Articles – Infrastructure

‘More Broken Promises: The Politics of Infrastructure.’ Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 88 (2024), pp.41-58.

Drawing on key arguments from The Broken Promise of Infrastructure one year after its initial publication, this article reflects on the evolving politics of infrastructure in the UK and globally. It begins with the situation in Gaza, arguing that each piece of decimated infrastructure there is a broken promise, a bit of future life that has been deliberately eradicated. It then turns to the UK context, exposing the affective connections between the rentier capitalism that is ruining Britian’s infrastructure and the racist riots that shook the country in August 2024. It argues that the policies of the new Labour government are exacerbating this situation, and that a binary discourse of NIMBY vs YIMBY is part of the problem. In conclusion, it sketches out ways in which the left might begin to mobilise effectively around infrastructure in the political landscape that we now find ourselves in, including through community infrastructure projects. Read more.

‘The Infrastructure Humanities.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 26.8 (2024), pp.1351-1367.

It is an exciting time for the infrastructure humanities, with numerous publications, the formation of the UK’s first Infrastructure Humanities Group, and a swell of conferences and panel events on infrastructure appearing in recent years. As infrastructure becomes an increasingly familiar object and method of study in the arts and humanities, this essay reviews three books – two edited collections and one monograph – that were published under the broad umbrella of the infrastructure humanities in 2023. Drawing from these reviews and a series of reflections on the field, the essay offers a sketch of the origins of the infrastructure humanities, a snapshot of current interests and directions, and potential areas for inquiry moving forward. Read more.

‘Graphic Capitaloscenes: Drawing Infrastructure as Historical Form.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 65.4 (2024), pp.680-695.

This article describes “graphic Capitaloscenes” – narrative moments in which graphic novels draw infrastructure as a material expression of capitalism’s historical development. Drawing on work that has described graphic narrative as both an “infrastructural” and “scenographic” form, it contends that graphic novels are particularly adept at representing infrastructure as historical content while themselves materializing that historical infrastructure on the page. Bringing this to bear on visual texts concerned with capitalism’s frontier zones, this article suggests that graphic novels are therefore not only able to stage extractive infrastructures as historical forms, but that they are also themselves formally conjoined to the current historical moment of the Capitalocene. The article offers two case studies in support of its argument, each of which revolves around the extraction of fossil fuels: Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) and Pablo Fajardo’s Crude, A Memoir (2021). In each of its readings, the article shows how these comics are able to stage infrastructure as historical form, while at the same time bringing into view anti-colonial and anti-capitalist relations that offer a counterpoint to the accumulative relationships of the Capitalocene. Read more.

‘Queering the Line.’ Roadsides, Collection No.9: Gendering Infrastructure (April 2023), pp.65-71.

This essay argues that capital’s economic ideal of the ‘straight’ infrastructural line does not simply echo heteronormative and patriarchal ideals, but actively concretizes them into the world. It produces and reproduces social relations, contends Tim Ingold (2007: 4), its “straightness” epitomizing “not only rational thought and disputation but also the values of civility and moral rectitude.” By queering the straight line, I refute this ‘rational’ ideal and show instead how it blends together systems of patriarchy and accumulation. To avoid straightness in my own line of argumentation, I approach this topic from three different directions. Each section begins with an image and statement about the straight line, which it then deconstructs and disorganizes. The aim is to weave together a cross-hatched argument, rather than marching a masculine line through the empty page. Read more.

‘The City of the Missing: Poetic Responses to the Grenfell Fire.’ Journal of Urban History 49.3 (April 2023), pp.584-599.

This essay is about the representation and recognition of the victims and survivors of the Grenfell fire disaster in poetry written since June 14, 2017. It begins by arguing that the fire was caused not by a lack of knowledge, but by a refusal to acknowledge the voices of the community. It shows how this refusal of recognition was both direct and systemic, slow and immediate, situating the fire in the recent and long-term contexts of austerity and the hostile environment, the demonization of social housing, urbanization and the rise of slums, and the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. The essay then turns a series of poetic responses to the fire, read and discussed mostly in the order of their publication. These include poems by Ben Okri, Roger Robinson, and Jay Bernard; spoken word performances by Potent Whisper; and two tracks by Lowkey. Through close and careful readings of this work, the essay identifies a hauntological politics of acknowledgment and memorialization that refuses social death and galvanizes social life. Read more.

