This article presents a preliminary outline of what an infrastructural humanities might involve. We ask how the established body of work in the geohumanities, including literary geography and related fields, might incorporate the infrastructural turn that has been emerging in geography and anthropology. Studying literary and cultural imaginings of infrastructure, we suggest, extends considerations of spatiality by emphasizing how spatial connections and disconnections are constructed through material and technological means. In seeking to demonstrate the potential of attending to the imagination of infrastructure, we focus our analysis on one specific case: the infrastructure of gullies in Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston's gullies-an extensive system of open drains meant to quickly channel rainwater to the city's harbor-occupy an important if largely unexamined space in the Jamaican capital's urban imaginary. In this article, we read the gully not just as a specific spatial imaginary, but as a form of infrastructure. How are Kingston's gullies imagined in Jamaican popular music, literature, and visual culture? How do these forms of cultural production convey and evoke infrastructure's aesthetic and affective dimensions? How do writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage with infrastructure both to assess urban dis/connections, and to reimagine these relations otherwise? We address these questions across a range of cultural texts to illustrate how a direct engagement with infrastructure might extend work on spatiality by highlighting the cultural politics of materiality and technology.
In a study offering postcolonial perspectives on crime fiction, Christine Matzke and Susan Mühleisen observe that the "boundaries of the genre have become fuzzier than ever, stretching over a wide range of registers, themes and styles". The growing diversity within crime fiction, they suggest, has created a need for new critical paradigms (2006: 2). This symposium has two related aims: first, it examines the changing formal characteristics of crime narratives, and second, and more importantly, it considers how, in an age in which crime takes the form of terrorism, industrial disaster, state violence, corporate corruption, drug wars, and cyber scams, conceptions of crime and criminality are being challenged and reconfigured within these narratives. A key concern of the symposium is the shift from a mode of writing that endorses the colonial project to one that reflects critically upon its legacies. In this respect, it extends Matzke's and Mühleisen's comparison of crime fiction in the colonial era, which often served to reaffirm imperial power, to a postcolonial mode of crime writing that questions the social order, launching an investigation of "power and authority" (2006: 4-5).This transferral of focus from the individual to the social system as the subject of investigation is not a new phenomenon in crime writing. In his account of the evolution of detective fiction, Martin Priestman refers to two "national" traditions: the English detective story, beginning with Wilkie Collins in the 1860s and continuing into the interwar "Golden Age" dominated by Agatha Christie, and the US hardboiled private-eye style of detective fiction initiated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which Priestman suggests evolved in "conscious opposition" to the English model of the detective novel (2003: 2). The clear-cut rationality of the detective figure who upholds law and order in the "clue-puzzle" English tradition can be compared to the confusion and angst of the private eye negotiating a corrupt and morally questionable society whose institutions cannot be trusted. As Andrew Pepper explains, "one of the distinctive features of the hardboiled crime novel has traditionally been the problematic nature of notions like 'law ' and 'justice'" (2003: 212).
Set in Kingston, New York and Miami in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, James's 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings charts the transformation of politically affiliated Jamaican gangs into transnational criminal organisations. The novel references various incarnations of the 'gangster' in the context of mid to late twentieth-century Jamaica: the rudie, the shotta and the don. In this article I consider how, through its engagement with the iconography surrounding the gangster figure both within Jamaican popular culture and in the global mass media, A Brief History examines and complicates models of masculinity associated with this figure. In the process, I suggest, the novel at once reflects on and contributes to evolving Jamaican and transnational discourses of masculinity. Reading A Brief History as a gangster narrative, I position it within an increasingly global tradition of gangster fiction and film. The novel's multiple narrative voices and perspectives, along with its eclectic range of cultural reference points, render the gangster icon-a central component of the genre-ambiguous and plural. I argue that through his reworking of the gangster figure, James both queers the gangster genre and extends its transnational reach.
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