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Introduction
Reading for Infrastructure

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson and Daniel Nemser

In early February 2020, as we were writing this introduction, the Royal

Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) violently raided the Unist’ot’en Camp
in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, where Indigenous people had for a
decade been blocking roads and bridges to prevent the construction of
new oil and gas pipelines. While some of these projects had been canceled
as a result of these actions, this raid was intended to clear the path for the
building of the $6.6 billion Coastal GasLink Pipeline, which would carry
fracked natural gas from northern British Columbia to a liquefaction plant
on the coast. The police raid sparked dozens of solidarity actions across
Canada, and protesters mobilized to shut down roads, rail lines, and ports
from Vancouver to Halifax, with the multiplication of blockades effec-
tively paralyzing passenger and freight traffic across much of the country.1
Although these blockades form part of a broad struggle against
what the anthropologist Anne Spice calls “invasive infrastructures,” with
echoes across the Americas and beyond, they are not against infrastruc-
ture as such. 2 Rather, they articulate a politics against a world structured
by the material needs and interests of fossil capital. In preventing pipe-
line construction, the blockades in fact propose an alternative vision of
infrastructure tangled up with and enabling different “forms of life”
(Jennifer Wenzel, this issue) that for their part also function as “infra-
structures of decolonization.”3 They also unsettle what counts as infra-
structure. As Freda Huson, the spokesperson of the Unist’ot’en Camp,
explained to Spice, the route of the pipeline passed through the clan’s
best berry patches, which help to sustain not only the First Nations peo-
ple who inhabit those lands but also the region’s expanded ecosystem that
links people and berries to streams, salmon, and bears. “All of that is

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part of the system that our people depend on, and that whole cycle and
system is our critical infrastructure, and that’s what we’re trying to pro-
tect, an infrastructure that we depend on. And industry and government
are pushing these projects that would destroy that critical infrastructure,
most important to our people.” What Huson calls “our critical infrastruc-
tures,” which sustain forms of life that are antagonistic to accumulation,
are threatened by the “critical infrastructures” of racial capitalism.4

An Infrastructural Turn

Huson’s insights about infrastructures as key sites of struggle, vectors of

social war, and the material conditions of possibility for often antagonistic
worlds resonate with the expanded sense of infrastructure coming out of
the self- declared “infrastructural turn” that has particularly marked the
discipline of anthropology in the past decade or two.5 This has involved a
two-headed extension of infrastructure. On the one hand, material infra-
structures themselves — pipelines, railroads, sewage and water systems,
roads, landmines, grain silos — have been taken up more vigorously as
significant objects of ethnographic study. On the other hand, this engage-
ment with material forms has generated new theoretical reflections with
infrastructure as a critical concept in ways that exceed previous mobili-
zations of infrastructure as a metaphor in critical theory. AbdouMaliq
Simone, for example, has proposed that we understand people in cities
like Lagos, Dakar, and Kinshasa, where certain material infrastructures
are lacking, as being themselves infrastructural insofar as “their selves,
situations, and bodies bear responsibility for articulating different loca-
tions, resources, and stories into viable opportunities for everyday sur-
vival.”6 Similarly, Julia Elyachar suggests that the practices of gossiping
and chatting undertaken by women in Cairo be understood infrastruc-
turally to the extent that they lay down the grooves through which finan-
cial arrangements later flow.7 And in Stefanie Graeter’s work, low-income
port residents in Peru are understood to function as unwitting vessels of
toxic storage for the lead generated by the pathways of metal commodity
chains. 8 In each of these cases, infrastructure is taken up as a theory-
metaphor to do new kinds of analytic work.
In the humanities, one of the most sustained bodies of work using
the concept of infrastructure has addressed media, beginning perhaps
with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964). Without using
the term “infrastructure” specifically, McLuhan extended the notion of
media to encompass the workings of electricity, railroads, and airplanes
alongside examples of the alphabet, typography, money, television, and
radio as extensions of the human body that changed the scale, pace, and
forms of association between members of society. Thus media can be

