“A theoretically enlightening book that broadens our conceptual understanding of the multiple materialist registers on which infrastructures operate in colonial fiction.” – Niyita Sharma

Contents

Introduction. Infrastructure, Resistance, Literature

  1. Mapping Humanitarianism: Flora Annie Steel and the Contradictions of Colonial Capitalism

  2. Mapping Segregation: Literary Geographies of South Africa

  3. Mapping Frontiers: John Buchan and the Topographies of Imperial Ideology

  4. Mapping Nationalism: Allegories of Uneven Development

    Conclusion: Towards an Infrastructural Reading of the Present

Between 1880 and 1930, the British Empire’s vast infrastructural developments facilitated the incorporation of large parts of the globe into not only its imperial rule, but also the capitalist world-system. Throughout this period, colonial literary fiction, in recording this vast expansion, repeatedly cited these imperial infrastructures to make sense of the various colonial landscapes in which they were set. Physical embodiments of empire proliferate in this writing. Railways and trains, telegraph wires and telegrams, roads and bridges, steamships and shipping lines, canals and other forms of irrigation, cantonments, the colonial bungalow, and other kinds of colonial urban infrastructure – all of these infrastructural lines broke up the landscape and gave shape to the literary depiction and production of colonial space.

By developing a methodology called “infrastructural reading”, Davies shows how a focus on the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance that manifests spatially within their literary, narrative and formal elements. This subversive reading strategy – which is applied in turn to writers as varied as H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner and John Buchan in South Africa, and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster and Edward Thompson in India – demonstrates that these mostly pro-imperial writings can reveal an array of ideological anxieties, limitations and silences as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation.

“Infrastructural reading is rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word ‘infrastructure’ as a critical tool for opening up and comprehending a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within colonial literary narratives. The first is the use of infrastructure in the text, both physically and symbolically – what Sarah Nuttall would call the ‘literary infrastructures’, or ‘imaginary infrastructures that surface in fiction’ (2008: 198–200): roads, railways, cantonments, the colonial bungalow, and so on. The second usage is the more complex notion of the infrastructure of the text. By this I mean the historical raw material, be it social, economic or geographic, out of which the literature, as a specific crystallisation of cultural patterns and trends, is carved. As the close textual readings throughout this book demonstrate, the infrastructures in the text and the infrastructures of the text are intimately related. In the process of mapping colonial literature’s narrative depiction of imperial infrastructures, I have consistently found that when they surface in the text, the economic and political infrastructures of imperialism (and the capitalist world-system) are at least acknowledged, if not explicitly engaged. This simultaneity means that the imperial rhetoric of ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’, which was often sustained by those lines of physical infrastructure, collide with the socioeconomic and political realities of imperialism – that is, the processes of economic exploitation and uneven and underdevelopment that those infrastructures historically enabled. The result is a productive clash, or generative friction, that results in the production of gaps from within which various forms of anti-imperial resistance can be excavated and (re)mobilised.”