis Moreno -- Infrastructure and Intimacies: Early Black Women's Writing and the Care Work of Colonialism / Samantha Pinto -- Affect and Technologies -- Fine-Tuning Frantz Fanon's Infrastructural Affects / Yanie Fecu -- Embodied Subjects and Infrastructural Failure in Chris Abani's GraceLand / Janice Ho -- Border Zones: Infrastructure and Human Migration in Exit West and EXIT / -- Sangina Patnaik -- An "Elastic Severalty": Distributive Infrastructuralism in Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift / Jeannie Im -- Energy, Environment, Extraction -- Poetic Ultrasound: Atmosphere, Photography, and the Natural Aesthetics of Wind Power / Georgiana Banita -- To Be Addressed by Nuclear Reactors: Radiation Exposure and the Aesthetics of Life Itself / Rahul Mukherjee -- Cocaine Logistics and the Neoliberal Art of Credibility / Susan Zieger -- Afterword. Rediscoveries of the Ordinary; or, All That Is Solid . . . / Jennifer Wenzel.
Summary:
"This volume uses literary methods to interpret infrastructure, showing that its aesthetic and sensorial experience cannot be understood apart from its histories of production and political economies"-- Provided by publisher. "A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize biological and social life This timely and radically interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals, infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized concept of infrastructure, driven by capital's restless expansion, is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely making visible infrastructure's modes of power, however, The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure brings literary methods to bear on the interpretive terrain, reading infrastructural space and temporalities to show that their aesthetic and sensorial experience cannot be understood apart from histories of production and political economies. Building on critical infrastructure studies in anthropology, geography, and media studies, this collection demonstrates the field's vitality to scholars working across the humanities, including in literary, visual, and cultural studies. By querying the presumed invisibility of infrastructure's hidden life, the volume's contributors revitalize ongoing literary debates about reading surface and depth. How, they ask, might infrastructure and aesthetics then function as epistemic tools for rethinking each other? And what urgency do they acquire in light of current crises that bear on death, whether biological, social, or planetary?"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.