The Infrastructure of Emergency Paperback ? August 19, 2021

Contributors to this special issue explore the ways literature and literary studies contribute to historical understandings and imagined futures of infrastructure under conditions of planetary ecological emergency. Focusing particularly on the infrastructures of empire and capital, as well as the local and global environmental ramifications of their historical unfolding, the authors consider the roles that literature can play in the theorization of infrastructure. The issue covers how settler capitalism has shaped the infrastructural transformation of the continent, from the settler colonial project of the nineteenth century to “transform dirt into infrastructure” to the deep entanglement of ecological emergency with the arrival of the internet in the United States. The issue also focuses on the intersections of infrastructure with the ongoing emergencies of racial oppression. It covers topics ranging from an emergent formal technique in contemporary African American fiction called “geomemory”—where the racial emergencies of the present are revealed to be the result of still-active infrastructures of the plantation—to the conglomeration of the buildings, laws, institutions, and capital markets that constitute the US healthcare system.

Contributors. John Levi Barnard, Suzanne F. Boswell, Rebecca Evans, Stephanie Foote, Michelle N. Huang, Jessica Hurley, Jeffrey Insko, Andrew Kopec, Kelly McKisson, Jamin Creed Rowan

Stephanie Foote is Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University.

John Levi Barnard is Assistant Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Jessica Hurley is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University.

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Oakland University.