2 Johnson and Nemser • Introduction

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understood as infrastructural or, alternately, as dependent on a variety
of other infrastructures, whether material, social, or institutional. In this
vein, Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski position their edited volume Sig-
nal Traffic (2015) as demarcating “a critical shift away from the analysis
of screened content alone and toward an understanding of how content
moves through the world and how this movement affects content’s form.” 9
The various essays in Signal Traffic take up the study of the material infra-
structures that make possible the circulation of media content, such as
underwater cables, data centers, and processes of compression as well
as “soft infrastructures” like daily routines, marketing, and knowledge
practices.
Our call for a seminar entitled “Thinking Infrastructure” for the
American Comparative Literature Association’s 2018 conference, on which
this special issue is based, invited participants to take up the challenges
and opportunities that infrastructural thinking posed in methodologi-
cal and theoretical terms beyond this more established vector of media
infrastructure studies. As scholars based in literary and cultural studies,
we were looking for interventions that did not stop at the question of how
infrastructures were represented in, say, literature or film.10 We were also
interested in the traffic and effect of fictive forms on the social forms and
fictions of infrastructures themselves. Additionally, as Latin American-
ists interested in the Americas more broadly, we were also hoping for work
that would confront infrastructure as marked by colonial, neocolonial,
and settler colonial relations, and engaged with subaltern social forma-
tions, heterogeneous temporalities, and the history of racial capitalism
with its uneven processes of accumulation and extraction. For this reason,
too, we explicitly had in mind a longer temporal frame that could account
for the Americas’ early insertion into these historical processes, pushing
against the narrower association of certain material infrastructures with
conventional periodizations of modernity and technology rooted in the
long nineteenth century.
“To be modern,” wrote Paul N. Edwards in an influential 2003 essay,
“is to live within and by means of infrastructures.”11 This vision of infra-
structural modernity is rooted in the global North, where infrastructures
tend to operate as “an invisible, smooth-functioning background.” The
situation is very different in the global South, Edwards observed, where
infrastructures frequently fail, become unusable, or do not even exist.
Two decades later, with rampaging climate change and infrastructural
collapse increasingly apparent, it is worth questioning whether this frame-
work still holds. Yet Edwards also acknowledged that the infrastructural
norms of the global South are “equally ‘modern,’ ” which again begs the
question of what modernity means, and how it relates to infrastructure.12
The anthropologist Brian Larkin points out that the “unbearable

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modernity” of infrastructure is conceptually rooted in Enlightenment
thought, specifically in the ideological association between the circula-
tory work of infrastructure and the ideas of progress and freedom.13 Even
so, infrastructure also calls our attention to the temporal continuities and
breaks that structure relations of path dependency. On the one hand, trac-
ing fiber optic cables and railroads back to the cow paths over which they
were more or less smoothly layered, for example, makes these exemplary
condensations of modernity appear less “revolutionary” than is commonly
assumed. On the other hand, attending to infrastructures can also help to
track the inauguration of new epochs, as they carve paths that enable radi-
cally new or divergent futures. In The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Rosa
Luxemburg famously argued that capitalism’s conquest of noncapitalist
societies “begins in most cases with magnificent constructions of modern
transport, such as railway lines which cross primeval forests and tunnel
through the mountains, telegraph wires which bridge the deserts, and
ocean liners which call at the most outlying ports.”14 Here primitive accu-
mulation works through colonizing infrastructures that configure a spa-
tial order of extraction while consequently delineating a temporal rupture.
From the vantage point of the Americas, this argument dovetails with
the view of world-systems and world- ecology theorists that racial capitalist
modernity ought to be thought not from the Enlightenment or industrial
revolution on, as with infrastructure critics who focus on large technical
systems, but from the long sixteenth century, which laid their historical
foundations.15 An “assemblage of colonial infrastructures,” including cit-
ies, forts, ports, and roads, was already weaving the Americas into a glo-
balized world by the late sixteenth century, while the contemporaneous
emergence of new systems of classification, quantification, standardiza-
tion, and rationalization formed part of the “symbolic, cultural, and sci-
entific processes central to modernity’s reworking of the oikeios.”16 This
special issue thus asks what infrastructural modernity looks like if we start
from the slave ship rather than the railroad, for example, or place the elec-
trical grid alongside the chain gang.17
One outcome of this approach is an expansion of what it might mean
to conjugate reading and infrastructure: reading as infrastructure, read-
ing infrastructure, and readings of infrastructure. The essays that follow
work with the critical possibilities of reading things as functioning infra-
structurally, a move that positions infrastructure not so much as a thing
but an analytic. This option follows Larkin’s argument that infrastruc-
tures are not simply “out there,” so that any discussion of infrastructure
is necessarily a “categorical act.” He uses the example of the entangled
relations between electricity and computers (each of which could be said
to be infrastructural to the other), as well as software protocols and the
educational and cultural competence needed to operate such systems. For

