Infrastructuralism: An Introduction

Abstract

Our introduction argues the importance of infrastructure—both the concept and the thing it denotes—to twenty-first-century critical and literary theory. Infrastructures are big, expensive technological undertakings that trouble the distinction between private and public ownership because they both draw on and contribute to the public good in ways that go beyond the limits of purely private enterprise. Examples include a CEO’s attempt to commodify water and a South African grassroots organization’s unconditional demand for government provision of basic services like water and electricity. The final section offers synopses of each of the essays in the volume.

Poetics of Still Lives: Rewalking the Ruinscape of Still Life (English version)

“…In other words, infrastructure collides and overlaps with structures of social class. 24 Unlike formal housing, temporary houses, abandoned public areas, or slum neighborhoods are rarely protected by laws and regulations. 25 Boss He's bridge home represents a type of such informal housing, while the viaduct benefits the kinetic elites and deprives the socially vulnerable groups of their right to move.…”

“…The arrangement of infrastructures and mobility facilities and the use of space are shaped by power relations. In other words, infrastructure collides and overlaps with structures of social class 24. Unlike formal housing, temporary houses, abandoned public areas, or slum neighborhoods are rarely protected by laws and regulations 25.…”

America’s Intracoastal Waterway: Understanding the nation through narratives about infrastructure

“…As mentioned above, I discovered two common modes of representing the Waterway, with one approach narrating the canal as a massive infrastructural project with nationalist implications, and the other being more local in nature and often considering the specific environments and people around the canal. My approach in this article is influenced by a recent infrastructural turn in the Humanities, in which infrastructure has become understood as entailing more than just material things like dams and roads, but also the cultural meanings such projects entail (Levine, 2010;Rubenstein, Robbins & Beal, 2015). First used as a French railroad engineering term in the mid to late 19th century to refer to the land, embankments, and bridges over which railways ran (Carse, 2016, p. 27), the term infrastructure entered the English language in 1927 in _______________________________ Shima Volume 17 Number 2 2023 -53 -reference to underground military constructions like tunnels or culverts before being applied to a broader web of civilian structures like roadways and waterways (Bowker, 2018, p. 212).…”

Towards a Poetics of Hacked Infrastructure and Leaky Agency: Reading Global Capitalism Through Aase Berg

“…Infrastructure, as recent scholarly interventions have argued, points to a crucial schism of the neoliberal turn: the tension between private ownership and the public commons. 6 Narrative realism, Caroline Levine suggests, can use description to "defamiliarize" infrastructure and its relationship to social forms-a powerful tool of critique, given the tendency of infrastructure to exist in the background of the cultural imagination. 7 Berg, however, takes this intervention a step further.…”