Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This article introduces the key terms of the special issue by contextualizing these essays within the current infrastructural turn in the humanities and social sciences.The article then extends itself into a longer engagement with the politics and methodologies of infrastructural critique via Colson Whitehead.When we first proposed this special issue to Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, we had a sense that there was something infrastructural in the air.President Joe Biden had just passed the "Infrastructure and Investment Act," making good on Donald Trump's spectacularly failed "Infrastructure Week."Indeed, our global milieux seemed to be awash with conversations around questions of infrastructure, from ideas about political constitution to systemic destruction; from the long arm of colonialism iterated through infrastructural investment to techno fixes for imminent climate apocalypse.This atmosphere of infrastructure had not gone unnoticed by those of us in literary studies.While literary queries and investigations of infrastructure had percolated across literary studies since at least the turn of the millennium, 1 this disciplinary subfield seemed to be expanding into a field in its own right.The journals American Literature and Resilience, to take a recent example, published a joint special issue in 2021 on "Infrastructures of Emergency," that looked to literature to theorize how it was that infrastructure -in the contemporary -had begun to signal, as Jessica Hurley and Jeffrey Insko so elegantly phrased it, "at once causes, causalities, and solutions." 2 These literary queries, of course, did not exist in a vacuum and, indeed, they were extensions of an ongoing series of conversations begun in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, in the late '90s by theorists including Susan Leigh Starr and Geoffrey Bowker.We will not rehash that narrative here as the essays that follow situate themselves within this interdisciplinary context without us needing to provide a truncated history.3 What we do want to flag is how prominent infrastructure has become within literary studies.In the past two years alone, there have been a proliferation of further special issues, edited collections, and monographs that continue to think through the nexus of the literary and the infrastructural.These works tend to take one of two interrelated approaches -and ones that the essays that follow also adopt to some extent.Either they follow the literary life of a specific infrastructural form or think about literary genre as a type of infrastructure -we can think here of Julia Lee's work on railroads or the recent collection Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities -or they think about how infrastructure names a new type of methodology for thinking through literature.This latter approach, what Henry Ivry calls "infrastructure-as-method," enables two distinct ways of reading and rereading texts.4 On the one hand, infrastructure names a new scale of analysis, thinking about how literary texts themselves are imbricated within systems of production and circulation that work toward consolidating specific articulations of modernity (as in Sarah
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4405541818