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Larkin, calling something infrastructure is a decision that involves “tear-
ing into . . . heterogeneous networks to define which aspect of which net-
work is to be discussed and which parts will be ignored.”18 The point
is not that everything is now infrastructure or that infrastructure is the
dominant category of life but that reading for infrastructure might yield
unexpected insights. Analyzing something as if it were infrastructural, for
example, affords new ways to think about relationality.
It is not only that, as Alan Liu suggests, infrastructure offers a “pur-
chase on social complexity,” like Raymond William’s keyword “culture.”19
A different kind of complexity is at stake. To consider berry patches or
pipelines as part of culture integrates them into a larger field, a more or
less organically experienced whole, and gestures perhaps to the meaning
they are made to bear, and their imbrication with other symbolic prac-
tices. But it does not specify anything further about the lines of force
to which they are subject, or their effect or position within a larger dis-
tributed assemblage. To consider them in terms of infrastructure, on the
other hand, implies attending to their positionality within a set of colonial/
capitalist relations.
The anthropologist Ashley Carse observes that what distinguishes
infrastructure from neighboring terms like “system” or “network” is that,
while all are collective nouns denoting “a plurality of integrated parts,”
infrastructure diverges from the other terms by “suggesting relationships
of depth or hierarchy.”20 The network imaginary that, for Patrick Jagoda,
has become “the principle architecture and most resonant metaphor of
the globalizing world” foregrounds attention to lateral connectivity, to
decentered, distributed, or nonsovereign modes of operation and “non-
hierarchical models of connections.”21 While infrastructure is also a net-
like system, however, it is both more topographical and more temporal:
analytically, one focuses not only on what is brought into relation through
infrastructure but also its sequential placement in terms of what it con-
figures or enables. This is a legacy of infrastructure’s origins as an orga-
nizational and accounting term deployed in nineteenth- century French
civil engineering to identify construction work that was conducted physi-
cally beneath or organizationally prior to unlaid railroad tracks, such as
roadbeds, surveys, or embankments. 22 Insofar as it is associated with that
which undergirds, is within, or is prior to something else, infrastructure
is also marked by what Jennifer Wenzel calls its “transitivity”: its function
is to allow something else to happen, or to prevent it from happening. And
still, as Carse also explains, for all its conceptual plasticity, infrastruc-
ture’s “common referents” (roads, pipes, rails, cables) have an “undeni-
able materiality” that further set it apart from networks.23 As an analytic,
infrastructure lends such material effects even to what are less easily iden-
tified as material realities: to call gossiping in the markets of Cairo “phatic

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labor,” with Elyachar, and to claim that it works infrastructurally like
channels through which economic benefits are then funneled, is to turn it
into a “thing,” drawing attention to its world-making capacities. 24
Infrastructure is not just a network then: but neither is it just struc-
ture. The “infra” that denotes its placement within or beneath also indi-
cates a supposition that it recedes into the background, becoming simply
part of the environment. If some critics associate infrastructuralism with
a weaker form of determinism than structuralism, it may have something
to do with the open- endedness of infrastructures, their plurality and ori-
entation toward dispersed connectivity. Rather than determinism, infra-
structures set up what the architect Keller Easterling calls “disposition,”
or “an unfolding relationship between potentials.”25 Easterling uses the
example of a ball on an inclined plane to illustrate this concept. Even if it
has not yet begun to roll, the ball nevertheless possesses a potential that
is immanent in the relationship between itself and the plane. Within this
relationship, of course, the ball will tend to move in particular ways, even
if it does not end up moving in the same way every single time. Moreover,
how the ball moves will make visible the complex dispositions embedded
in or composing the environment — these movements are “signs of ongo-
ing processes — like the ripples used for river navigation.”26 The worlds
that infrastructures help assemble are designed for or oriented toward
particular ends — the ceaseless accumulation of capital, the control of bod-
ies, the formation of subjects, the management of populations, and so
on — although their effects also exceed them.

