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During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half
of the twentieth, insurgencies erupted in imperial states and
colonies around the world, including Britain's. As Nicole Rizzuto
shows, the writings of Ukrainian-born Joseph Conrad, Anglo-Irish
Rebecca West, Jamaicans H. G. de Lisser and V. S. Reid, and Kenyan
Ng gi wa Thiong'o testify to contested events in colonial modernity
in ways that question premises underlying approaches in trauma and
memory studies and invite us to reassess divisions and
classifications in literary studies that generate such categories
as modernist, colonial, postcolonial, national, and world
literatures. Departing from tenets of modernist studies and from
methods in the field of trauma and memory studies, Rizzuto contends
that acute as well as chronic disruptions to imperial and national
power and the legal and extra-legal responses they inspired shape
the formal practices of literatures from the modernist, colonial,
and postcolonial periods.
A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize
biological and social life This timely and radically
interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of
infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals,
infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works
that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized
concept of infrastructure, driven by capital's restless expansion,
is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract
resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the
living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization,
affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely
making visible infrastructure's modes of power, however, The
Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure brings literary methods to bear on
the interpretive terrain, reading infrastructural space and
temporalities to show that their aesthetic and sensorial experience
cannot be understood apart from histories of production and
political economies. Building on critical infrastructure studies in
anthropology, geography, and media studies, this collection
demonstrates the field's vitality to scholars working across the
humanities, including in literary, visual, and cultural studies. By
querying the presumed invisibility of infrastructure's hidden life,
the volume's contributors revitalize ongoing literary debates about
reading surface and depth. How, they ask, might infrastructure and
aesthetics then function as epistemic tools for rethinking each
other? And what urgency do they acquire in light of current crises
that bear on death, whether biological, social, or planetary?
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