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Call for Proposals - Special Issue

Special Issue: Infrastructural Poetics

Co-editors: Marty Cain, Claire Farley, and Michael Martin Shea

Call for Papers:

Over the past two decades, the "infrastructural turn" in the humanities has produced a substantial body of criticism about how literary texts mediate material conditions. As Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, and Daniel Nemser (2022) demonstrate in the introduction to their special issue of Social Text, infrastructure no longer simply designates an object that appears in literary texts but suggests itself as an analytic, a method of reading attentive to both hierarchical relationality and the materiality of built environments. Indeed, what Robbins, Rubenstein, and Beal (2015) referred to as "infrastructuralism" in their own special issue of Modern Fiction Studies has become, per Breu and Di Leo (2023), a "metacritical approach," which humanities scholars particularly enrich through their focus on the representation and visualization of infrastructural arrangements. Infrastructure's centrality to the most pressing issues of our time–climate crisis, Indigenous sovereignty, resource allocation, migrant justice, and prison abolition–entails that the infrastructural turn is not just another wave of humanities thematics but is paralleled by substantial debate among politicians and activists for whom infrastructural projects emerge as urgent sites of social reproduction and political activity (Spice 2018, LaDuke and Cowen 2020). While infrastructure connotes physical things (pipelines, fiber optic cables, highways, search engines), it is equally about the socialities these structures materialize–what Lauren Berlant (2019) calls "the movement and patterning of social forms."

This special issue proposes to literalize the "poetics" in anthropologist Brian Larkin's conception of the "poetics of infrastructure" by centering on the undertheorized relationship between infrastructure and poetic form (2013). Though recent standalone essays have taken up more traditional forms of infrastructure as it appears in the work of poets as diverse as Timothy Donnelly, Cathy Park Hong (Haines 2023), June Jordan (Knittle 2022), Jennifer Scappettone (Lewis Hood 2021), and José Emilio Pacheco (Dowdy 2013), there has yet to be any sustained engagement with poetic form as its own linguistic, affective, and representational infrastructure. We argue that poetry and poetics scholarship is particularly well-suited for thinking about infrastructure due to, on the one hand, the robust body of criticism on poetic form across history which offers an analogical relationship to the forming properties of infrastructural projects, and on the other, the specific technologies of the poem as they demonstrate what Christopher Nealon has referred to as a "nimbleness around scale shifting" (2019). Through a focus on poetic stagings of infrastructure as well as the varied infrastructures which underwrite poetic production, this special issue aims to extend the purchase of infrastructuralism as a critical method while reinvigorating the framework through the specifically infrastructural capacities of poetry as a form which in turn forms and deforms language and representation.

Poets from various national and linguistic traditions have long seen infrastructural projects as the materia prima for their poetic works, from Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo's Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía ("Twenty poems to be read on the trolley") to more contemporary works like M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!. Theorizations of the poetic act have likewise relied on infrastructural metaphors to describe how the poem is, to borrow a phrase from Brian Larkin (2013), an "architecture for circulation:" for Charles Olson (1997), the poem is a "high-energy construct," while for Octavio Paz (1973) the poet becomes "a wire that conducts and transforms the poetic current." The relative dearth of scholarship that reads infrastructure through poetic form is thus surprising not only because of the growing body of poetry projects that take infrastructure as their object, but also because poetics is itself a theory of structure accustomed to interpreting the significance of organizational patterns. Yet despite the marked formalism of poetry and its unmistakable homology with the built networks that we often take to be representative of infrastructure, infrastructuralist critics have shown a distinct preference for narrative forms, one which has seeped into and shaped their theorizations of infrastructuralism as a method of reading. In Caroline Levine's (2015) influential monograph, Forms, for instance, her omnivorous understanding of form as a pattern or structuring (in which infrastructure is a key subcategory) is articulated around moments of formal collision and conflict, a fundamentally narrativized relation. Recent infrastructuralist critics have broadly followed Levine's example, orienting their theoretical frameworks through readings of the plots and protagonists of infrastructure.