Worlds Made and Broken

As the Wet’suwet’en land defenders make clear, when infrastructures make

worlds with certain dispositions and facilitate certain “forms of life,” they
break others, dismantling existing patterns of flows and relations and
encouraging or effecting their replacement. In A Billion Black Anthro-
pocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff writes that “the end of this world has
already happened for some subjects, and it is the prerequisite for the pos-
sibility of imagining ‘living and breathing again’ for others.”27 Conven-
tionally, infrastructure is imagined via the continuous provision of public
goods such as water, electricity, and waste management. In this frame,
infrastructural violence takes the form of exclusion (as when Detroit resi-
dents’ electricity is cut off), while inclusion (turning the electricity back
on) implies the negation of this violence. But infrastructure also effects
violence through inclusion, by bringing people, communities, and terri-
tories into the fold of an exploitative, extractive, or genocidal social order.
It is these “invasive infrastructures” that numerous social movements,
often led by Indigenous people, are fighting against across the Americas,

6 Johnson and Nemser • Introduction

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from Wet’suwet’en territory to Standing Rock to Chiapas. 28 Drawing on
a formulation from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we could say that the worlds
that infrastructures assemble distribute premature death unevenly, that
is, they are both racist and racializing systems.29 And the relation between
infrastructure and racialization runs through this special issue explicitly.
On the one hand, infrastructure materializes and contributes to the repro-
duction of the violent logics of an already existing racial order; while on
the other hand, infrastructure can also be understood as itself productive
of race.30 The early Portuguese slave ship produced social differentiation
in part through the uneven distribution of death, for example, while the
roads built by chain gangs in the US South in turn underwrite the logic of
whiteness as freedom and self- determination. How might one notice, on
the one hand, the forms of inertia set in motion by infrastructures — the
work and weight of maintaining a certain status quo, that which they make
happen or keep from happening — and, on the other, the forms of leakiness
and ruination that nonetheless permeate these infrastructural systems?
Indeed, several essays unexpectedly converge around Steven Jack-
son’s injunction for a “broken world thinking,” where the starting point is
an assumed positionality in an aftermath, rather than a forward-looking
orientation: the inheritance of an old and layered world, a fractal and
“always- almost-falling- apart world.”31 But if the central claim for Jackson
is that infrastructures are to be understood as not functioning perfectly,
as constantly breaking down and thus in need of ongoing repair, these
essays tend to think the possibilities of repurposing debris and detritus so
as to generate new configurations. This is not piecing the “broken world”
back together — since the worlds built by many modern infrastructures,
even in ideal conditions, break bodies and ruin lives — but instead mak-
ing use of fissures and flaws to build the conditions for other worlds and
forms of life to emerge.
Given the simultaneous world-making and world-breaking functions
of infrastructures, this special issue extends the challenge to the “invisibil-
ity thesis” central to early infrastructure studies. In contrast to the “network
imaginary” declaratively configuring twenty-first- century social life, infra-
structures were assumed to become “black-boxed” over time so as to fade
imperceptibly into the background as they enabled something else to take
place, becoming visible only when they break, as Susan Leigh Star put it in a
field- defining article.32 But the invisibility thesis, as Larkin and others have
already argued, can also be politically inattentive because it holds mainly
for socially privileged subjects who can afford to take infrastructure for
granted or for whom infrastructure works.33 In terms of reading for infra-
structure, pushing further on the invisibility thesis means that rather than
simply performing a figure-ground reversal, one probes the very distribu-
tion, management, and distinction between what is deemed “figure” and

