Ecologies of Infrastructure in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures

Abstract

Ecologies of Infrastructure in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures synthesizes postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine how built infrastructural systems in the Global South link the historical spatial logics of colonialism with contemporary environmental issues. Typically, postcolonial literary critics have studied explicit, thematic depictions of ecological crises to understand colonialism’s impact on environments. By turning from the thematic to the ambient, my project considers how infrastructures contribute significantly to the environmental worlds literary characters inhabit, while also evading attention within the rhythms and banalities of daily life. Throughout my chapters, I explore systems like roads, oil and water pipelines, and nuclear weaponry that are unlikely subjects for narrative. I ground my analysis in the following questions: How does literature imagine the everyday encounters between postcolonial subjects and infrastructures, and what do these teach us about colonialism’s enduring legacies? How do literary texts animate infrastructures as agentic rather than inert systems, shaping but also shaped by human and non-human forces? And in using infrastructure to move beyond spectacular crisis narratives, how do postcolonial writers reframe what “counts” as matters of environmental concern? In pursuing these questions, I first read for infrastructure, exploring how infrastructures are represented thematically in postcolonial novels, and what a critical attention to infrastructure adds to existing conversations about postcolonial environmental issues. Next, I argue for reading as infrastructure, suggesting that literary genres are themselves infrastructural forms which help us read for ambience and, in doing so, situate novels within broader political, social, and ethical relations. Each of my chapters triangulates a shared postcolonial location, infrastructural system, and literary genre, comparing contemporary West African and South Asian Anglophone novels by Ben Okri, Helon Habila, Mohsin Hamid, Indra Sinha, and Kamila Shamsie, among others. By exploring these authors’ interpretations of magical realism, petro-fiction, the picaresque, and the sentimental, I take the genre’s affordances as my starting point to question how the form’s conventions deepen our understanding—or challenge our perceptions—of the social and political ecologies that infrastructures facilitate, create, and support in the postcolonial sites where they are implemented. Just as STS scholars examine how everyday people extrapolate national identity and belonging from infrastructure, I explore how genres provide a path through literary interpretation to consider how infrastructures shape conditions of contemporary postcolonial political and social life—namely, in terms of temporality, citizenship, knowledge, and feeling. Ultimately, Ecologies of Infrastructure offers a history of the environmental present. My dissertation uses contemporary literary texts to make legible how the legacies of colonial development remain materially, ecologically, and discursively present in the infrastructures that shape everyday postcolonial life.