From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."

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