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“ground,” or setting and plot, depending on one’s location. These essays
bring into view the vantage point of populations that may be excluded or
detached from the circulatory systems of infrastructure, or whose worlds
are damaged by their inclusion into them, as well as those who have to work
to build, operate, maintain, or repair infrastructure and for whom therefore
it is never part of a functioning background or substrate. Additionally, the
essays also raise differential relationships to modern infrastructure proj-
ects on the part of nation-states, north and south, across different latitudes
of development, as witnessed in George F. Flaherty’s study of the anxious
reach of the Mexican state to deploy infrastructural formations on territo-
rial borders that might strengthen feelings of national identification where
there is a perceived deficit.
Finally, these essays variously probe the affective, imaginary, or fic-
tional registers of material infrastructures beyond what, following Lar-
kin, anthropologists have analyzed as infrastructure’s “poetics,” as well
as how these registers can be taken up or refracted in cultural forms. 34
That is, in addition to reading new things as infrastructure, this issue also
suggests new ways to read infrastructure or to engage with readings of
infrastructure, a traffic between the infrastructural and the aesthetic or
fictive that goes beyond the question of how infrastructure is represented.
Material infrastructures can be read as semiotic, aesthetic, and affective
vehicles in addition to the concrete technical function they are meant to
fulfill. They can condense signification within an ideological landscape,
underwriting fantasies of speed, safety, or modernity when they function,
or signaling ruin and belatedness when they do not.35 Like the novels and
newspapers in Benedict Anderson’s classic account of national imaginar-
ies, tunnels, roads, and border infrastructures can be modes of imagining
the national community and producing state forms. 36 And if, as Wenzel
points out, “well-functioning infrastructure is itself a kind of fiction, an
unfulfilled promise” (Jennifer Wenzel, this issue), then it also has a gram-
mar, a plot, and a narrative form, in addition to an aesthetic dimension.
A ship or tunnel carries with it a rhetoric of stasis and mobility. And the
plots or chronotopes projected by infrastructures show up in particular
relief when they go awry, as in unbuilt or unfinished infrastructures like
the Trans- Saharan Railway, which live on in shadow histories.37 Novels or
speculative work might bolster the cultural scripts written into infrastruc-
ture, spreading in a different register the regimes of perception, logic, and
affective address of certain infrastructural projections while consolidating
their silences. On the other hand, they may also talk back to the futures
promised or threatened by infrastructure, unsettling or remaking the aes-
thetics and sense-making capacities of borders, electric grids, or oil rigs.
The particular practices of writing — genres, tropes, intertextuality — or
language itself might be understood to function infrastructurally.

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To follow one line in more detail, one possibility that emerges here
is that, if infrastructure itself is a kind of fiction, it is a “realist” fiction,
one that not only projects a desired world but also aims to produce cer-
tain “reality effects” by actively designing and composing a world. If it is
speculative, this speculation is “firmative” rather than “affirmative” — to
borrow terms from Juan Llamas- Rodriguez’s essay — in its attempts to
contain risk, foreclose potentialities, and solidify the possibilities of the
future. We might remember Edward Said’s designation of colonial dis-
course as “radical realism,” where its authoritative address renders a new
reality simply by designating, pointing to, fixing, or using the copula “is”:
thus the wall is the border between two distinct territories, the road is
how one travels from point A to point B, accessing electricity is how one
participates in a realm of light, power, and connection.38 The claims that
oil must flow through pipelines and that berry patches are not worth pro-
tecting can also be seen as a form of radical realism. These claims are
world-building; as Easterling suggests, stories are “active forms” that can
“inflect disposition in infrastructure space.”39
In contrast to these reality effects, several of the essays here focus on
how visual artists or writers might be said to “derange” realism, rerout-
ing the spaces, temporalities, and forms of connectivity that are sedi-
mented through infrastructures. As Llamas-Rodriguez explores in his
essay, Edwin Agudelo’s A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos
Nogales rethinks the role of border tunnels as public spaces, not only for
the present but also for the future. For Wenzel, China Miéville’s “weird
tale” “Covehithe” mobilizes the literary imagination to depict sunken oil
platforms as revenant, reproducing organisms that pose new questions
about relationships among humans, nature, and technology, and about
the care, responsibility, and politics such forms of life demand. Susan
Zieger closes her essay with the magic and illusion that form Black escap-
ology (one appropriated by Harry Houdini) as staging a drama of fugi-
tivity that eschews the promise of roads built into white- authored chain
gang narratives. And Sage Gerson analyzes how Ralph Ellison’s “elec-
trifiction” Invisible Man unwrites cultural and historical narratives shap-
ing how electricity is perceived in US culture, particularly in terms of its
relationship with race. As a whole then, these essays raise the possibility,
as Wenzel suggests, that there might be a singular capacity of “cultural
objects, including literary fiction, photographs, and film, to reckon more
radically with infrastructure as a lifeform.”

