American literature : a journal of literary history, criticism, and bibliography - Taylor, Mathew A. (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2021)
War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century Andrew Kopec This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow's early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism-and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau's celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle's recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal-this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure's long-that is, low-relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle's case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life "after" infrastructure.
Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit Michelle N. Huang Illuminating how biomedical capital invests in white and Asian American populations while divesting from Black surplus populations, this article proposes recent Asian American dystopian fiction provides a case study for analyzing futurities where healthcare infrastructures intensify racial inequality under terms that do not include race at all. Through a reading of Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014) and other texts, the article develops the term studious deracination to refer to a narrative strategy defined by an evacuated racial consciousness that is used to ironize assumptions of white universalism and uncritical postracialism. Studious deracination challenges medical discourse's "color-blind" approach to healthcare and enables a reconsideration of comparative racialization in a moment of accelerating social disintegration and blasted landscapes. Indeed, while precision medicine promises to replace race with genomics, Asian American literature is key to showing how this "postracial" promise depends on framing racial inequality as a symptom, rather than an underlying etiology, of infrastructures of public health.