With Benjamin Fraser. ‘Infrastructure and intervention on the comics page: An interview with Dominic Davies about his book Urban Comics (2019).’ Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 9.2 (December 2022), pp.275-283.

This interview documents a conversation between two scholars of space and comics. Benjamin Fraser asks Dominic Davies about his recently published book, titled Urban Comics. Conversation ranges from the author's experience connecting the medium of comics and graphic novels with various themes from the geographical and social sciences. Readers are introduced to the general arguments of the book, which are supported with specific quotations from selected chapters. A range of aesthetic and political concerns are discussed, as are various comics creators and their projects. Read more.

‘Unsettling Frontiers: Property, Empire, and Race in Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63.4 (August 2022), pp.385-400.

This article explores the “unsettling” qualities of American writer Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. It explores the book’s engagement with environmental crises and indigenous cosmologies to show how the metaphysical insecurities, common to much of Johnson’s fiction, come in this context to challenge the very concept of American nationhood itself – or as the novella’s title parodies, the “American Dream.” Train Dreams unsettles what I call the narrative infrastructures undergirding the story of the American frontier-becoming-nation-state: the transcontinental railroads, and the colonial property regimes that those railroads both pursued and opened up. In three central sections, the article explores Johnson’s unsettling of notions of property, then empire, and finally race. Through these readings, it shows how the novella finds its way to an indigenous critique of America as a settler-colonial state. While previous critical discussions of the “unsettling” qualities of Johnson’s work have until now meant that word affectively, in this article my aim is therefore to emphasize its decolonizing momentum as well. Read more.

‘Concrete Stories, Decomposing Fictions: Body Parts and Body Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23.6 (October 2021), pp.922-940.

This essay reads the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) to explore the “concrete stories” and “infrastructural narratives” devised by the US military in support of its occupation of Baghdad. By stitching together a city and society littered with composing and decomposing fictions, Saadawi’s novel reveals how biopolitical governance produces, contra the hegemonic US war story of security consolidation and societal stabilization, pervasive insecurity instead. Saadawi’s “decomposing fictions”, as I call them, operate on three homologous terrains: the (de)composition of the city; the (de)composition of the body; and the (de)composition of the narrative itself. Through this three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well. Read more.

‘Feelings in Common: Democracy as Maintenance and Repair.’ Violence & Democracy, A Joint British Academy (UK) and Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (India) Publication (September 2019), pp.23-27.

In this short reflective paper, I want to consider briefly how these common ‘feelings’ come about, and how they relate to feelings, or ‘atmospheres’, of democracy. I will try briefly to explore the political, physical and affective infrastructures that might bring these feelings into being – or that conversely might curtail and inhibit them. And I will conclude by suggesting that it is not only through building and developing new such infrastructures that democratic atmospheres might be conjured; just as importantly, it is through the routine activities of maintenance and repair that feelings of social and political commonality might be revitalised. In order to contain these admittedly large and riskily abstract reflections, I will route them through the specific context of contemporary Britain, focusing in particular on the conditions created by the political phenomenon of austerity. Read more.

‘Literary Non-Fiction and the Neoliberal City: Subalternity and Urban Governance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.1 (February 2019), pp.94-107.

This article challenges claims made for Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers as a piece of non-fiction, using the text to explore questions around subaltern agency and voice that have been at the centre of postcolonial studies since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It foregrounds the continued relevance of Spivak’s question in the postmillennial context of the neo-liberal city, particularly as it relates to issues of urban governance, and argues that a postcolonial reading of Boo’s book reveals a new set of triangulated connections between subalternity, literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal Indian cities. Beautiful Forevers reveals how the violent infrastructures of such cities continue to be shaped by the legacies of colonialism and exacerbated by neo-liberal urban governance, and how the genre of literary non-fiction is responding to, and at times both complicit with and resistant to, this neo-liberal urban regime. Read more.