Grammars of Infrastructural Modernity

Any collection of essays will inevitably involve a certain amount of con-

tingency, yet the contributions included here not only converge on the

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deployment of infrastructure as an analytic but also cluster around three
key themes that open onto the imbrication of infrastructure and racial
capitalism. The first is slavery. We begin with Anna More’s “The Early
Portuguese Slave Ship and the Infrastructure of Racial Capitalism,”
which takes up a foundational infrastructure for the formation of racial
capitalist modernity. For More, reading the slave ship as infrastructure
demands an engagement not only with logistics and circulation but also
with production, specifically the production of social difference or racial-
ization. By packing human captives into the holds of merchant caravels
designed to carry nonhuman commodities, the spatial regime of the slave
ship configured asphyxiation as a form of death to which only the enslaved
were exposed. At the same time, free African sailors known as grumetes,
whose knowledge and labor were crucial to the functioning of these ships,
were inserted into a debt economy that drew the boundaries of racialized
freedom. More stresses the material forms and practices through which
infrastructures racialize and differentiate and underscores how the early
slave ship constituted a key infrastructure for the transatlantic slave trade
while establishing the parameters of racial capitalism over the longue durée.
Where More explores the infrastructural conditions of possibility
for the rise of racial slavery, Susan Zieger’s essay, “Back on the Chain
Gang: Logistics, Labor, and the Threat of Infrastructure,” turns to the
institution’s infrastructural afterlives. As in More’s essay, what is at stake
is the connection between logistics — the movement of goods and bod-
ies for profit — and racialization, where infrastructures of mobility — in
this case the road rather than the ship — are built on the immobility of
certain bodies from which labor is extracted. And like More’s essay, it
also reads something as infrastructure that is not commonly perceived as
such: chains. The historical phenomena of the chain gang in the US South
becomes the conjunction of two infrastructural forms — the road and the
chain — a figure that brings together how the racialized bodies that build
and are objectified in the roads were denied the promise of movement and
freedom associated with these infrastructures of circulation. Zieger reads
the cultural script of the chain gang through accounts that attempted to
bring it to national attention in assorted genres and media from memoir
and novel to photography and film, paying particular attention to the way
roads are attributed with meaning in the narratives and either expose or
reenact a racial regime.
The management of circulation and containment, of flow and immo-
bility, that converge in the institution of slavery and its afterlives is also at
stake in the logic of the border, which is the concept that anchors the fol-
lowing two essays. Both of these essays, moreover, are exercises in reading
infrastructure: in this case, border crossings and tunnels. George F. Fla-
herty’s “ ‘Anxious Desires’: Hyperbolic Beautification and Affective Infra-

10 Johnson and Nemser • Introduction

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structure under Mexico’s National Border Program, 1961 – 1971” takes up
the Mexican state’s project to construct buildings, museums, and border
crossings as part of its National Border Program (Pronaf) at a moment of
economic transition. This network of spectacular late modernist architec-
tures served not only to more tightly manage cross- border flows of people
and commodities but also to demonstrate the “beauty” and “desirability”
of “all things officially Hecho en México.” Attending to its aesthetic and
rhetorical foundations and expressions, Flaherty argues that the project
constituted an affective infrastructure, designed not to disappear as a sub-
strate but to hail fronterizos, stoking stronger feelings of national identifi-
cation and encouraging them to support the national economy by satisfy-
ing their consumer needs and wishes with Mexican products rather than
those obtained on the other side of the border.
Certain forms of design, then, can reinforce border imaginaries orga-
nized around nationality, accumulation, and security. Yet other forms, as
Juan Llamas- Rodriguez argues in “Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Envi-
ronments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border,” can inter-
rupt these closed imaginaries and project more open- ended narratives of
futurity. Llamas- Rodriguez analyzes the limits of contemporary specula-
tive design projects about the border, particularly the lauded Borderwall
as Architecture initiative that, despite its stated aims, ends up reinscribing
the “infrastructuralizing imperative” to turn certain regions into state
borders. By contrast, Edwin Agudelo’s art project A Practice in Excavating
and Envisioning Ambos Nogales stages the multivalent underground infra-
structures of mobility that traverse the US- Mexico border, like smug-
gling tunnels and sewage systems, and the fugitive flows that they enable.
The project gestures at a future world below, rather than beyond, cur-
rent geopolitical formations and architectural structures. As a form of
what Llamas-Rodriguez calls “ruinous speculation,” Agudelo’s project
suggests that the openings for sustainable futures can be found in the
failures of the present.
These failures, of course, can take many forms. To the extent that
infrastructure’s reach is uneven, failure for some can be synonymous with
smooth functionality for others. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than in
the case of energy infrastructure and the churning fossil capitalism it
fuels, around which the last two essays are clustered. These essays might
also be said to take up more directly readings of infrastructure. Sage Ger-
son’s “Siphoning and Sabotage: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and US
Electricity Theft” turns to the electrical grid as both an infrastructural
mediator of electrical power in the United States and a materialization of
power itself. The essay triangulates three “electrifictions” focused on the
relationship between Blackness and electricity: General Electric (GE)’s
“electric slave” advertisements from the interwar period, news cover-