We argue that this preference for narrative forms not only restricts our understanding of how writers have represented infrastructure by ignoring a key mode of literary production, but also limits our theoretical conceptions of infrastructuralism as an analytical method. If, for Campos Johnson and Nemser (2022), fantasies of infrastructure have their own "grammar, plot, and narrative form," we argue that the affective realities generated by and through infrastructural projects also possess their own sound, rhythm, and pattern–the other poetic qualities of language. How might poetics offer an alternative critical vocabulary for the study of infrastructure? What is the relationship between the distinct forming, patterning, and shaping properties of poetry and infrastructure? How can infrastructure studies build on the substantial body of poetics scholarship on the infrastructures of literary production and circulation–including recently exemplary work by Feinsod (2017), Nardone (2020), Quiogue Andrews (2023), and Spahr (2018), among others–to help us think dialectically about the relationship between poetic literary infrastructure and other built networks of transfer and exchange? How does a focus on infrastructure renew our understanding of poetic form? And what can poetic form as an internally structured mode of thinking allow us to grasp about infrastructure and its "unruly" ontology (Larkin, 2013)?

As infrastructure is inherently transnational, we invite articles on poets from any linguistic tradition whose work explores the convergence between poetics and infrastructure studies. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Infrastructuralism as an approach to poetics, especially theoretical links between built infrastructure and the dynamics of poetic form
• Poetic representations of the afterlives of colonial or plantation infrastructures
• Poetry, social media, and new media technologies, including the material infrastructures which underwrite their existence
• Infrastructures of publication, circulation, and cultural production
• Poetic community and infrastructure, including academic infrastructures
• Translation infrastructures and borders as infrastructural projects
• Infrastructuralism as an approach to literary historicism
• Ecopoetics, infrastructure, and environmental justice
• Transitional and speculative infrastructures

Please submit a 500-word abstract (for essays between 8,000–10,000 words) and a CV to Marty Cain, Claire Farley, and Michael Martin Shea at poeticsofinfrastructure@gmail.com by December 15th, 2024. When submitting, please also copy College Literature at collit@wcupa.edu. Essay drafts will be due in the summer of 2025 and sent out for anonymous peer review. This special issue is scheduled to be published in Fall 2026. Prospective authors should also feel free to email the editors with general inquiries about the issue.

References

Berlant, Lauren. 2016. "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times." Society and Space 34 (3): 393–419.

Breu, Christopher, and Jeffrey R. Di Leo. 2023. "Theorizing Infrastructure: An Introduction." symplokē 31 (1'2):1–8.

Campos Johnson, Adriana Michele, and Daniel Nemser. 2022. "Introduction: Reading for Infrastructure." Social Text 40 (4): 1–16.

Dowdy, Michael. 2013. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Feinsod, Harris. 2017. The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures. Oxford University Press.

Haines, Christian P. 2023. "Up in the Cloud: Digital Infrastructure, Lyric Poetry, and Late Capitalism." symplokē 31 (1'2): 57–71.

Knittle, Davy. 2022. "'Harlem Will Widen from River to River': Environmental Justice and Racialized Gender in June Jordan's Future New York." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 29 (1): 17–39.

LaDuke, Winona, and Deborah Cowen. 2020. "Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure." The South Atlantic Quarterly 119 (2): 243–268.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure." Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.

Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lewis Hood, Kate. 2021. "'In the 'Fissures of Infrastructure': Poetry and Toxicity in 'Garbage Arcadia.'" Envirpazonmental Humanities 13 (1).

Nardone, Michael. 2020. "Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu." College Literature 47 (1): 248–258.

Nealon, Christopher. 2019. "Capitalist Value and Poetic Abstraction." Paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, November 7, 2019.

Olson, Charles. 1997. "Projective Verse." Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Oakland: University of California Press: 239–249.

Paz, Octavio. 1973. The Bow and the Lyre. Translated by Ruth L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Quiogue Andrews, Kimberly. 2023. The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rubenstein, Michael, Bruce Robbins, and Sophia Beal. 2015. "Infrastructuralism." Modern Fiction Studies 61 (4): 575–586.

Spahr, Juliana. 2018. Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spice, Anne. 2018. "Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines." Environment and Planning: Advances in Research 9 (1): 40–56.