Infrastructure, Security, Sabotage
Description
As Paul Edwards notes, infrastructure “simultaneously shape and are shaped by…the condition of modernity,” even as the “large, panoptic systems” associated with modernity shift toward the “distributed and dispersed control” associated with the digital networks and technologies of our present. Contemporary forces of security, financialization, and control do not simply and immediately replace modernist infrastructure but integrate with and work alongside it. The persistence of this infrastructural modernity, however, opens it to the possibility of sabotage, resistance, and repurposing, which in turn motivates continuing processes of securitization. Such dynamics in turn raise critical questions about how infrastructure mediates power, precarity, and dissent in both everyday life and aesthetic form.
This panel draws attention to the global nature of these processes by exploring the dialectical relation of security and sabotage as evinced in aesthetic encounters with the lingering, and often crumbling, infrastructures of the past and present. We welcome comparative and transnational approaches to literature, film, and other media that activate modernist and postmodernist infrastructure as sites of ongoing concern for the state and its subjects, uncovering their embroilment in security processes while simultaneously imagining possibilities of sabotage, destruction, and refusal that reactivate them as arenas of resistance.
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
I am a cultural theorist working at the intersections of literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and political economy. I received my PhD in comparative literature from Cornell University in 2022 and am currently a Regional Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. My articles have appeared in Social Text, NLH, Cultural Critique, Cahiers Georges Perec, MLN, and symplokē, and my first book is currently under review with Fordham UP's IDIOM series.
Speaker Bio
John Un is a scholar of the environmental humanities, critical theory, and film and media studies. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2023, and has since taught as a Lecturer at Cornell and Case Western Reserve University.
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Devin William Daniels is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. His manuscript, US Fiction and the Informatic State, on the connection between information science, statecraft, and US novels from the 1940s to the 1970s, is currently under review. His work is published or forthcoming in Post45, Representations, Mediations, The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Film, and other venues.
Speaker Bio
Julia Isler recently received their PhD from the University of Toronto. Their doctoral dissertation, Anti-Underdogs: Capitalism and Narrative Form, argued that the underdog plot is an ideological tool of capitalism, and that a broad swathe of modernist texts can be understood as experiments with the form designed to reveal its ideological underpinnings. Post-defense, their research is now focused on the function of narrative form under contemporary surveillance capitalism.
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Meghan Romano is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute. Her dissertation, "Midway Modernism: Newfoundland and Labrador Media Infrastructures," examines how media and/as/about infrastructure made Newfoundland and Labrador a nodal point for imperial, national, and capitalist connectivity.
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Sam Carter is a lecturer at Dartmouth College whose work focuses on sound, media, and migration in Latin America. He is currently completing a book titled The Auditors of Argentina: Listening and Literature in an Age of Migration.
Speaker Bio
Marisa Lewis completed her doctoral work at the University of Ottawa in Canadian literary studies. Her research interests include coalitional thought, solidarity movements, and the intersections between place, temporality, and solidarity in Canadian literary work on alliances. She is a sessional instructor at the University of Ottawa and Cegep Heritage College.