Social Text 153 • December 2022 11

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age of electricity theft in Detroit in 2010, and Ellison’s novel. Unlike the
Detroit news coverage, Gerson’s reading of Ellison’s novel figures electric-
ity siphoning as a form of retributive refusal that potentially “sabotages”
systems of infrastructural ordering, reconfiguring particular infrastruc-
tural worlds and intervening in the current relationship between energy
systems and sociocultural power structures.
Finally, in “Forms of Life: Thinking Fossil Infrastructure and Its Nar-
rative Grammar,” Jennifer Wenzel puts her long trajectory in the energy
humanities into conversation with infrastructure studies in order to
advance a narrative theory of infrastructure that includes a question about
what it means to read infrastructure with the tools of literary analysis.
Discussing China Miéville’s short story “Covehithe,” about oil rigs that
have come to life and returned to shore to reproduce like ungainly, latter-
day sea turtles, she explores how cultural objects differ from built envi-
ronments in thinking infrastructural forms of life: both the vitality, for
example, that is imputed to fossil infrastructures themselves as well as
modes of living gathered around certain energy infrastructures.
Taken together, this special issue extends the infrastructural turn in
the humanities and proposes a method, or set of methods, that we have
called “reading for infrastructure.” These essays grapple with the gram-
mars of infrastructural modernity and attend to the worlds its infrastruc-
tures configure and dismantle, the futures they promise and threaten,
and the practices of reproduction and struggles for survival they gener-
ate in response, across multiple levels of scale. The deployment of infra-
structure as a concept and a method of reading reaches, on the one hand,
into the nonmaterial realm of discourse, visual representation, and artistic
and symbolic practices where these are understood not as mimetic but as
themselves participating in world-making endeavors. On the other hand,
to read everything that is named infrastructure (even a berry patch) as
also fictive or aspirational is to attend to the temporal arcs it projects, the
forms of coherence built on it, the realisms it grounds, the protagonisms
that accrete to it, the plots it builds, and the life-forms it sustains.

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson is associate professor of comparative literature at the

University of California, Irvine. She is completing a project on visual infrastructures
in Latin America and published a blueprint for it as “Visuality as Infrastructure”
(Social Text). Recently she has published “In- São-Paulo-Visible” (Revista Hispanica
Moderna), “Excess of Visibility/Scarcity of Water” (Discourse), and “An Expanse of
Water” (Liquid Ecologies in the Arts).

Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He

is the author of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico
(2017), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities
Book Award in 2018.

