Fictions of repair: infrastructure, genre, and the African American novel

"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.