‘Urban comix: Subcultures, Infrastructures, and “the Right to the City” in Delhi.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 43.3 (June 2018), Special Issue: Delhi: Writings on the Megacity, pp.411-430.

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric. Read more.

‘Performing Urban Violence: Protest Theatre and Semi-Public Space in London and Cape Town.’ Theatre Topics 28.2, Special Issue: Protest Theatre (July 2018), pp.89-100.

This essay offers an account of two case studies of theatrical performance in London and Cape Town, both of which raise and interrogate the interrelated concepts of protest theatre and public space. A production of Tunde Euba’s play Brothers by the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre (GLYPT) in London (2013–14) and the contemporaneous theatrical work and awareness-raising campaigns of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in Cape Town both use performance to question, diagnose, and protest multiple forms of violence perpetrated against marginalized urban populations, often at the hands of the state. In twenty-first-century neoliberal cities such as London and Cape Town, government and private forces collude to privatize their once public spaces, thus encroaching upon, if not entirely disappearing, venues that might be used for protesting against such forms of violence. In response, I argue that GLYPT and SWEAT cultivate semi-public spaces—that is, spaces that do the political and civic work of urban public spaces but that cannot themselves strictly be considered “public” as such (Jones et al. 645)—through their use of theatrical staging and their spatial and performative facilitation of political participation. These companies use a kind of interactive theatre to foster community solidarity among marginalized urban inhabitants. Read more.

‘“Walls of Freedom”: Street Art and Structural Violence in the Global City.’ Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities IX.1 (June 2017), pp.6-18.

This article argues that contemporary street art (or graffiti) uses a unique set of resistant techniques to foreground the contours and shapes of different kinds of structural violence inscribed into, and perpetuated by, the infrastructural layouts of the twenty-first century’s increasingly global cities. Graffiti can resist structural violence as it is shaped and exacerbated by—even embedded within—the physical walls of city spaces, ricocheting off into alternative and on occasion more democratic modes of urban habitation. Through a discussion of examples from urban spaces as diverse as revolutionary Cairo, divided East Jerusalem and the West Bank in Palestine, and South African townships and gentrifying East London, the article shows that street art can transform the violent infrastructural strategies of oppressive state governance into a canvas that articulates calls for democratic and political freedom. Read more.

‘Geography, Topography, Infrastructure: Mapping the Oscillations of the Frontier in John Buchan’s Prester John (1910)’. Tropos 2.1 (September 2015), pp.14-21.

This paper develops a conceptual map of ‘frontier consciousness’, outlining this ideological perspective that gave shape to a strand of Britain’s imperial relationship with South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. It does so through an application of world-systems theory to the textual ‘mappings’ of John Buchan’s frontier novel, Prester John (1910). Frontier consciousness comes into being through its proximity to the unknown spaces of the discursive African interior and its distance from the imperial metropole. But in the very process of describing these unknown spaces they necessarily become known: frontier consciousness, as articulated and mapped by Buchan’s novel, has thus to continuously produce and re-produce new unknown geographical areas in order to maintain the binary simplicity that allows it to come into being (‘civilisation’ vs. ‘savagery’ and so on). It is caught in a constant production of spatial distance and the simultaneous need to become proximal to it. The article concludes by arguing that this understanding of frontier consciousness, underpinned by notions of distance and proximity, can be mapped onto the historic and socioeconomic expansion and accumulation of capital that was taking place at this point in Britain’s imperial history. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Investigating the Southern City through Postcolonial Literature: Infrastructures in Delhi, Johannesburg, and London.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.4 (May 2015), pp.359-409.

This article explores the ways in which postcolonial literary and other cultural texts navigate, decode and in some cases re-imagine the infrastructures that organize urban life, particularly in the postcolonial cities of Johannesburg, London and Delhi. Readings of Ivan Vladislavić, Mark Gevisser Brian Chikwava, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta and Manju Kapur consider the constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, the organization of public space, and various other forms of human intervention, and suggest that the ways in which urban spaces are mapped in creative practice can explore, negotiate and at times disrupt and reconstruct that relationship. Read more.