12 Johnson and Nemser • Introduction

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Notes
1. Brown and Bracken, “No Surrender”; McClearn, “Back on Track.”
2. Spice, “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures.”
3. On “infrastructures of decolonization,” see Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 36 – 37.
Similarly, Glen Coulthard writes that the use of blockades by First Nations commu-
nities constitutes “both a negation and an affirmation,” that is, they aim to disrupt
capital accumulation in settler colonial society while also “embody[ing] an enact-
ment of Indigenous law and the obligations such laws place on Indigenous peoples to
uphold the relations of reciprocity that shape our engagements with the human and
nonhuman world — the land” (Red Skin, White Masks, 170).
4. Spice, “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures,” 40 – 41.
5. For an overview of this “turn,” see Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infra-
structure.” See also Larkin, Signal and Noise; Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch; Harvey
and Knox, Roads; Anand, Gupta, and Appel, Promise of Infrastructure; Appel, Anand,
and Gupta, “Infrastructure Toolbox”; and Hetherington, Infrastructure, Environ-
ment, and Life in the Anthropocene.
6. Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar, 154.
7. Elyachar, “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment.”
8. Graeter, “Infrastructural Incorporations,” 22.
9. Parks and Starosielski, “Introduction,” 1.
10. See, e.g., Michael Rubenstein’s excellent Public Works, one of the only
books to tackle thinking infrastructure through literature, which tends to the rep-
resentations of waterworks and the electrical grid in Irish literature and how they
emerge as vehicles for an Irish imagined community, a relationship of material con-
nection and interdependence, a fiction that is either desired or rejected.
11. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 186.
12. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 188. See also Furlong, “STS
Beyond the ‘Modern Infrastructure Ideal.’ ”
13. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 332.
14. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 366 – 67.
15. See, for example, Wallerstein, Modern World- System I; Quijano, “Colonial-
ity of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”; and Moore, Capitalism in the Web
of Life.
16. Nemser, Infrastructures of Race, 19; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 79.
17. In addition to the world- systems-inspired approaches referenced above,
our framing of infrastructural modernity is indebted to scholarship in the Marxist
and Black radical traditions, including the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Wil-
liams, C. L. R. James, Cedric Robinson, and Robin Blackburn, which situates Atlan-
tic slavery as what Du Bois called the “foundation stone” of the modern capital-
ist world. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 5; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery;
James, Black Jacobins; Robinson, Black Marxism; and Blackburn, Making of New
World Slavery. More recent scholarship in the field of US history has attended to the
history of capitalism and, specifically, its entanglement with slavery in rich, empiri-
cal detail. For a helpful discussion of this historiography, see Beckert and Rockman,
“Introduction: Slavery’s Capitalism.” For the most part, however, infrastructure — as
an object or an analytic — has received little sustained attention in this scholarship.
Two recent exceptions are essays by Archie Davies and Eric Kimball, exploring the
articulations, respectively, between British capital and the circulatory infrastructures
of nineteenth- century Recife, Brazil, and between industry in New England and the
infrastructures of slavery in the West Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth

Social Text 153 • December 2022 13

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centuries. See Davies, “Coloniality of Infrastructure”; and Kimball, “ ‘What Have
We to Do with Slavery?’ ”
18. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 330.
19. Liu, “Toward Critical Infrastructure Studies,” 2; Williams, Keywords,
76 – 82.
20. Carse, “Keyword: Infrastructure,” 27.
21. Jagoda, Network Aesthetics, 3 – 4.
22. Carse, “Keyword: Infrastructure,” 29.
23. Carse, “Keyword: Infrastructure,” 35.
24. Elyachar, “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empower-
ment,” 455.
25. Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 72.
26. Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 73.
27. Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 12 – 13.
28. Spice, “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures.”
29. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28. Brian Whitener draws on Gilmore’s work to
analyze the racialized politics of infrastructure in Detroit. See Whitener, “Detroit’s
Water Wars.”
30. Nemser, Infrastructures of Race.
31. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” 222.
32. Jagoda, Network Aesthetics; Star, “Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 382.
33. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 336.
34. Specifically, Larkin draws attention to the doubled effect of material infra-
structures where they fulfill a technical function even as they work as “concrete
semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees.” As poetic vehicles, infra-
structures not only draw on and convey fantasies and desires but also generate a
“sensory apprehension of existence,” like the experience of speed, smoothness, or
cold (Larkin, “Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 329, 338).
35. This approach is closer to Jagoda’s study of the adjacent term “network,”
where his concern is to understand the ways narrative and visual forms as well as games
offer a sharpened analytical perspective on the networks dominating twenty-first-
century social life, from social media to banking interfaces (Jagoda, Network Aesthetics).
36. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
37. Carse and Kneas “Unbuilt and Unfinished,” 16.
38. Said, Orientalism, 72.
39. Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 90.

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16 Johnson and Nemser • Introduction