An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Henry Ivry (Environmental Humanities Fellow, 2024)
Infrastructuring Critique: Genre, Infrastructure, and the African American Imaginary
In the past decade and change, infrastructure has become increasingly theorized, mapped, and contested within the social sciences and the humanities, highlighting how infrastructure has become both the content and form of the political in the Anthropocene contemporary. In this talk, I outline some of the working premises of my manuscript in progress Incommensurate Repair: Insurgency, Infrastructure, and the African American Imaginary, 1900 to Present, which continues to build on this work but reorganizes it through African American literature and Black Studies. I argue that African American literature and thought has been intimately aware of infrastructure as a technology of racialized and climatic violence for over a century. In this particular talk, I'll give an overview of the literary life of infrastructure through a brief a counter-history of infrastructural archives and the political possibilities of insurgency. My hope is to begin mapping and documenting the interwoven logics of colonial and climatic violence embedded within infrastructure and infrastructural relations. At the same time, I argue that Black literature provides both the material and heuristic possibilities to build the reparative infrastructures needed for an otherwise world.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
Passcode: 6aSe7GF7