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Infrastructure has been the form and content of a strand of Black politics from the plantation onwards. And African American writers, Henry Ivry argues in this book, have been important critics and theorists of the anti-Black violence of infrastructures of transportation, urban planning, energy, and the plantation itself, while also imagining new infrastructural forms to support Black life.
This book traces the critical engagement with infrastructure in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Octavia Butler, Imbolue Mbue, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, and many other writers. Fictions of Repair argues that genre in African American literature tracks infrastructural critique. Through surprising readings of Johnson's bildungsroman as staging an intervention into Jim Crow railroad cars, for example, or Butler's imagination of Black futures through the plantation romance even as she critiques white supremacist infrastructures in the present, Ivry uncovers an overlooked mode of infrastructural critique. At the same time, the book offers a new literary history of the African American canon, revisiting questions of periodization and organization.
"Tracing infrastructural thinking by African American writers for over a century, this indispensable and timely book shows how physical infrastructures and literary genres have shaped each other, as both conduits of anti-Black violence and possible pathways to more livable futures." —Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University
"Ivry magisterially and urgently reveals infrastructure's aesthetic registers central to creating the kinds of new worlds necessary, in both literary and literal domains, to destroy white supremacy and build other forms of relation in its place." —Adrienne Brown, University of Chicago