Under Construction: Infrastructure and Modern Fiction
My book project Under Construction: Infrastructure and Modern Fiction investigates the relationships between infrastructure and culture, seeking out new frames for understanding the ways infrastructure indelibly shapes our world and our lives. More specifically, my research argues that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modern and contemporary fiction.
“Shunted, Changed”: Urban Forms and Infrastructural Modernism in James Joyce’s Ulysses
My first chapter traces the ways in which James Joyce’s shifting literary forms—from the initial style of Ulysses to its later more experimental registers—recontextualize Dublin’s infrastructures such as the tram system in order to reframe a material politics of the city. In the heart of the (Hibernian) chapter is an “infrastructuralist” reading of the “Aeolus” episode, unpacking the multiple ways in which Joyce intermingles Dublin’s infrastructural systems with the city’s other media technologies, generating overlapping networks of texts, bodies, and ideologies. The collision of these networks in “Aeolus” allows us to understand the differences between a nation or community imagined through discourse and one that is mediated materially by means of infrastructure. The chapter concludes by “plumbing” Irish water and sanitation systems, both in terms of how they appear within the novel and in terms of how they figure as an important model for understanding Joyce’s conception of Irish modernism and modernity more broadly.
Good Roads and Great Floods: Rural Infrastructure and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
My second chapter examines the transformation of the material and social geographies of the U.S. South in the early twentieth century through two specific events—the construction of interstate highways that emerged from the Good Roads Movement and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Originally, the objective of southern road development was to assist farmers by improving the material conditions for transporting crops, but the Good Roads Movement quickly reoriented its project away from improved rural farm-to-market infrastructure and instead toward the construction of tourist highways, marginalizing rural southerners from the nation. In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner juxtaposes every reference to the “good roads” with references to local weather patterns and floods, charting a connection between road construction and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. One of the greatest disasters to afflict the United States, the protracted flood was caused by a slew of infrastructural and economic interventions with the environment including road construction. Despite the aspirational qualities of infrastructural projects like the Good Roads Movement, its material transformations carried irrevocable social and environmental consequences that destabilized the South’s rural communities.
Presentation for ASLE Virtual Symposium, EmergencE/Y (July 2021)
“Anyone on the ground’d know”: The Sites and Sights of Infrastructural Violence in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange
My third chapter considers Tropic of Orange, a novel in which Karen Tei Yamashita elaborates the connections between infrastructural development and disaster by representing the social and environmental consequences of slow and planned violence. Yamashita meets the representational challenges of slow and planned violence by redeploying multi-modal cultural forms that typically operate through visual and audible registers, in order to bring the invisible materialities, histories, and consequences of infrastructural development into the foreground. Like the novel itself, the critical thrust of this chapter converges on the Los Angeles Harbor Freeway where a catastrophic traffic accident reveals most fully the novel’s connections between infrastructure and disaster. Through the homeless population’s embodied occupation of physical space and their visual media transmission upon taking over the Freeway and the news broadcast, Yamashita connects the links between infrastructural violence, historical precarity, and catastrophe that remain undocumented in popular media narratives. By demonstrating the efficacy of a community media for articulating the collective right to recognition and to previously dispossessed spaces, Yamashita asks us to understand the long histories of precarity and to seek out new frames of imagining those affected by spatial injustice.
“As If By Magic”: Mediating Migration in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West
My final chapter looks at how, in response to the catastrophes of a civil war and a global migratory crisis, Mohsin Hamid in Exit West reimagines migrant networks as emerging from magical doors that connect disparate places around the globe. Hamid connects the magical properties of these doors with the digital media technologies of our contemporary age, including popular news broadcasts, cellphone footage, and drone surveillance, which poses questions about technology’s relationship to space, belonging, nationhood, and globalism. The novel relies on the imaginative possibilities of magical realism in order to respond to histories of displacement and political and infrastructural abuses and to represent multimedia discourses that produce politicized and policed narratives of the migrant crisis itself. In other words, the novel represents contemporary clashes of globalization and xenophobic nationalism as technologically and infrastructurally mediated and (re)produced. I argue that Hamid seeks out new frames of understanding spatial dispossession and the communal aspirations of those dispossessed, using the novel as a form to forge new ways of conceiving material and medial capacities of belonging.