Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930

by Dominic Davies

Overview

The colonial literature of the British Empire often depicted the imperial infrastructure: railways, telegraph wires, steamships and canals. With a focus on writers in South Africa and India, the author uses 'infrastructural reading' to demonstrate the connection between the depictions of these urban developments and anti-imperial resistance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906165888
Publisher:	Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2017
Series:	Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century , #2
Edition description:	New
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dominic Davies is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, where he also obtained his DPhil in Post/Colonial Literature. He is the author of a range of publications on colonial and postcolonial literature and history and the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes related to infrastructure and resistance in literature. His current research focuses on the way in which comics and graphic novels resist violent urban infrastructures in twenty-first-century cities.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS: Infrastructure, Resistance, Literature – Mapping Humanitarianism: Flora Annie Steel and the Contradictions of Colonial Capitalism – Mapping Segregation: Literary Geographies of South Africa – Mapping Frontiers: John Buchan and the Topographies of Imperial Ideology – Mapping Nationalism: Allegories of Uneven Development – Towards an Infrastructural Reading of the Present.

Editorial Reviews

«For Davies, infrastructure in colonial fiction persists as a reminder of the economic unevenness inherent within the project of imperialism. Drawing on a range of thinkers (J.A. Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, Edward Soja, Edward Said, amongst others), he argues that the inequality produced by global imperial capital takes on a distinct, and contradictory, spatial form in the colonies: underdevelopment coexists with development in these spaces as the shanty town is never too far from the developed roads, bridges, railways.»

«Davies insists that an infrastructural mode of reading offers the only true record of resistance – a claim grounded in his privileging of a materialist/economic lens. Taking this interplay between real and imagined geographies a step further, he argues that infrastructures in fiction directly shape and organize spaces outside.»

«[T]his a theoretically enlightening book that broadens our conceptual understanding of the multiple materialist registers on which infrastructures operate in colonial fiction.»

(Niyati Sharma, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 54, Number 6 2019)

From the Publisher